I had a chance to catch up with an old friend this weekend whose retirement party I unfortunately couldn’t attend . He was a senior partner in a law firm .
He told me a story which I want to share here . This happened some 35 years or so ago when he was just hired .
As he walked into the office, he saw that all the partners were in a conference room with a very serious look on their faces . After an hour or so they called the office manager – a middle aged woman who had spent all her career in that firm – inside . She came back with a big file in her hand – and she was crying . She left office almost immediately , still crying . His first thought was that she was fired !
He ran into her at the train station that weekend and she told him what had happened . He bought her and her kids some ice cream and she explained the reason why she was crying that day .
She had an abusive stay at home husband who was blaming her for all his problems, and she couldn’t afford a divorce . Apparently one of the partners came to know about this from his secretary and he called everyone else into this meeting . At the end of it – all of them wrote personal checks of $1000 each (which was a lot of money at that time) for her , and gave it to her saying “You gave your whole life to this firm and you are family for us . We have this covered and we will represent you in your divorce case etc . Go take your kids on a vacation for a couple of weeks and come back and we will figure out what’s next”.
Some years passed and my friend was nearing his own partnership at the firm . The trouble was that while he was good at his job – he just didn’t get the kind of visibility to the three senior partners . He went to this lady for some advice – by then she was supporting one of the senior partners as his secretary .
She pretty much coached him through the process – including apparently what to wear , what restaurants to eat, what jokes to crack and so on . She also helped him get some opportunities to be part of important work that got him the right attention . In two years he made partner .
She retired soon after – and at her farewell party, she told his fiancé (and now wife ) “I will never forget your boy friend buying ice cream for my daughters as we waited for the train – it’s the nicest thing anyone had done to them till then”.
A few days ago, my friend Frank Scavo wrote about the pendulum starting to swing from commercial software to custom built software . Today morning, I listened to his podcast with another common friend Den Howlett .
I would highly encourage you to read Frank’s blog and listen to the podcast. The movement to DIY is real and I am seeing it in the field too. It is something I have wanted to write about and now is as good a time as any. I would like to focus on just a few aspects I have seen as critical to the success of custom building software at scale.
Do you have the right BRAND to attract the top engineering and product talent ?
There are not a lot of talented software engineers to begin with. Attracting those few good people – be it a fresh CS grad or a veteran developer or product manager – to your company takes a lot more than throwing a lot of money at the problem. Your company may be the best retailer, or bank or automobile manufacturer on the planet.
Do these engineers you are trying to hire know of you as a place that works on cutting edge technology – and all that comes with it like great techies as your colleagues, modern work spaces, a thriving tech community and culture , cool perks and so on ? Do you have credibility in the market as an employer who invests in training people to keep up with the changing market ? Building that brand is real hard work and it takes significant time and investment . It is not a commitment you can make lightly.
Do you have the endurance to move from a project culture to a product culture ?
I have already posted my misgivings on IT shops using agile and scaled agile , so I will spare you those here. But in general – what sets apart professional software shops and rest of the world is the focus on products as opposed to projects. That is a culture shift that won’t happen without a lot of painful – and continuous – change management effort. Hiring has a direct influence on the culture .
The two largest pools of talent are other IT shops (commonly people jumping for better roles and $$) and SI companies ( commonly people who may even be willing to take a small pay cut if need be, but want to get out of their road warrior lives) – both largely made of people who come from a project oriented background. May be ten years from now, this won’t be an issue – but today it is a definite issue.
One more thing while we are at it – If your team is global, are you willing to make the remote teams self sufficient and fully empowered and not just order takers from HQ ?
Will your cutting edge team have the staying power?
If you are modernizing your IT function to enable a largely DIY culture – your economic model will probably need teams to be self sufficient on dev and ops, as opposed to one team having all the fun developing cool stuff and another doing the grunt work supporting it and answering the pager.
Will your software engineers hang around long enough if they are woken up at 3 AM by their buzzing pagers ? Do they have the skills to continuously automate ( the SRE types ) ? As you build follow-the-sun teams across the world – will your engineers have the skills and patience to work with people who are across time zones ? As you become more geographically distributed – will they be ok being further removed from the users for whom they are building software ?
Do you have a stress tested strategy for talent pipeline and IP protection?
Just as you want to build an awesome team, your competitors want to do exactly that as well . It is a lot cheaper to pay more $$ for your top tech talent than identifying them early and grooming them for a long time. Even if you are an amazing employer that checks every box, you have to assume a certain level of attrition.
Hence there are questions to answer about the supply chain for talent all the way from entry level to top levels in every geography that you operate. If there is anything more painful than attracting top engineers – it is in recruiting a top notch tech recruiting team and letting them do their job (often radically differently than what you have done traditionally).
Can you balance fun and discipline in engineering ?
Software development is not traditional engineering – developers are more artisans than engineers. On the good side, you will have plenty to choose from their creativity. On the not so good side – only a handful of engineering managers can balance it and eventually ship on schedule. Every good engineering team loves to create and evangelize their frameworks – and what they probably love even more is tearing down everyone else’s frameworks. I am as guilty of this as the next guy or gal.
The battle of frameworks goes like this typically – a new manager notices his teams are using 4 different frameworks . He brings them together and after a lot of debate they agree on a common framework . A few PIs later they find that they now have 5 different frameworks.
Needless to say – you need strong engineering managers, and ideally they are not repurposed from another function to fill a role.
So, can it be done ?
Despite all these uphill challenges – all this can be accomplished and to various degrees I have seen some companies do a decent job with modernizing their IT based on a DIY set of principles. I personally don’t know anyone who is still not struggling with it. The ones doing it better than others are the ones with extremely strong CIOs with the full backing of their CEOs (which is not common), and their boards (even less common).
I bought this book on Amazon Prime to read on a plane ride last week to Austin, and the round trip was all the time I needed to finish it, that too at a leisurely pace. I loved Walter Isaacson’s take on Steve Jobs when it came out and expected a similar in-depth treatment on Tim Cook as well. Considering the fact that Kahney did not get to interview Cook in person, I think this book does as good a job as possible under that circumstance.
I knew very little of Cook’s early years – except that he was an IBMer for a while. The book gives a great view to his upbringing in Alabama and ties together the themes on how his early years influenced his world view quite a bit.
The book paints the picture of a very talented Cook rising up fast at every employer he worked for – and yet never taking the lime light. The contrast is stark – he stayed in the shadows of Jobs when he was COO. And then when he became CEO, he had no trouble dismantling quite a bit of what Steve did at Apple. That takes a lot of bravery given the cult following Steve Jobs enjoyed – even after his death. People I know at Apple have confirmed this time and again that the culture has shifted significantly under Cook to a more pleasant, humane and charitable one.
The million dollar question in every reader’s mind is who has had more influence – Jobs or Cook ? This book makes a good case on why Cook was the better CEO for Apple, based on the financial performance ( which in turn is because of better operations under Cook), more fair employment practices, green initiatives and so on. Cook does not get much credit as a product guy – and only time will tell. His two major initiatives are Apple Watch and the secretive(?) Apple Car projects. Apple Watch has taken off and I bet it will go from strength to strength (already bigger than the swiss watchmaking industry) with the push on healthcare fronts. Car – the book indicates is a failure. If we draw a line today, of course Cook cannot hold a candle to Jobs on product front.
All that said – the book makes a very strong case that Cook is a significantly better human being than Jobs. Jobs had no issue with lying, and he would never apologize for his mistakes. Cook on the other hand have very high standards for himself and he holds his team accountable for that.
As much as Cook cares deeply about Ethics, fairness etc – he is all about the business first and foremost. This becomes clear in the book from the wide gap between his talk on diversity and his actions on filling Apple’s board and senior executive team with mostly white males. He won’t risk disrupting what is in place today. He does deserve credit for significant effort and investment in STEM education and other initiatives to have a better entry level pipeline. Can’t blame him too much though, to be fair – what he has done so far is significantly better than most other CEOs.
While his stance on diversity can be questioned, his initiatives on cleaning up Apple’s act when it comes to their Supply chain partners is commendable. Of course we can argue that Apple can do more and should do more. But on a relative scale – Cook has not only made Apple a better company, I think he has laid the groundwork for the industry to be a whole lot better as a collective. Not a lot of CEOs can claim that !
The book covers in great detail his strong stance on not compromising privacy of his customers – especially with the FBI request for a backdoor entry to phones. That is admirable and is one of the parts of the book that I enjoyed the most. To do this in silicon valley when FB and Google and others all thrive on convincing customers to trade privacy for convenience is beyond admirable. Kahney paints this picture very well indeed.
I would definitely encourage you to read this book
And Vijay Says... 