Technical Leadership Is Leadership

Being a technical leader can involve a number of challenges.  Between outside forces, long- and short-term pressures, legacy systems, and complex problems an architect, lead developer, or development manager has a lot on his plate.

Many of the most skilled programmers are comfortable with those kinds of challenges.  For a lot of technical people that's the only kind of problem with which you are comfortable.  Whether, like me, you are arrogant and demanding or, like many others, you are shy and reserved, there is a decent chance that you don't count people skills among your strongest.

Yet the technical challenges only represent half of the problems facing a technical leader.  To be truly effective, you have to be a leader of people in addition to a setter of technical direction.  That is, unless you want to do everything yourself.

I'm not saying that every kind of management problem necessarily rests on the shoulders of a technical leader.  I do believe, however, that empowering the people you work with to make better technical decisions on their own will have an enormous impact on your effectiveness as a technical leader.

For instance, I recently wrote an article for InformIT that touches on the subject, entitled Five Ways to Optimize Encapsulation in Your Software Architecture.  In most scenarios, every single step requires someone to not just be a leader in the area of design and architecture but also a leader of men.

For me, this is the biggest kind of challenge available in the software world.  It's hard and rewarding.  Sure, there are things that are harder - like trying to maintain really terrible legacy code - but those things aren't as rewarding because so little is accomplished in exchange for so much energy.  There are areas where I have more success - like maintaining code that was written the modern way - but that's not as rewarding because so little energy was exchanged for the benefit obtained.

Building up people's skills, guiding them, helping them grow, and influencing their decision making meets all my challenge criteria.  At least, it does now that I've become interested in that level of challenge.  It requires patience, understanding, and a close approximation of empathy - things that don't come easily to me.  On the other hand, in exchange for the enormous effort involved, you get enormous value.

The worst likely case is that you fail and nothing happens.  In the software industry, that's actually a pretty good bad scenario.  Once you develop your mentoring and leadership skills, the most likely case is that you will permanently modify how effective someone is as a programmer, building up a portfolio of recurring dividends over time.  Sometimes, you will help someone else become a true technical leader, improving the rate at which dividends are increased.

The rate of return on this kind of effort is very, very high.  For most of us, there's nothing more rewarding than hard work with a high rate of return.  So, the next time you're considering your position as a technical leader, try to think about how much time you spend leading people not just products.

The Dumbest Move Microsoft Made with Windows 8

It would be a stretch to argue that Microsoft's release of Windows 8 was anything other than a disaster.  It was.  It was terrible.  As business events go, I don't think the word "nightmare" would be hyperbole.

There had to be someone inside of Microsoft who knew it was going to be a disaster.  The Windows team has too many people for them all to be completely out of touch.  Someone had to know that Windows 8 was totally unsuited to the desktop world, which is still a significant part of their business and where most of us do our work.

Even more importantly, they had to know that the operating system representing interesting offerings in the touch-device world.  It's actually not too bad with a touch device.  I could see it having taken over some market share in the tablet and phone space.

I think, by now, everybody knows what Microsoft "should" have done.  They should have released what they are calling "Windows 8" as a touch-only OS and kept working until they had a real OS for real computers that they could call "Windows 8" with pride.

...but that's easy.  It's always easy to look back and say "You should have released that under a different brand" or "You should have folded that hand even though you had three of a kind."  Everyone makes great decisions in hindsight but I think we can look at the information that Microsoft had and see that they made some bad decisions knowing what they knew.

As I mentioned already, the platform would probably have done alright in the space of touch devices.  Clearly someone, somewhere, thought that it would do well on desktops too but I bet you that their confidence was not has high as it was for mobile devices.  Even if they were 98% sure that Windows 8 was going to be a blockbuster product in the desktop world, they were probably 98.5 or 99% sure it was going to do well on tablets.

That division is what they failed to recognize.  I think that, if Microsoft had done a phased roll out of the new OS technology and targeted one form factor, they would have chosen mobile phones or tablets.  If they'd done that, it seems pretty apparent to me that they would have gotten good or mixed reviews - which is a lot better than people marching down Bel-Red Road with torches and pitchforks.

They could have carved out a substantial and defensible position for Windows 8 in the first place and then, if they moved in to the desktop world and failed exactly as they have from that point on, they could be retreating into the mobile world rather than being routed completely.  It is possible that they could have leveraged whatever goodwill they had in the mobile market(s) to sustain Windows 8 while they got Windows 8.1 out the door but that's more speculative than my previous claim.

This is another flavor of the same old batch-size and cycle-time problems that have plagued Microsoft since as long as I've been in the business of professional software development.  I sincerely hope they learn their lesson before Apple realizes it can't ride the coattails of Steve Jobs's ghost forever because I would very much like to live in a world where Microsoft and Google are vying for #1, not Google and Apple.

Paperclip attrition metric

Before a meeting, put a paperclip in front of each seat.  When more than twenty-five percent of them are mangled, the meeting is officially a waste of time.