Ted Dziuba

The Speculation Trap

Thu, 09 May 2013 16:10:52 -0700

Don’t ever answer a question that forces you to speculate.

Forcing you to speculate is a tactic that reporters, investors, executives, and spouses use to put you on the defensive. Don’t play the game. You can’t win.

As soon as you accept the invitation to speculation, the boundaries of the hypothetical problem you need to solve are beyond your control. The other person can change the situation as needed to throw you off your balance. For example:

“What would you do if Google launched a competitor?”

- Every Investor, Ever.

No direct answer will make you look good. There’s a bear trap behind every door you open:

“But Google has billions of dollars in cash, you don’t.”

“Google can instantly scale their product because of their vast technical resources.”

“Google could have a hundred top engineers working on this by lunch.”

It’s impossible to answer a question like this without complete context, and if you start speculating, the context is whatever the investor wants it to be.

How do you answer, then?

Use the question as an opportunity to re-iterate your message. You’ve got a message, right? When asking for money, my message is usually: “This is a huge market opportunity, and my team is perfectly suited to tackle it.”

When I get the “what-if competition” question, my response is:

“Well, who knows if that will ever happen, but I’ll say this: with such a big opportunity in front of us, there are tons of challenges. My team and I love difficult problems, and we’ve already done some amazing things that nobody else has pulled off, for example, ….”

Shut down the speculation and get back on message. Yes, this it the “non-answer answer” you see on TV all the time. You see it on TV because the people giving these answers have had media training and have learned how to completely own the conversation.

It feels corny the first time, but it’s a cheat code for any adversarial conversation.

"Rules were meant to be broken, but sentencing guidelines were meant to be followed."

Sun, 05 May 2013 21:06:31 -0700

“Rules were meant to be broken, but sentencing guidelines were meant to be followed.”

- Me

I Am a Gun Owner. Let's Talk Gun Control.

Fri, 14 Dec 2012 20:50:48 -0800

I own 5 guns. 4 of them are traditional looking hunting rifles and shotguns.

However, one of them is an AR-15, a “military-style assault rifle”, except that it’s been modified so as not to fit the definition of an “assault weapon”, since assault weapons are illegal in California. I bought it legally from a gun dealer in California, and went through a background check and 10-day waiting period.

I know a lot of vehemently anti-gun people. I usually keep my views to myself, but I’m happy to join a rational conversation. Inevitably, the question always comes up, “why do you need an assault weapon?”

(Well, technically it’s not an assault weapon since those are illegal in my state, but I’ll play ball. Like I said, rational discussion.)

I need it because I don’t need the government telling me what I don’t need.

My interpretation of the Second Amendment that is that the Constitution explicitly grants Americans the right to private gun ownership because it is the last line of defense against an oppressive government.

I believe it is for the government to be afraid of its people, not the other way around.

However, this is just philosophy. It’s not something I can rightfully say to someone whose child died from gunfire. I’m sure this story would play to a much more receptive audience in Syria, Bahrain, or Egypt, but American citizens have only once tried to overthrow their government, and they lost. Since then, representative democracy has done a good job at keeping civil rights intact, save for a few knee-jerk reactions since terrorism joined the national conversation.

So, is private gun ownership still relevant?

Before we talk about private gun ownership, let’s talk about nuclear weapons. There are lessons here that play into the gun control discussion.

On August 6, 1945, the United States dropped a bomb on Hiroshima, Japan. This bomb held 64 kilograms of Uranium 235 and produced an explosive force of 16 kilotons. It destroyed everything in a 2-mile radius from its explosion point. Between the blast, fire, and long-term radiation effects, Little Boy killed 200,000 people.

A 16 kiloton bomb kills 200,000 people.

The end of WWII brought America face first into a nuclear arms race with Russia. Russian spies brought details of bomb design back home, and Russia exploded its first nuclear weapon, 4 years after the United States. This bomb, lovingly nicknamed “Joe 1” by American scientists, produced a yield of 16 kilotons, the same as Little Boy.

16 kilotons. A bomb large enough to destroy a city and kill 200,000 people.

However, once this happened, the race was on. No bomb could be too big. The Americans exploded Ivy Mike, the first boosted-fusion weapon, in 1954. It yielded 10 megatons. We’ve now gone up an order of magnitude in destructive power.

What’s interesting about the Ivy device is that our scientists figured out how to burn virtually endless quantities of the 238 Uranium isotope, the most common form. With this discovery, they could build a bomb as big as the Generals wanted.

Not to be outdone, the Russians exploded Tsar Bomba in 1961, the largest nuclear explosion to date. Tsar produced a 50 megaton explosion. It could have produced 100 megatons, but the Russians dialed it down because their test pilots would not have survived the blast.

50 megatons, when all it takes to destroy a city and end a world war is a 16 kiloton bomb.

The only nuclear weapons ever exploded in anger caused a horror previously unimaginable, and we’re competing with the Russians to build bombs that are orders of magnitude more destructive.

What’s more, during the Cold War, the Strategic Air Command, America’s military organization in charge of figuring out how to turn Russia into a parking lot, had drawn up nuclear war plans for every possible scenario.

Someone asked SAC commanders, under their models, what would a nuclear bombing of Hiroshima look like? Their response: 3 bombs, 80 kilotons each. Little Boy was 1 bomb, 16 kilotons.

I hope that I’ve demonstrated by example that when two parties with opposing interests get into an arms race, the result is weapons that fly beyond practicality, beyond horror, to a place that is so unimaginable, we can only understand it statistically.

Buildings leveled.

Military installations destroyed.

People killed.

This is analogous to the current state of affairs between Gun Culture and the American Government. Police officers regularly patrol the streets with AR-15 assault rifles in their cruisers. I own an AR-15 because I think it’s a hedge against an oppressive government, a reason that, in this country, still only exists in the abstract.

But there’s part of me that worries about a police force that vastly out-guns the citizenship. I read about police brutality and see videos of cops abusing their powers, and it reinforces my interpretation of the Second Amendment.

But it’s an arms race. And history tells me how those work.

So, I propose this: let’s talk about multilateral arms reduction. If Congress and the President choose to ban “assault weapons” and high-capacity magazines, let those laws apply to the police as well.

An all-out ban with confiscation is not plausible, but a ban on future sales is, as are tighter controls on handguns. I propose that for each gun control measure imposed on American citizens, a matching measure be imposed on domestic police forces.

As wonderful as it would be to no longer see pictures like this:

It would be equally wonderful to no longer see pictures like this:

Thanks for reading.

Corporate Bureaucracy is Anti-Capitalist

Tue, 09 Oct 2012 14:42:50 -0700

“Our bureaucracy is a huge competitive advantage and adds real shareholder value.” — No CEO, ever.

Corporate bureaucracy is a malignant tumor on capitalism’s vital organ: incentive. The cruel irony is that corporate bureaucracy is a byproduct of a sloppy capitalist implementation. It’s the method by which privately owned companies govern themselves in pursuit of competition with one another.

How Bureaucracy Kills Innovation

At the risk of getting too cerebral too early, let’s look at an example.

Typically, at most companies, products and services undergo legal review before development. Corporate attorneys are punished for introducing risk. If an attorney signs off on a contract, only to have it adversely impact the company, chances are, that attorney is either disciplined or fired. It’s important to note here that a corporate attorney isn’t positively incentivized for every unit of risk he or she mitigates. Attorneys don’t get bonuses for making contracts extra-safe.

Internally, the client is a product group that wants to ship something with business value. This group is positively incentivized to ship the product, as if it produces significant profit, the group will likely be rewarded.

See how these mismatch? The lawyers might get whacked on the fingers if they say “yes”, and the product group will get paid if their product is successful, but first, they must get the laywers to say “yes”. The lawyers have no upside, only downside.

This incentive structure is what defines degenerate bureaucracy: groups within a company that control resources supporting profit centers are not positively incentivized, or if they are, the goal the group must reach to get the payoff is incorrect.

Let’s see an example where a support group has a degenerate goal: Tech Ops.

Goals for technical operations organizations typically focus around uptime. If the website is up, the company is making money, but if it’s down, they’re losing money. Since it’s ops’s job to keep the servers up, it makes sense that they should be positively incentivized for keeping those servers up, right?

In this case, it is never in Ops’s interest to help deploy new products. For example, if a product development group comes to Ops and says that they need some databases provisioned, there is no upside for Ops to assist. There is only downside. If a systems admin provisions a new database on a machine that’s being used to serve some other core functionality, and the new database gets hit so hard that it takes down the core site, then Ops falls short of their goal, and thus, their incentive.

If there’s no explicit incentive for ops to help new product development, they won’t.

In 1942, the Soviet Union started its analog to the American Manhattan Project. The Soviet intelligence apparatus had discovered joint American and British efforts to develop a nuclear bomb, and Stalin thought that the Soviets ought to have this weapon, too. Stalin picked a protege named Vyacheslav Molotov to lead the program. (Early in the development of the Soviet state, Lenin had been contemptuous of Molotov for his “shameful bureaucratism”)

To the surprise of exactly nobody, bomb development moved at a crawl under Molotov. Soviet chemical industry administrator Mikhail Peruvkhin recalled:

For instance, we had problems drawing institutes into our work. We asked [a researcher at the Institute for Inorganic Chemistry] to develop some chemical methods for us, but he refused. “Why should we do it? It’s not our work. We have our own job to do.” [1]

In 1944, Stalin replaced Molotov with Lavrenti Beria, the head of the secret police. Bomb development proceeded quickly from there, as Beria threatened scientists and their supporting organizations with execution or imprisonment if they failed. (Ironically, when Khrushchev took power after Stalin’s death, he had Beria executed for crimes against the state)

Where Bureaucracy Comes From

The parallels between modern corporate bureaucratism and Stalin’s Soviet Union are uncanny. In both cases, the means of production are collectively owned. In both cases, there is a central planning committee that attempts to set the direction of the organization. In both cases, great forward achievements are only nominally rewarded by the governing body. In both cases, people use the policy and procedure to protect themselves from punishment, rather than take risk on their own behalf.

Inevitably, when you gather enough people behind a common goal, you need a way to govern them, you might say. That’s a great point. The Soviet Union had millions of people behind an ostensibly common goal: the continued success of the Soviet state.

However, in America, we have millions of people, but we’re not all pursuing a common goal. Under a democractic/capitalist system, we all pursue individual goals - liberty and the pursuit of happiness - and the side effect is that we achieve the common goal of continued success of the American state.

I believe that corporations take this misguided view that everyone must be united behind the common goal: profit for the company. Central planning of the goal inevitably leads to bureaucracy, protectionism, and dysfunction.

However, when people are organized into smaller groups, all following the same standard capitalist incentive, the organization as a whole succeeds.

Taken to its extreme, the perfect implementation of a capitalist corporation is a venture capital fund, that takes capital from its shareholders and deploys it with the intent of seeing a return. The fund does not centrally plan the execution of all the companies in its portfolio, and is only judged on its ability to deploy capital and earn a return.

It’s Simple. We Kill the Bureau

In the end, this all points to outsourcing support organizations, or restructuring them to be profit centers. If other companies can turn a profit by providing Human Resources or Information Technology services, then your company can too. If you don’t think that’s an effective way to deploy capital, then outsource it.

People incentivized by profit will always try to do a better job than people who will simply be punished by failure.

Yes, this is a hard-nosed view of the world. Yes, there are a lot of people fat and happy in relatively safe corporate jobs who would suddenly need to start producing more efficiently. And yes, that’s difficult.

But Moscow does not believe in tears.

[1] Rhodes, Richard. “Material of Immense Value.” Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995. 66-67. Print.

Python 3's Marketing Problem

Tue, 03 Jul 2012 09:39:42 -0700

I’m a work-a-day Python programmer, and I don’t see a compelling reason to switch to Python 3. Sure, there are some neat bits and pieces that I would get in exchange, but a less broken Unicode model and some cleanups of syntax and the standard library are not nearly a big enough carrot to convince me to migrate existing, known-working code to what is effectively a new programming language. It’s also not enough of a carrot for me to learn the small, but still new, Python 3 syntax changes and constructs.

Learning Python 3’s nuances would not be difficult, but there is simply not enough payout to justify the investment.

There’s a great Q&A with one of the core Python developers about the migration process, and it’s very telling about how much “developer capital” the Python team thinks it has.

The Sunk Cost of a Language

If you buy something at a big department store, you’ll notice that their point-of-sale system looks like it came out of the eighties. That’s because it did. See, for something complicated like a point of sale system, the store made a significant investment early on to tie it together with inventory supply chains, sales staff commission structures, and national or regional pricing models. There’s a great deal of business logic ingrained in systems like that.

Technology has advanced pretty far since the time when the store originally installed these systems. You can buy systems now that make the checkout flow really fast - for example, signing for credit card transactions electronically and NFC payments by phone. If it takes you ten fewer seconds to serve a customer, then your volume can increase significantly, especially during busy shopping seasons.

Sure, there’s a quantifiable value associated with an upgrade to modern technology, but that value just doesn’t overtake the cost of the switch. I’m not talking about the direct cost of new hardware and software, that’s a simple capital expenditure, but the cost of the unknown is horrifying.

Taking this back to Python, you can consider the time and energy it would take you to learn Python 3’s libraries and idioms to be a capital expenditure. You pay it once, and it (supposedly) produces future value for you. However, I don’t think the future value it produces is worth the initial expense. What do you gain by migrating to Python 3? Some better Unicode handling, a cleaner standard library, and the promise of future updates and maintenance, since Python 2.x will effectively be discontinued.

Cool, I guess, but you’ve just told it to me, not sold it to me. If I’m going to migrate to Python 3, I need to believe that there’s some wonderful thing I’ll get at the end of the tunnel. I need to believe that something about this upgrade path will carry the language into the future.

I need to see the Global Interpreter Lock disappear.

The GIL As A Marketing Tool

There’s always a lot of technical squawking whenever the GIL comes up. This is not an “I Hate the GIL” post, that’s been done. The general understanding of the interpreter lock among Python programmers is that if you want to use threads and CPython, you’re gonna have a bad time. We could chew the rag about CPU bound vs. I/O bound for this whole coffee break, but at some point, the GIL will burn you if you’re using threads with CPython.

The canonical response from python-dev about this problem is “use multiprocessing”, which isn’t a real answer, it’s a “leave me alone” answer. Multiprocessing’s API mirrors the Threading API, sure, but there are always weird problems with it. Unexplained lockups, file descriptor issues, data sharing problems, all these things that make your average Python developer think that concurrency is really just an afterthought.

There are other Python implementations that don’t have a GIL, sure, but Jython isn’t as well supported as CPython, and IronPython runs on .NET (lol, no). And there’s always some stupidness getting your database to work in either of these, since the Python DB drivers are usually C modules that target CPython.

Anyhow, Python’s GIL is a turn-off for a lot of developers, including me. For me, I look down on the GIL because other programming languages don’t seem to struggle with this. In Java, you can make threads, and they behave the way you expect. Same for C++ and Perl. But in Python, there’s this issue niggling in the back of your mind.

If Python 3 could take away that issue, it would have a much stronger sell to the development community. Consider this conversation that I’ve fabricated to prove my point:

Developer: “Hey boss, I think we should use Python for our next project, because it’s a very productive and easy-to-maintain language.”

Boss: “I’ve seen Python used before, but isn’t there some problem with scalability? Something about threads? We should use a language that won’t have those issues.”

Developer: “Ah, yeah, the Global Interpreter Lock. That was a limitation of the legacy version of Python. The new version, Python 3, got rid of that, and it also has way better Unicode support, so our app will be easier to bring to international markets.”

Boss: “Alright, let’s give it a try. See if you can get a proof-of-concept together.”

The GIL is something that developers, rightly or wrongly, constantly bitch about. Now, Python 3’s backward incompatability is something new for developers to bitch about. From my perspective, Python is just getting worse over time. From my perspective, the core Python team is ignoring business realities.

From my perspective, Python 3 isn’t worth it, yet. I’m going to spend some time on professional development, and it looks like that time would better be spent learning a completely new programming language, because the risks are about the same, but the rewards are the speculative and unknown.

That’s the fun of it.

The "Reward is Cheese" UX Technique

Sun, 10 Jun 2012 17:10:37 -0700

Web application users are reluctant to do any work if they don’t know what the payoff is. You can’t write a description of the payoff because users don’t read.

What you really want is a demo, to show the user a picture or video of what they’re going to get in return for performing a task, but making demonstration videos is difficult, and if you hire a creative agency to do it, it gets expensive. (A two minute animated product overview can cost upwards of $50,000).

Fortunately, there’s a cool shortcut I call Reward is Cheese. There are two basic components to this technique:

A blurred-out or obstructed view of what the user experience will look like. (the cheese)
A primary call to action that, if performed, will give the user this experience.

It’s best shown by example:

Example 1: Do Work, Receive Cheese

Mixpanel is a web analytics company that focuses more on actions than page views. They show you trendlines for actions users perform in your application, but if you’re poking around Mixpanel before you install their tracking code on your site, they hint to you that they will give you some delicious cheese.

There’s a primary call to action at the top, offering to guide you through setting up Mixpanel on your site. Below that, there’s a blurred-out image that gives you an idea of the kind of party you’re about to walk into. Look at all those colors and dots, this looks like a Roman orgy of analytics.

If you do the work to install the tracking code, the reward is cheese.

Example 2: Cheese Isn’t Here, But It’s Nearby

tenXer is a startup that makes tools to help a programmer quantify his or her productivity. The primary landing dashboard shows you a graph of how much code you’ve modified this week, but if there isn’t any data for that week, rather than show you a zeroed-out graph, tenXer prompts you to select a different week.

In this case, I’ve already done the work to link my GitHub account to tenXer (which was not hard at all), but since I’ve been on vacation all week, it can’t show me any recent trendlines. The call to action overlaying the dummy graph explains this, and tells me what I need to do to get my cheese.

When To Use Reward is Cheese

You need two basic conditions:

The user experience you are offering must be a reward, that is, interesting and engaging. Graphs: yes, displaying a spreadsheet: gonna have a bad time.
You need specific data from the user or the user must perform some action external to your application.

Web application users are simple creatures. I know this because I am one myself. If the primary calls to action don’t lead me to what I want, I’m gone. I don’t read instructions, I depend on pictures and colors to get me to where I want to go.

Remember, user experience is the new intellectual property.

Starting Over

Wed, 06 Jun 2012 20:01:00 -0700

The last time I posted to my personal site was February 12th, 2012. When I wrote it, I didn’t know that my brother would only be alive for another 14 days. Two weeks after I wrote about some trivial Silicon Valley drama, I got the worst phone call of my life.

I made a name for myself first by trolling the Web 2.0 scene with my first blog, Uncov, and then later by trolling the web developer community with my personal web site. That was a lot of fun, and it brought me a lot of great things. If I had never started slaying sacred cows, my life would be a lot different than it is now, but my brother and only sibling Andy would still be gone.

You get a lot of attention when you touch nerves, and on the internet, attention is everything. But touching nerves isn’t what I want to be known for. It used to be, but it isn’t anymore.

I’ve gone through a lot of phases since Andy entered into rest, but the scariest one was when empathy disappeared from my emotional vocabulary. It’s probably a defense mechanism of some kind, but when that happened, I couldn’t separate the real me from the persona. The beast became me, and I became the beast.

That’s not the life I want to live, and it’s not the life I’m going to live anymore.

So, starting here, starting now, I’m done with trolling the tech community. I’m still going to blog about web programming, but everything I write here is going to be of substantive value. It’s important to note here that this is not an apology. I don’t regret anything I’ve ever written or published.

People want to be trolled. It’s in our nature. When we unite against a common enemy that attacks our ethos, it nurtures group solidarity. Trolls are sensational, yes, but we keep everyone honest.

Thanks everyone.

ted