Serendipity: Another out-of-band win.

While at the genetic engineering gig, I was regularly scouted for positions elsewhere. I didn’t want to leave: the pay was terrible, but the freedom and professional satisfaction was immense. But really, I had teenagers and Omaha has her epilepsy, so we needed insurance more than I needed professional satisfaction. If Obamacare had been a thing back then, maybe I’d have stayed all the way. They’re still doing well there.

The one job that really threw money at me was a textbook company, of all things. They were looking for front end developers who would help them transition from traditional publishing to on-line, and they wanted their website to be a “core value proposition,” a place where school districts could describe their needs and their requirements, and get customized textbooks to meet their district needs.

During the interview, the other guy asked me if I was working on anything interesting in my spare time. I mentioned that I’d just written “a little thing,” a toolkit that glued together a markdown processor, a couple of python scripts, and a JSON file to automatically create ebooks. He asked me to explain how it worked, I explained the simplicity of the NCX and OPF formats, and how I hoped to put a visual front-end on this tool someday. “You actually know the EPUB standard?” he said, his eyes wide and genuinely hungry.

“Well, most of it.”

They hired me. A year later they laid me off. It turns out they were hoping to add automatic EPUB generation to their existing LaTeX-based production line. But I never got to see any of that; I was stuck doing the website for a year, my Epub skills reserved for “When we get to it…” I think part of the idea was that EPUB 3.0 would come soon, which had some Javascript and interactivity built in, and the interactive chemistry and biology lessons I was building for the website would be book-ready by then. But it never happened.

The serendipity here is obvious: I had no professional reason to know the EPUB 2.0 standard. But I did for unprofessional reasons. They wanted me for it, as yet another an in-house expert. They never used me in that capacity. They had too many in-house experts spending their days doing the more routine parts of bootstrapping; that may be part of the reason they failed to really get anywhere.

Open Office Plans: What's The Incentive?

Open office plans has been a subject of significant controversy recently, with everyone and his brother pointing out that the quiet craft of software development clashes horribly with the loud, communal, extroverted environment of open office plans. So the question then becomes: who benefits from this arrangement?

Psychopaths.

Venkatesh Roy has this thesis– he calls it the Gervais Theory– that all modern office hierarchies have three kinds of people: the losers, the clueless, and the psychopaths. Extroverted and manipulative, pychopaths form companies and temporary alliances as they claw their way up the corporate and financial hierarchies; their lives are wrapped up in playing this game. Losers don’t play the corporate game at all; they knowingly enter into arrangements with psychopaths to do the work and go home to their “real lives.” The clueless are mostly middle management: they believe in the company, but play by the rules, believing they’ll be rewarded for their loyalty with greater rewards. Eventually, the company is filled by successive layers of middle management until it becomes a hollow shell, at which point the psychopaths cash out; the losers, who knew this was coming, tranfer their transferrable skills elsewhere; the clueless are left wondering what the hell just happened. The psychopaths go on to form a new company; lather, rinse, repeat.

Software development is so hot right now that skilled developers can just up and leave. They can find work elsewhere. If they’re bored and unrewarded, they will find work elsewhere. Psychopaths need to keep a closer eye on their software developers than on other productive roles, like in manufacturing, refinery, delivery, and so on.

The open bay permits that. It gives the psychopaths in the room a horizon they can scan for trouble. It gives them an intelligence edge they wouldn’t have if developers were all in their own little rooms.

Open office bays are a control mechanism for restless developers.