The Peter Principle

The Peter Principle states: “in a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence”. This means that employees will tend to be promoted until they reach a position in which they cannot work competently. It originated in 1969 by Dr. Laurence J. Peter and Raymond Hull in their book carrying the title of the principle.

Quoting from the Wikipedia entry on the subject:

The principle holds that in a hierarchy, members are promoted so long as they work competently. Eventually they are promoted to a position at which they are no longer competent (their “level of incompetence”), and there they remain, being unable to earn further promotions. Peter’s Corollary states that “in time, every post tends to be occupied by an employee who is incompetent to carry out their duties” and adds that “work is accomplished by those employees who have not yet reached their level of incompetence.” “Managing upward” is the concept of a subordinate finding ways to subtly “manage” superiors in order to limit the damage that they end up doing.

Unfortunately, there has never been a large-scale statistical verification of the principle and most evidence given for the axiom is usually humorous and anecdotal.

Pre-designed organisations

However, I’ve been thinking about this principle ever since our chat in the context of building the “right size” organisation from scratch and how important the initial hires are to a start-up. If the Peter Principle is true then in theory you can’t have one layer of promoted management within the organization. But what would happen if you planned the organization like an empty shell from the start and filled the gaps as revenue and available operational budget grows? That way you recruit someone with the express intention of the final scope of their role which which may or may not include the responsibility for others. If you subscribed to the Roman principles of 10:1 management ratios (which I don’t since Sig so ably ripped it apart) that would peak your organization at 100 people. It does of course depend on the nature of your business, but you can usually achieve a lot with 100 people [1].

There’s no denying that hiring well is hard, as is managing the expectations of individuals around their “career growth” but that shouldn’t stop us from trying.

Valuing individual contributors

The underlying challenge is whether we create or join a culture where the role of “management” is viewed as something for all to aspire to and a greater goal than that of “individual contributor”. The collateral damage of badly formed cultures is sometimes seen in situations where managers with two-direct reports themselves work for a manager with two-direct reports and compound job titles such Distinguished Senior Principal Something Manager as attempts to standardize pay-grades and give people “something to aim for”.

There has to be respect for the craftsman, the creator, the knowledge worker, the domain expert. Those roles are not ones where you can shift straight into fifth-gear, they take a steady compound month-on-month, year-on-year development of knowledge and skill. Even if you look at an industry like manufacturing which many knowledge workers would look down their nose at, companies like Toyota have proven that an expert and empowered work-force is a powerful one.

In his book, Delivering Happiness, Tony Hsieh descibes how the moved to a more regular and granular approach to setting goals and related merit increases. I believe this could help remove some of these compound job title type issues and improve the motivation for growth within roles.

Management as administration

Joel Spolsky recently wrote a post on management as part of the MBA Mondays series on Fred Wilson’s must-read blog. You need to read the whole thing but these paragraphs really jumped out for me:

The “management team” isn’t the “decision making” team. It’s a support function. You may want to call them administration instead of management, which will keep them from getting too big for their britches.

Administrators aren’t supposed to make the hard decisions. They don’t know enough. All those super genius computer scientists that you had to recruit from MIT at great expense are supposed to make the hard decisions. That’s why you’re paying them. Administrators exist to move the furniture around so that the people at the top of the tree can make the hard decisions.

When two engineers get into an argument about whether to use one big Flash SSD drive or several small SSD drives, do you really think the CEO is going to know better than the two line engineers, who have just spent three days arguing and researching and testing?

If people are hired with the expectation that if they ever get management responsibility they should consider they’ve just moved into an administrative function then maybe some of these problems can be preempted. I’ve met some killer administrators and these deserve their own higher levels of respect!

A recent embarrassing outburst from a former-CEO in the online gaming world led Dave Winer, who continues to push whole communities along with his polarising but well thought-out views wrote:

There’s a lot of hands-off-ness, a lot of delegation. And humanity never entered into it.

OMGPOP was not a 20-year old company, it should not have had an ingrained culture that was impossible to reform due to constraints built up over many years of corridor-walking employees.

Get Out of the Way

Joel’s article closed with:

For every Steve Jobs, there are a thousand leaders who learned to hire smart people and let them build great things in a nurturing environment of empowerment and it was AWESOME. That doesn’t mean lowering your standards. It doesn’t mean letting people do bad work. It means hiring smart people who get things done—and then getting the hell out of the way.

However I believe these thoughts best closed by a quote from a classic two-fighting-brothers band:

“We need each other, we believe in one another” – Acquiesce, Oasis

[1] I hate it when people refer to organization with less than 100 people a “small business” as it seems so belittling of the achievement of providing that many people with work. In places like South Africa and other similar countries, one person with a job often supports many more people in a family and community group.*

Last week’s Cost of a Data Breach Study update had one particular statistic that stuck with me and to which I keep being drawn to when discussing it with others. In the UK study, they discovered that where an organisation that suffered a breach had a Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) or someone with the equivalent level of responsibility in place, the cost per record dropped by an average of £18. I think the key word in the previous sentence is “responsibility” for a few reasons.

Firstly, we have the increasing amount of fines and penalties that can be applied to the individuals involved in failing to deliver against expectations. These have gone beyond the original highly regulated industries and out into the broader business context. With the coming updates to EU legislation, it’s likely to get more attention in the boardrooms of Briton, not less.

Secondly, and contrary to popular thinking, stopping data loss and protection of the key information assets an organisation has goes way beyond using scanners to prevent credit card details being emailed out. Primarily, it’s not a technical problem, it’s a people-process-technology challenge.

In the past, I have heard references to people-process-technology being like a three-legged stool of which you can’t remove any without falling off! This can be considered a fair comparison but, for me, the ‘people’ part of this stool is the most critical starting point. People have negotiation skills. People have perspective. People drive change.

When it comes to the role of technology in stopping data loss I view it like an exoskeleton to the people involved. That may sound a little sci-fi but what they need to be able to do is say “this stuff is important, please tell me how it’s being used, where it’s going and who uses it”. Technology enables them to reach into network pipes with gigabits of data pumping through them. Technology enables them to piece together a process involving four employees and an outside contractor. Technology enables them to see the HR director does not like using the VPN from his second home in the Cotswolds.

The reason I view it as an exoskeleton is that the knowledge of what’s important comes from the people involved, as does the appropriate response and the negotiation to get from where they are today, to a more secure future-state.

The relentless growth in information and systems shows we’re not moving towards a state where data loss won’t happen anymore. However, this report shows that if you put someone in charge with responsibility and authority to make change happen when it does occur, the impact to an organisation’s bottom-line is significantly reduced. I’m happy to predict the gap between those that take it seriously and those that stick their head in the sand will only get larger in the coming years.

The story starts with Hotmail, which I started using back in the 90′s. I had an account there pretty early on and had mr_mike_jones@hotmail.com as my address instead of some inane mikejones938832932@hotmail.com address they’d probably give you these days. In ’98 or ’99 sometime I got sick of the “directory harvest attack” spam waves that Hotmail just didn’t seem to be able to deal with and decided to move usernames. I wanted “imsickofspam” but “spam” along with “help” and “support” etc. was not allowed in your username in case you tried to spoof those functions. So I just reversed the word! Maps is Spam backwards…

The spam stopped and choosing an account name at every service ever released ever since has been a piece of cake!

So there you go, I don’t hate maps… I fact when you walk into our house you’re greeted with a giant map of the world that’s about 3M wide … I LOVE MAPS!

via Quote by Anne Lamott: “Try looking at your mind as a wayward puppy that y…”.

Moving from talk to action was one of my New Years resolutions this year so its top of mind for me personally, hence the link to the quote on the Silicon Cape interview that said:

We don’t need more people talking about it. We need people to act. We need people to ship things.

So the question I want to pose and collect feedback on is this: Do developers in Cape Town want to increase their business skills or partner with non-coders who are stronger in that area?

I can’t remember where I read it this weekend, but the predominate Founding CEO’s in Internet-first businesses in Silicon Valley are Technical Founders not business folks… what’s the feedback developer friends?

I got to end of the article and all I could think was, “Why do I read this crap?” Well, I read it because my curiosity sometimes overcomes my importance filter. And getting that balance right is what we all need to make this curiosity thing work for good, not evil.

from Should designers learn to code? Who cares, as long as they always remain curious.

#1 – Print one picture per week
Slight change in strategy to save money on this one. I’ve been choosing one photo per week and storing them in a folder to bulk print and save money.  On Track.

#2 – Read less, write more
I culled a bunch of my inputs in Google Reader and deleted some irrelevant Twitter follows. I’ve written one of the longest posts I’ve ever written on ScaleConf (which has had over 250 people read it so far!), plus a few on my project blog.  On Track.

#3 – Cook something new every month
I cooked spicy meatballs that I made by hand and a awesome chicken balti. On Track.

#4 – Do the Freshpak Tri in under 1 hour 25 mins
I’ll have to wait a while on this one. Need to run more though generally. Pending.

#5 – Stop talking, build and launch a new site before April 1st
I’ve not stopped talking or building code. But I have begun to solidify the fundamentals so I can direct my activities wisely! On Track. 

#6 – Read the Bible in a year
This started well but trailed off. I changed tactic to read every day until inspired, a better resolution, but that failed too! This is officially not a habit yet! Failing.

Before I get into reviewing the conference and my personal thoughts, my key takeaway for my employers is that somebody needs to be at events like this representing Symantec. Symantec probably has the most relevant “vendor” portfolio of anyone to this topic and not everyone in the room was a bootstrapping start up using open-source. Nobody mentioned Symantec’s private/public scaling and availability technologies once (except for me, over beers, 1:1).

The conference itself was well run, up to the event and the event itself. Any organisational glitches that I experienced (my double-ticketing, bad WiFi performance, speakers getting ill) were handled quickly and neatly (extra ticket cancelled, bandwidth increased, moved to a panel instead). The coffee may not have rocked anybody’s world, but they had Rooibos tea! Logistics were handled by LessFuss so we should probably have expected nothing less, but there’s a more than small difference between keeping Capetonians lives in order and 200+ geeks happy for two days (or is there Jen?).

Content on the other hand was a mixed bag with some superb talks and some downright dreary talks! There were nine speaker sessions and one panel at the end (to cover for the unfortunate illness of Coda Hale) with each session lasting forty-five minutes. This is a perfect length for a talk. Thirty-five minutes of content, ten of interaction. It’s perfect in two ways. Firstly, because if the speaker is great, they can get a lot of information and inspiration done in that time and leads you toward how you can learn more from them or online. Secondly, because if they suck, you can easily entertain yourself on Twitter in the backchannel or answer some email and not feel like the whole thing is a waste of money.

Before I get into the session reviews let me say these three things so I don’t get struck off as a rude ignoramus forever:

1. Organising conference content is really, really hard. I help do it at least three times a year for internal and external events at Symantec. People suck. At commitment, sticking to deadlines, doing what they agreed, the list goes on and on.
2. Speaking amongst peers is really, really hard. Especially in the Stack Overflow/Hacker News era when everyone’s done a quick search after hearing something new and is an “expert” suddenly.
3. Every single speaker at this conference had something good to say. There’s a bible verse that roughly says “Don’t hide your light under a basket but put it on a lamp stand for all to see”. Some people needed help with their basket and lamp stand skills.

Lastly, one more caveat (do I sound nervous of a backlash much?). I said on Twitter during one session of the conference:

95% of the room are trying not to kill themselves, the other 5% think this is the best talk of the day. #iminthe95 #scaleconf

Though I may be exaggerating with my 95% claim, I think from the Twitter traffic during the “not so great” sessions I was in the majority in most of my opinions. In a non-tracked conference, I think you have to try and satisfy majority requirements. With that in mind here’s my own personal, very high-level view of the sessions and any slide links I could find.

Session 2: Craig Raw - Webscaling Tips
Competent, confident speaker but for me delivered little that couldn’t be found on a blog post about 101 Scaling. Maybe not a bad choice putting Craig from Quirk in for level-setting early on in the conf for newbies. Got some grief on Twitter for not even mentioning Python during his comparison of “safe/unsafe” languages for scale! [Slides]

Session 3: Zach Holman - Scaling GitHub
Easily the slickest presentation of the two days by Zach and not just pretty content but delivered well and with the right amount of detail. Top points for me from [Slides]:

• Happy employees make Productive employees (and visa-versa)
• Everybody (not just managers) should worry about co-workers happiness
• Look for seemingly separate datasources to graph for interesting correlations (e.g. “Twitter mentions” against “production deploys”)
• When using Git for source control, Master should be ready to go at any time, branch for new features and merge back to Master

Session 4: Miles Ward - Scaling using Amazon Web Services (AWS)
This was the first of the sessions where the quality of content was hidden by the delivery. Subsequent appearances and comments by Miles during the panel showed clarity of thought and humor. AWS is amazing, getting better all the time, but I knew that before. Whizzing through many reference architectures, mumbling into the mic is not a great use of 35 mins. What I would have like to see here is examples of bad scaling decisions when using AWS contrasted against the good. [Slides]

Session 5: Bryn Divey - Nimbula’s bIC: lessons learned and challenges faced
Firstly, I couldn’t shake the feeling that Bryn reminded me of Captain Jack Sparrow! Well delivered talk that touched on how they overcame some of the challenges in building a solution for developing private clouds. I felt like I knew a bunch of this stuff because I work at Symantec (we do it too) but key lesson for me in design was the criticality of tracking and documenting service dependancies is critical for multi-service-multi-server systems. One improvement could have been a bit more structure on being explicit on the lessons learnt.

Session 6: Deon Erasmus - Highly available infrastructure on the cheap
OK … last session of the day, so where do I start with this one from Deon. Erm… I didn’t make any notes on this one. But I spent a lot of time on Twitter.

Session 7: Ashley Peter - Scaling a mobile social network
This was an excellent start to day two from Ashley, very practical and very inspiring given 2go’s massive growth (16m registered users) and low numbers of staff (3!). One thing I picked up about scaling which I think I’ve paraphrased was “there’s nothing to do, until there’s something to do, then you need to do it really well, really quickly”! The structure of this one broken down into a focus on how they themselves worked through a combination of Vertical scaling, Parallelism and Horizontal scaling was great. [Slides]

Session 8: Simon de Haan - Learning to Fail
Simon is from Praekelt which is a fascinating dual commercial/foundation organisation. Their focus on solutions for Africa and building Open Source tools to enable that is both well engineered and worthwhile. I took lots of notes on this one, probably worth a post on its own and would like to meet up with the team behind Praekelt again to dive in deeper on some of their organisations set-up. My favourite tip though was “Avoid One Hammer To Rule Them All” … in other words, don’t use your favourite tool (framework, language, database, etc.) inappropriately! [Slides]

Session 9: Mark Phillips - Building Healthy Distributed Systems
Mark is from Basho, makers of the NoSQL database Riak and split his talk into talking about the characteristics of a distributed company, community and system. Great talk delivered with a sense of humor that I like and the right amount of clear advice which was something that some of the talks missed out on highlighting. [Slides]

Session 10: Wesley Lynch - Software Architecture and building E-Commerce Websites
Wesley certainly had a tough job ending the speakers content. He presented a case study of the job Realm Digital did (and continues to do from the looks of things) in bringing Exclusive Books online operations to life. Unfortunately it seems they had to bring order to a ball of “kak” and its taken its toll on Wesley’s positivity and it felt more like a rant than set of learnings with guidance! Full marks for attempting to stoke more audience participation and to the crowd for trying to draw some positives out (I tried… and got a nice t-shirt for my efforts!).

Concluding Thoughts
The conference closed with a speaker panel which had the right amount of wrapping up questions, audience participation and “in jokes” referencing the rest of the two days.

Overall, this was a great use of two days “off work” for me personally. It was an impressive setup given it was the first time the team had attempted a conference of this size and subject. Well done to Jonathan Hitchcock (@vhata), Duncan Phillips (@nuknad) and the LessFuss crew (Jen, Bradley and Marije).

Lastly, I tried to build a Twitter list of attendees by monitoring for mentions which you’ll find here.

Looking forward to the next event!

I’m not usually one for new years resolutions and certainly not written down and published to the world. However, this year I’ve had a long holiday and we’ve mentioned it a few times so I’ve actually given it some thought and wanted to capture them!

#1 – Print one picture per week
I take tons of photos, especially with my iPhone (and sometimes with my DSLR), but never print them out. I have a big blank wall in my office so I’m going to fill it with one “moment” from each week.

#2 – Read less, write more
I often have streams of thought running around in my head and the process of writing them down really helps solidify them. On the input side thought I’m a knowledge horder and love my 30 minute coffee/twitter/Google Reader hit in the morning (I think its what I miss most from my routine when I’m travelling with work). I might try and curate my list of inputs down a bit and carve out 10-15 mins for writing instead.

#3 – Cook something new every month
This is one Lyd and I have jointly agreed. We’ve got loads of cookery books filled with interesting things we’ve never tried and yet we revert back to the same-old-same-old every week. So, to resolve that we’re both going to cook something new every month leading to 24 new things on our home menu (unless they turn out gross!).

#4 – Do the Freshpak Tri in under 1 hour 25 mins
In 2011 I did my first two triathlons in Clanwilliam and Brandvlei Dams thanks to the encouragement of my friends Werner and Kelvin. I’m hoping to do more again this year and weather permitting I want to knock a massive 10 minutes off my previous time. Given I now know what to expect from the course (and triathlon in general) I hope this is a stretch, but achievable goal. I say weather permitting because if its 35 degrees (which it can be) I’ll be aiming for survival!

#5 – Stop talking, build and launch a new site before April 1st
For the last 6 months I’ve been dabbling on weekends and free evenings with a bit of programming again. This time with Ruby on Rails which is super-easy to prototype with. Its led to a bit of a reawakening of certain parts of my brain which has been fun and a great diversion from work. However, I keep starting stuff and not finishing so now I need change that! I need to sign some paperwork for my employers to make sure they know this is non-competitive and evenings/weekends only then get cracking.

#6 – Read the Bible in a year
The others are all mind and body, this ones for the soul! I once was given a bible by my mother-in-law Jean that had all the readings planned out and divided up with dates to help cover the bible in a year. I did it, just it took about 2 and a half years to finish because I keep missing days on end! I’m going to try and be a bit more disciplined this year as I know every time I pick up my bible I get something from it so it’s ridiculous to not prioritise it!

I think six should be more than enough to get going with, I’ll need to check back at regular intervals for my ability to stick with them!

“I have the three i’s: inspiration induced insomnia” – @imsickofmaps on twitter

I sometimes get these spurts of inspiration late at night and then spend hours with a notepad/iPad/iPhone/book/etc. scribbling, reading, thinking and Googling. That night I finally managed to get to sleep five hours after I went to bed about 3am. Sometimes I wake and whatever consumed me was just a passing crazy train of thought that no sane person would care to discuss with me. Thankfully, sometimes its not and that night was of those and has sparked a number of useful conversations since which warrant another blog post another day.

The next day I tweeted again a follow-up quote that is one of my favourites:

“Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration” – Thomas Edison

I’ve been thinking about that quote over the last few days and I think that there’s a missing portion to the formula in the quote which I’m stuck for a name for but is “post-inspiration but pre-perspiration”. To be cool it would need to be an “..piration” word but the concept is one of “thoughtful planning”. The formula is probably more like “1% inspiration + 5% thoughtful planning + 94% perspiration”. Too often I think people can jump straight from idea to execution and then flail around trying constantly pivot and re-aim in order to hit the mark they’re aiming for.

Anyone think of a “…piration” word for “thoughtful planning” so I can create a quote as cool as Thomas Edison?