When Wendy Meets Karen.

May 11, 2023 ~ Taran ~ 1 Comment

Because the economy is so awesome, Wendy’s is working with Google on integrating an AI chat-bot into their drive-thrus. The italics might be an indicator of sarcasm.

Granted, I’m not a fan of fast food jobs, though when it comes to fast food burgers in the United States, I do lean toward Wendy’s. Even so, I have noted over the years that the Wendy’s I visited weren’t necessarily the best maintained areas to eat. That could be a factor of geography in Florida.

So cutting costs and decreasing lines would make sense, except… well, there are people who are working multiple jobs working in these fast food areas and making not that much to get yelled at by angry Karen’s who will demand to see the manager.

“…Penegor [Wendy’s Chief Executive] said the goal of the chatbot is to help reduce long lines from forming in the drive-thru lane, which could prompt some potential customers to go elsewhere. In my experience with most fast food joints, it’s not the long lines that turn customers away but rather, the slow pace and incorrect nature in which an order is prepared in the kitchen that’s the problem. Other establishments like Chick-fil-A and In-N-Out Burger figured this out long ago and can successfully manage long lines with efficiency…”
Shawn Knight, “It’s happening: AI chatbot to replace human order-takers at Wendy’s drive-thru“, TechSpot.com, May 9th 2023.

With the price of gas as it is just about anywhere in the world, the only time I go through a drive-thru is when there is nobody else in the drive-thru. Honestly, who but a blithering idiot would be in a drive-thru spending money on gas while waiting in a line – which you’re generally trapped in – waiting more than a few minutes.

I agree with Shawn Knight, too. The problem isn’t in taking the order, the problem is in producing the order at peak times in time for the line to continue moving and taking orders. Granted, Wendy’s may have done some metrics and come up with this, or at least I would hope that they have, but generally speaking taking the order is not the problem.

Well, at least not on the employee end.

The other side of the problem are the people who get to where they can make the order… and don’t know what they want. And that leads to how far away the menus are from where one orders. It’s nice to have the menu where you order, but if you’re in line it might help speed things up if you could see the menu before you get there. This theory doesn’t pan out when you walk inside to order, though, because people are… well, not that sharp.

In the end, some people will lose jobs, and they won’t be getting jobs as software engineers at Google.

The real fun will begin when the Chatbots meet Karen.

The Process Is Underway

March 6, 2023 ~ Taran ~ 2 Comments

tt_tech_growth It took me decades to figure out something that I should have long ago. Call it naivete. When I first came back to Trinidad and Tobago, I thought my software engineering knowledge and experience would be considered worthwhile and useful, but all too often it was rejected in the need to pursue more local and deprecated technology use. It would drive me nuts.

No more. After considering the events around and surrounding what I wrote about starting with the basics, it dawned on me that the culture, at least for the last decades, demanded making it’s own mistakes. The winning bidder in technology is generally something that was marketed to the government, or which requires an allegiance to the software manufacturer in Redmond, Washington, all the while complaining about the United States.
For me, it seems technology usage lags by about 20 years behind the United States, which is becoming very awkward with the new technologies coming out faster than the crippling bureaucracy of Trinidad and Tobago can adapt – and when they adapt, it’s without learning the lessons of the last 20 years in other countries. That’s a very negative thing to write, but all too often it’s true.

Technology, though, can’t exist in a vacuum. Technology can only serve those who know how to operate it, or they get burned. Listening to a conversation today in a coffee shop, where an apparent meeting was taking place to sell tech adaptation services or something along those lines, the guy in running shorts with ear buds in was explaining to the professionally attired woman that he had saved the world with technology at other companies, and thus he knew what he was talking about.

I chuckled even though their loud conversation was annoying while I was reading because I’d see those guys for at least 3 decades sell themselves as solutions. People then buy the solutions, and then complain about the solutions, then want to fix the solutions because nobody wants to admit bad money was spent, even in a committee… until eventually they get someone who actually has some experience but they’re too broke to pay. There was a part of me that just wanted to look at them and say in a very level voice, “That’s a bunch of bullshit”, but then I remembered something very important.

It’s part of the process, and I may have been underestimating that woman’s bullshit sensor and that’s what needs to evolve. The bullshit sensor, and perhaps the bullshit feedback mechanism. Bypassing that is dangerous, and it’s a necessary part of technology growth. In fact, I’d offer that there’s quite a bit of that bovine fecal matter stuck in the cogs of bureaucracy from various fields beyond technology.

So I sat and finished my coffee, reading my book, satisfied that the process was underway, and that bullshit sensors would self-adjust or deprecate. I had no part of it and that made my day brighter.

Always Start With the Basics.

February 11, 2023 ~ Taran ~ 2 Comments

Disorganized Black Box I volunteered to assist with an office becoming more technology based, and so a month ago I put together a proposal on how to do this on a black box of an office.

Let’s take a moment and look at that. I volunteered to do something and was asked for a proposal on something I had no access to. Clearly, the first thing one has to do is see what is there, what goes in and what comes out. As a bonus, I do know that the whole thing has never been backed up before, so there’s stray unbacked data on at least 3 computers that I know of that can be in varying levels of organization, possibly using different software packages, etc, etc.

Thus, I put together a proposal and sent it in on January 6th, 2023, with an explanation of that, which would have to be done after everything was backed up. Start? Immediate, upon approval, estimated 40 hours total. It’s not a big office, and I live nearby.
Now, of course, with these projects everyone wants to run before they crawl. They have these grandiose designs of what the future office will do, and that’s healthy. However, when building that castle in the sky, one needs to first put the basics in place. Like backups, and knowing what information you have to manage – otherwise you’re not necessarily creating something efficient. You could well be creating more work, or more complexity, neither of which is the point of technology.

On the 26th of January, I was asked to attend a meeting at 8:30 pm, and while later than I liked, I went. Suddenly I was staring at a ticket system getting demonstrated and I was sincerely puzzled. While the future may hold a ticketing system for the office, the person they think will be managing the tickets isn’t the subject matter expert who will need to actually manage the tickets. Specialized knowledge would be required for that. Meanwhile, the system is still not backed up 20 days after the proposal was sent in. Not only were they putting the cart before the horse, they were adding a second cart.

I said as much, and it didn’t seem that well received despite dipping it in as much sugar as I could find. I’m volunteering, after all, and I can always walk out when I don’t like things. It’s better to know such things up front. And 2 weeks later – nothing. It came to mind this morning over coffee.
artificial intelligence
Everyone wants to innovate, to do something cool, but to do the cool things you have to get the basics done. You don’t just throw technology at a problem until you have actually defined the problem, and you most certainly can’t innovate your way out of a paper bag unless you understand the problem, it’s context, and how flexible the present technology being used is.

I do hope that I have time to deal with it should they want to do things properly, and if they don’t, I will not lose sleep over it. I have other things to do, and it’s not like it’s something that pays even as they mention to me that they’re willing to pay someone to do stuff that I might suggest.

Basics. The junior people fly at opportunities to use the latest hammers on the things they think are nails. The senior people want to assess things since they have more than hammers in their toolbox.

Bring Ice Cream to Meeting Hell.

November 11, 2018 ~ Taran ~ Leave a comment

Meet Piemur! — Bringing a mouse to a meeting is typically frowned upon.

If you think meetings suck, you’re probably doing it wrong or you’re stuck with people who do – so either do it right, or find a way out of those meetings.

Most meetings suffer a lack of definition, which is the core issue. Without that lack of definition, there can be no real actions to come from the meeting. There’s always at least one person who seems to be so out of scope that everyone else in the room doesn’t smack them only because it’s considered impolite.

There should be a set time. Everyone should show up on time, arguably earlier so that people can get out of it and move on with their lives.

Some people like transcriptions of the meeting. Ask at the beginning if they want one – and if so, guess who just volunteered? If not them, assign it to someone who knows how to listen and will halt things for clarifications.

This tongue in cheek, ‘20 tricks to appear smart in meetings‘ mocks the main problem of meetings: People trying to appear smarter than they are. They actually don’t for people who have more than 3 brain cells, so if at all possible, get the ‘must prove my intelligence to everyone people’ closed off in a meeting somewhere and treat it like a cage match with no bathroom breaks.

And then there is the tyranny of the clique – where a select few talk among themselves, not allowing anyone else into their conversation.

Avoid meetings, stick to a schedule and leave when the meeting is supposed to be done. Meetings are for people who like meetings, who like appearing busy rather than being productive.

Productive people meet. Busy people have meetings.

Information Fiefdoms

August 8, 2018 ~ Taran ~ 2 Comments

Yesterday, I found myself standing in Nigel Khan’s bookstore in Southpark, looking at what I consider old books.

I have a habit when I look at books, something I picked up in Trinidad some years ago after the Internet became more than a novelty. I check the date a book was published. It keeps me from buying antiques, though I have also been known to buy books in thrift shops abroad (though I am very picky).

I found myself looking at Tim Wu’s ‘The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires‘. Given some of the stuff I’d been talking about in different circles, it interested me – and Tim Wu I knew from his work with Network Neutrality. I checked the publication date.

November, 2010.
It’s August, 2018.

8 years. 5.33 evolutions of Moore’s Law, which is unfair since it isn’t a technology book – but it’s an indicator. Things change quickly. Information empires rise and fall in less time these days – someone was celebrating integrating something with OneNote in one of the groups I participate in, thinking that he’d finally gotten things on track – when, in fact, it’s just a snapshot more subject to Moore’s Law than anyone cares admit – except for the people who want to sell you more hardware and more software. They’ve evolved to the subscription model to make their financial flow rates more consistent, while you, dear subscriber, don’t actually own anything you subscribe to.

You’re building a house with everything on loan from the hardware store. When your subscription is up, the house disappears.

Information empires indeed. Your information may be your own, but how you get to it is controlled by someone who might not be there tomorrow.

We tend to think of information in very limited ways when we are in fact surrounded by it. We are information. From our DNA to our fingerprints, from our ears to our hair follicles – we are information, information that moves around and interacts with other information. We still haven’t figured out our brains, a depressing fact since it seems a few of us have them, but there we have it.

Information empires. What separates data from information is only really one thing – being used. Data sits there; it’s a scalar. Information is a vector – and really, information has more than one vector. Your mother is only a mother to you – she might be an aunt to someone else, a boss to someone else, an employee to someone else, and a daughter to your grandmother. Information allows context, and there’s more than one context.

If you’re fortunate, you see at least one tree a day. That tree says a lot, and you may not know it. Some trees need a lot of water, some don’t. Some require rich soil, some don’t. Simply by existing, it tells us about the environment it is in. Information surrounds us.

Yet we tend to think of information in the context of libraries, or of database tables. And we tend to look at Information Empires – be they by copyright, by access (Net Neutrality, digital divide, et al), or simply because of incompatible technologies. They come and go, increasingly not entering the public domain, increasingly lost – perhaps sometimes for good.

And if you go outside right now and stand, breathing the air, feeling the wind, watching the foliage shift left and right, you are awash in information that you take for granted – an empire older than we are, information going between plants through fungus.

There are truly no information empires in humanity other than those that are protected by laws. These are fiefdoms, gatekeepers to information.

The information empire – there is only one – surrounds us.

On Foreign Exchange, Credit Cards and Trinidad and Tobago (2018)

January 29, 2018 ~ Taran ~ Leave a comment

Yesterday, at least one person in the media (Judy Kanhai) started circulating the raw press release from the present Minister of Finance in Trinidad and Tobago. You can click it and it will open in a new tab so you can read it more clearly.

Personal Context and a Sincere Disclaimer

I found this particularly interesting in my own context since, even as I write this, I am trying to send money to my sister to help cover my mother’s funeral expenses. Because of the bank (whose name remains something I will not discuss … yet?…) bureaucracy as related to foreign exchange, will require me to send only half of the expenses I am paying per day under two separate wires – which, of course, works for the banks. They get to charge me for two wire transfers and two fees for purchasing foreign exchange. I had tried to charge up my own Visa Travel Money (VTM) card for handling it, but my sister decided to nip it in the bud – and meanwhile, I can only charge $100 US/day on the VTM.

So I’m quite literally being punished financially for assisting with funeral expenses for my mother. They aren’t even really that much given how much funerals cost, but the present systems allow me to be nickeled and dimed by banks for something that – let’s face it – isn’t me shopping on Amazon.com to get things I might simply want.

Clearly I have a reason to be unhappy. Clearly I have a reason to be angry. I am just one person, of course, but there are other stories at banks throughout Trinidad and Tobago about people dealing with their own issues with foreign exchange – illnesses, deaths, what have you. We have to be nice in the bank; we need them to deal with foreign exchange because to do it without them is deemed illegal.

Criminals of desperation, be warned. Right?

Writ Large

It comes down to the global economy, the Internet, and the inability of local banks to get their acts together to make accepting foreign exchange easier on websites for small businesses.

Pushing aside my own personal feelings I encountered today at the bank, let’s really look at the data that was given by the Honourable Minister. Credit card payments, which would include VTMs, come to $1.2 Billion of $5.2 Billion in U.S. dollars of foreign exchange, and that comes to 23% of the foreign exchange.

So, given this data that we acknowledge is rounded, we know that 77% of foreign exchange was not credit card related. For those slow with math, that’s $4 billion US.

And yet, none of that really tells us anything.

We know, at least anecdotally, that some foreign exchange is used for:

- Business
- Personal

So, what percentage of the 5.2 billion was business related? That might be hard to discern, since because of the bureaucracy at least some businesses are using credit cards to get their foreign inventory, and they are being throttled by new limits of charging their VTMs up. What percentage was personal?

Where’s that data? We actually have been given pretty useless data for anything deductive, and it makes me wonder if that data even exists. For a nation whose national ICT plan includes ‘open data’, where we hear talk about transparency, we are really not getting worthwhile data and we have to question if it exists. If it doesn’t exist, how are decisions actually being made?

This, in a country that doesn’t manufacture as much in the way of consumer goods as much as it imports – anecdotal, of course – it seems at least to me that most businesses in Trinidad and Tobago are simply resellers of imported goods. Food is a case that is arguable and remains arguable because of a lack of worthwhile data (there it is again), but other than that, just about everything is imported.

Cars. Tires. Sugar – revel in that a moment. We buy imported brand name oil for our vehicles when we export oil. We import… everything. We make… well, I don’t want to disrespect anyone who is actually making anything, but I’m pretty sure that they themselves are importing materials.

With an economy without jobs – and let’s forget the de facto welfare state government jobs that only exist to keep people from not having jobs – people become purveyors of goods and services to make ends meet, or they get into crime.

I’d wager that the largest employer in Trinidad and Tobago is the government if you roll up all the ancillary corporations and State owned enterprises.

And where is the investment in manufacturing locally? The Ministry of Agriculture subsidizes farmers, but I’ve seen people with farmer’s badges on land that they do not own or have receipts for. People are collecting money from the government for that and… are they giving anything back to the government in the way of taxes? We don’t talk about that. We should.

But instead, we have people doing what they must inside a nation that hasn’t figured out that it probably could have used a Ministry of Technology (where did that go and why?). We have banks showing profits yet increasing fees on their own customers. A proper Ministry of Technology might streamline all the disparate technology and protocol incompatibilities between Ministries while perhaps even refining processes in other Ministries to be more efficient and therefore less corruptible.

And if you want to get paid late, the best group to be owed by is the government. I know personally; NIDCO owes myself and others money over the Pt. Fortin highway project and yet somehow NIDCO has money to clear a forest reserve in Aripo, allegedly illegally.

Yet credit card usage is somehow the issue of the day, with incomplete data, with a lack of understanding of the global economy and the slippery slope of not adapting technology quickly and appropriately enough to bring in foreign exchange from companies rather than bleed it out for things we could probably do ourselves.

We know we have goods that would sell overseas – a small business could set up shop and sell our pepper sauce, as an example. Or dried fruits. But instead, the idea of centralized businesses persists, maybe because that’s where campaign finance comes from, when the global economy proves over and over again that the network has more power than the old centralized systems. And so, the old guard tries to cut that off – to assure that they retain their financial power and thus political power over a populace doomed to purchase ugly neon plastic things.

The world has changed. AirBnB sells timeshares that they don’t have, Uber rents taxis that they don’t have. In Trinidad and Tobago, it seems our model is the government spending what they don’t have while not paying what they owe to people, all the while enabling systems corrupted to disempower people.

So we talk about credit cards without any actual data of worth in the conversation in Parliament and hope for the best, apparently.

On Trinidad and Tobago, Policing and Crime

January 15, 2018 ~ Taran ~ 1 Comment

I’m no expert on Law Enforcement. I am, however, a lifelong student of systems with experience ranging from agriculture to medicine, business to the military, and of different cultures. I’m sure I’ll aggravate some people with this, maybe these are the right people to be aggravated.

It’s difficult to live in Trinidad and Tobago and not consider crime. To the simple, it is simple, to the political, it’s politics, and there’s little difference between those two. How crime is considered by the populace affects crime itself – it affects the approaches, it affects the way things are implemented, it affects what is actually considered crime outside of the police service and justice systems. There are so many perspectives on it that, on a slow grey morning, I find the time to explore some of them with you, gentle reader.

The Broad Strokes: The Context

In his January 4th, 2018 Bitdepth, Mark Lyndersay mentions the pronounced dichotomy and the grey in between when it comes to how people see crime in Trinidad and Tobago:

…There are at least two societies active in T&T, one committed to all the lovely sentiments that church-going, law abiding citizens are supposed to abide by and another that LOLs at that type of thinking before stuffing a pistol into their cargo pants and going off to demand what they want…

This is, of course, a brief explanation that is accurate in being vague. It’s exactly right. Speaking for myself, as someone who is not church-going, I fall more closely to the first group than the last. And, because of the nature of Trinidad and Tobago, I end up drinking beer now and then around some more close to the latter at local bars. The street knows who the criminals are, and a balance is there between self-preservation and being an extreme law-abiding member of the South Oropouche Police Council for me.

It’s also interesting to note that Mark Lyndersay and I look at things differently in that we’re generally in different circles garnering the perspectives of different people in different ways. This is one of the many reasons I value what he thinks.

And yet, we can talk about crime in Trinidad and Tobago and come to similar conclusions. In fact, most people have very similar thoughts. I’m just taking the time to go deeper into my perspective.

In Trinidad and Tobago, like other places, there is a veil of what remains unspoken in most company. You just don’t talk about certain things, mainly because you don’t know who you’re talking to will talk to with your name attached. I’ve seen it come back and bite others soundly not in their posterior but in their neck over the years – why would decades of experience relent to yet another attempt by

The same is true of at least some members of the Trinidad and Tobago Police Service (TTPS) that I encounter as well. With whispers of corruption echoing through the country beyond what occupies the traditional media, there’s a hard balance to be struck between the police service and the communities that they police. Trust is the core issue, but there is something more endemic: The criminals themselves are ‘law enforcement’ oftheir own areas, sometimes more so than the TTPS, but with their own local ‘laws’.

This leads to the ‘Community Leader’ label that has been applied by politicians for those that operate toward the darker side of grey. The only thing keeping some politicians from those labels are the Laws which don’t necessarily reflect Ethics in society; that so many politicians are lawyers is something that I consider now and then. Community Leaders know each other for what they are, some are just law abiding but have as fluid of ethics as their understanding of Law permits.

This didn’t all just happen one day. It didn’t happen because those without ethics woke up one morning and decided to go on sociopathic or psychopathic sprees; seeds do not grow in soil that is not suited for them.

Socioeconomics

Having came and left Trinidad and Tobago quite a few times over the decades, I have the luxury of snapshots that allow me to see some differences more easily. The poor, as they are, have always been poor. However, people living outside of their means seems to have escalated more. This is not just in Trinidad and Tobago; it’s global, but the degree here in a small island nation is a little more tangible and seems to have accelerated more quickly than other places I have seen.

Why? Well, the most obvious issue is that the economy is arguably not as diversified as it used to be. The sugar cane industry was lost due to government and private industry inefficiencies on a broad canvas of a decrease in demand in sugar due to different sources for sugar, such as corn. Generally, other businesses have been about importing things and reselling them locally; this does well when oil prices are high but it also developed an economical infrastructure that is crippled when oil prices are low. Factor in outright corruption and theft by people sitting comfortably abroad on their ill-gotten gains, and you have what we have now.

Because there was unemployment, the answer was having people cut grass and paint stones white. This was disguised under different acronyms attributed to different political parties by some. This work, sadly, became a means of income near enough to that of a recent University graduate to make it worthy of comparison. Factor in the national pastime of alcohol and politics, like everywhere else, and you find people doing less than more. The minimum wage, something I don’t really agree with in principle due to it’s easily being gamed, is hard pressed to keep abreast of the cost of living.

It seems that there are more single parents, it seems that there are more parents where both partners work to support the family. I write ‘seems’ because there’s really no publicly accessible statistics of worth that I know of; another issue that keeps coming back in my writings.

Because there seems to be more parents working to support their children, there’s less time effectively being spent with children. The moral majority, which is neither, will likely indicate that there are more children having children. Again, I have no statistics. Maybe that’s true, maybe that’s not, but it does seem like the nurture is increasingly required of primary and secondary school education systems whose ability to nurture has become more handicapped. Further, I’d say that the curriculum isn’t as challenging as when I went to school in Trinidad and Tobago – but I am biased and admit that openly.

Meanwhile, one of the other national pastimes of the country is leaving the country. This is what is termed as ‘brain drain’; as someone who could fall into that category, I can say that opportunity in this country is limited – it’s not so much about one’s ability to do things as much as knowing the right people and having enough letters behind your name to make you seem plausible to people who don’t know anything about what it is you do. Even in this downturned global economy, there does seem to be better opportunity for the young to go abroad than to stay… here. The system feeds itself by starving itself.

The centralization of the Trinidad and Tobago budget, too, is a little disturbing. On one hand, the government decides how to support those who supply something locally – for example, chicken – versus those who import. Where money influences politics and businesses that import with more influence, local suppliers are forced to compete at a global level within a limited economy. I don’t know if this is a good or bad thing, but I do know that I’m uncomfortable with a system so easily corrupted controlling such things.

The government now, with less in it’s coffers every year, wants to tax those who are earning less more to compensate for decades of poor planning and lack of diversification. It means less for the government to spend on things to correct the problems that the government created in the first place with bad policy and lack of diversification. Those who like talking about politics will now bring out their knives to stab at their opponents – but really, both sides of the political soap opera contributed and the political discussion simply keeps the easily distracted… easily distracted.

Public servants act like they’re doing you a favor sometimes; in some cases you can find tax-free businesses running to allow people to get through the rampant bureaucracy and poor customer service to get simple things done. Bribery is an open secret. Poor customer service is noted by at least one Minister publicly. This translates to time and money losses for citizens for things already paid for by the citizens of Trinidad and Tobago; in some cases these losses are necessary to avoid penalties and fines that are at least as antiquated as the processes involved.

On the ground, people are not happy with the government – and it’s not a matter of politics if you tune out the politicians. Right now, the national discussion is about how many murders there have been for the year already – more than New York City – and protests in various areas related to infrastructure. One more humorous protest even seems to have worked… so far.

This is, sadly, a result of systems that have worked exactly as designed – except with the perimeters well outside of what the systems were designed for.

Porous borders

I listened as a policeman formerly stationed in Cedros lamented to me that there were 25 points of entry and Trinidad and Tobago Coast Guard support has to happen through calling Port of Spain. All manner of things make their way through the borders on an twin island Republic which boasts a Defence Force on land and a Coast Guard at sea – the former assisting the Police, the latter the Police cannot seem to work with. On islands. I’m no expert, but I would think having rapid response vessels in key areas might cut down on illegal trafficking – from guns to drugs, from people to animals.

Politics

I am amused every time someone laments that whoever is the Prime Minister is at fault for crime – and I write that because indirectly, they are in some ways, but the expectation seems to be that the sitting Prime Minister should don a spandex outfit and go fight crime themselves. There’s a reason, aside from not wanting to see anyone in politics wearing spandex, that this does not happen.

The second politicians directly control the police services, or other matters of national security, and they do so without appropriate checks and balances there is the potential for abuse. Don’t like your Opposition? To the Gulag! Don’t like journalists? To the Gulag! Don’t like someone for any reason? To the Gulag!

So, directly, politicians can’t be blamed for such things. And while we have had Ministers of National Security over the year and all sorts of toys bought by the government to support them, they are little more than figureheads. The problem is so well entrenched that it will not be removed overnight – and, as I pointed out above, the larger view of the nation requires that across the board, policies must be implemented that mitigate socioeconomic issues as well as access to government services.

Silver Bullet?

There is no silver bullet. There is no way to deal with this overnight; this goes well beyond simply ‘fighting crime’ but dealing with the issues that create the fertile ground in which it grows. We live in a connected world now, where the Internet allows people to see things faster than any leader can steer through – but steer they must. The delays of antiquated bureaucracies need to be streamlined with common sense and appropriate technology usage (what we’ve seen so far in technology leaves much to be desired).

It boils down to trust – not trust in politicians, we change those like diapers, but trust in systems of governance.

The Human Factor: Tangible Results

May 11, 2017 ~ Taran ~ Leave a comment

One of the issues I faced across the decades of my professional and private technology endeavors has been, simply put, the amount of intangible there was.

A visit from my father in the late 1990s saw him proud of what I was accomplishing, but he had really little idea of what I was doing. He was of the electro-mechanical engineering sphere, a meshing of the arcane art of visualizing the magnetic fields of motors and the results that they churned out, physically. He enjoyed the recliner, the space in my apartment, and the ability to watch a flat screen in any room he was in – he appreciated the rewards of my work but not the work itself. Later, when he saw me strip myself of those ‘rewards’, he had no idea what I was doing even when I was getting media attention.

The human factor of sharing any achievements is difficult enough given the shifting sands of technology and the ability to comprehend them to understand the achievements. Dealing with things covered with Non-disclosure agreements, non-compete agreements, trade secrets and so forth creates a divide between people one doesn’t work with – sometimes unbridgeable. The idea of being the keeper of secrets is a romantic notion when it can be pretty tragic. I know I lost a few girlfriends to my being lost in thought about something that we could not communicate about. Call it a personality flaw. Mine. I live what I’m doing and employers and businesses loved me for it.

And then there’s the disconnect within a business, where the tangible results are misted by horrid implementations of the Agile processes. It’s why I prefer a more DevOps methodology. In the latter, there are tangible results with Operations, who are part of the process.

There is no complaint in any of that, simply a statement of fact. I bring this up because in comparing my battling the Trinidad Roseau versus Software Cost Estimation. On one hand, I have tangible results that I can write about and share with others, and on the other hand I am writing about how developers can’t properly estimate given the effective silos in a company that keep them from being a true part of the larger project. This is where startups are awesome to work with.

Everyone has a balance. Some people can balance these things better than I can, some people cannot balance them at all – at points, I balanced them well – but life isn’t a sprint, it’s a marathon.

But I do think that Software Engineers and others in Information Technology deserve more in the way of expressing tangible results not just to others, but for themselves.

On Software Cost Estimation

May 10, 2017 ~ Taran ~ 1 Comment

A recent video had me considering the problems of software engineering cost estimation – something that has plagued software engineering. It has also plagued people who think software engineering is just coding because, frankly, they’re idiots.

Since I’m out of the industry – by my choice and on my terms – I can now tackle some topics and speak my mind more freely without worry of repercussions when it comes to the next contract, or the next job.

The video is, “How To Price Design Services“, and I’ll embed it at the end of this post.

Now, when it comes to software cost estimation, we start off by gathering requirements. We come up with a design, or alternative designs, built on architectures and technologies that may be new or not, that a company might have the resources to do or not, etc. Some people call this ‘discovery’. Based on what is found in discovery, an estimate is done by reading tea leaves, a magic 8 ball, estimates of coders, and perhaps killing a gluten-free chicken and reading it’s entrails. That’s about as scientific as most people do it.

And how does one get the estimates? As a software engineer over the decades, I know an estimate given by someone writing code (not necessarily a software engineer) is:

based on assumptions based on the documented or communicated (mistake 1) information that leads to assumptions (mistake 2).
based on their skill level and experience, as well as innate ability.
dependent on how much pressure is applied to them, with different thresholds for different individuals.
usually wrong.
never tied to the value for the company.

Now, I’m not saying that the value of a project for the company should be the estimate – far from it, that’s just not how business works. But let’s talk about profitability – immediate and recurring.

The immediate profit usually doesn’t work out unless a marketing department is brilliant, or there is a monopoly, or both. So it’s about recurring profit. How much would be expected as a return withing – oh, let’s say – 6 months?

The point is that there is a value associated with the project that is rarely communicated to the development team, which is usually – hopefully – smart enough to pick this apart. And the people asking for the project almost never want to let the development team know the value that they’re contributing because those salaried employees will want more money.

Meanwhile, every software project encounters problems because of technology changes, changes on the development team (a problem of poor hiring or poor retention policy), requirements creep (‘someone in the sales department just had a great idea!’), design flaws (they happen), architecture problems and…. well, just about everything.

The main problem with all of this is that estimates simply aren’t accurate – which, actually, is exactly what they are supposed to be. An estimate is never accurate. It approximates, and people don’t get fired too often off of teams because of their coding abilities, but because of their or someone else’s estimation abilities.

There is a point here. That point is that the development team is only as invested in the project as the business team and management permits them to be – and if they’re better invested… productivity will increase and there will also be more careful and thoughtful estimates.

Now, does ‘invested’ mean ‘more money’? Sometimes. Free gummi bears and a gym might work in Silicon Valley, but they also make a metric buttload more money than a development team in – oh, let’s say Orlando, Florida. No, that ‘incentive’ is to get people to stay physically in place in a brick and mortar establishment which, sadly, is still the norm. But they don’t actually make people tweak that bit of code just a little more efficiently. You don’t toss gummi worms at developers and they prance around.

It’s about being vested. And that’s the core problem of cost estimation – the developers are given a black box to fill with little to no actual information from the business.

Oh. That video:

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RKXZ7t_RiOE&w=560&h=315]

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