It’s been a great year for infographics, almost too good (they’re starting to become a bit formulaic). At this seasonal time I thought I would highlight one to make us grateful:
(I’d link back to original, but I don’t know where it came from originally. I got it from here)
Back in September I set out on a process of writing less to write more. It looked then like there was just a possibility that I could get the end of the year and have written 1000 posts on this blog.
I need to set myself personal goals otherwise I get nothing done, it’s my way of focussing.
This is post number 907 and I’m clearly nowhere near the 1000 number. So I’ve decided to put the 1000 goal to one side. I’d rather focus on quality over quantity anyway, but sometimes it’s nice to have a target and quality targets are more difficult to set.
I like to reach a summit, but not at the expense of the view on the journey.
I also thought about adding up all of the other contributions that I’ve made on Twitter, Flickr, etc to come up with a view of my overall output this year. That got too scary so I decided to leave that one under the carpet.
It’s a simple question: "What is this document trying to say and to whom?"
I regularly ask this question to myself as I’m reviewing documents.
Most of these documents have followed a template which has been defined through a methodology. Much of the time people have written a document that fulfils what the methodology requires, but fails to communicate the story.
They’ve missed that the fundamental part of any decent methodology is that the document template is there to assist in telling you what the framework of the story needs to be. the methodology is rarely any good at telling you what the story is.
We should all regard ourselves as story tellers.
Without the story we aren’t communicating, if we aren’t communicating then we aren’t adding and value, if we aren’t adding any value then we ought to change so that we are.
(This is also one of the reasons why I dislike long lists of things in tables. They might be full of information, but they don’t tell a story)
I’ve always been slightly jealous of people who can skateboard. It was something all of the cool kids could do when I was at school, but I never quite got the hang of it.
So imagine my ire when I came across this group for freeborders who can look so utterly in control while flying down the extreme roads of the Alps:
CHoE Tapes 2011 – BSV 2011 from CHoE on Vimeo.
Southern Alps Session from CHoE on Vimeo.
While we are on the subject of extreme speed, how about this one:
One of the characteristics of an axiom is that it’s obviously true and as such you rarely question it.
I’ve subscribed to the view that some people are 10 times more productive than others for a long time – it has been obviously true.
As I look around the place where I work I can see that some people produce wildly more than others.
I’ve also worked on many projects where I’ve seen people who can clear the workload at an astonishing pace, they are obviously, noticeably more productive.
I was reminded of this axiom recently while reading a couple of articles by Venkatesh Raso on Developeronomics:
At the centre of the debate being had here is the idea of the 10x engineer:
The thing is, software talent is extraordinarily nonlinear. It even has a name: the 10x engineer (the colloquial idea, originally due to Frederick Brooks, that a good programmer isn’t just marginally more productive than an average one, but an order of magnitude more productive). In software, leverage increases exponentially with expertise due to the very nature of the technology.
While other domains exhibit 10x dynamics, nowhere is it as dominant as in software. What’s more, while other industries have come up with systems to (say) systematically use mediocre chemists or accountants in highly leveraged ways, the software industry hasn’t. It’s still a kind of black magic.
One of the reactions comes from Larry O’Brien knowing.net describing the 10X engineer like this:
This is folklore, not science, and it is not the view of people who actually study the industry.
Professional talent does vary, but there is not a shred of evidence that the best professional developers are an order of magnitude more productive than median developers at any timescale, much less on a meaningful timescale such as that of a product release cycle. There is abundant evidence that this is not the case: the most obvious being that there are no companies, at any scale, that demonstrate order-of-magnitude better-than-median productivity in delivering software products. There are companies that deliver updates at a higher cadence and of a higher quality than their competitors, but not 10x median. The competitive benefits of such productivity would be overwhelming in any industry where software was important (i.e., any industry); there is virtually no chance that such an astonishing achievement would go unremarked and unexamined.
In another article from 2008 Larry O’Brien gets into the specifics of programmer productivity:
That incompetents manage to stay in the profession is a lot less fun than a secret society of magical programmers, but the (sparse) data seem consistent in saying that while individuals vary significantly, the “average above-average” programmer will be only a small multiple (perhaps around three times) faster than the “average below-average” developer (see, for instance, Lutz Prechelt’s work at citeseer.ist.psu.edu/265148.html).
So, it would appear, there seems to be some disagreement on this axiom which is precisely why I started this series – how many of my axioms are really just nice ideas?
One of the problems with axioms is working out where I first came across them, this one is proving difficult to remember. I suspect that it comes from my old friends Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister writing in Peopleware:
Three rules of thumb seem to apply whenever you measure variations in performance over a sample of individuals:
- Count on the best people outperforming the worst by about 10:1.
- Count on the best performer being about 2.5 times better than the median performer.
- Count on the half that are better-than-median performers out-doing the other half by more than 2:1.
Peopleware: Individual Differences
But where did this come from: "[this diagram], for example, is a composite of the findings from three different sources on the extent of variations among individuals". So it comes from research undertaken around 1984 on software programmers.
You may have notice that I was vague at the beginning of the post about who the 10X people were being compared with – the median, the worst? It was deliberate, because I didn’t know, the axiom had become degraded over time and I couldn’t be specific. I was confused, and after doing some digging, I don’t think I’m the only one.
DeMarco and Lister point to and reference some real research for 10X being between worst and best which seems like a safe place to be. Everyone seems to agree that there is an order of magnitude difference between median and worst so that seems like a safe place to be too.
I feel like I’m having to constrain my curiosity a bit because there would appear to be so much more to learn but my time is limited. So I’m sticking to the safe areas.
Whatever the true axiom, we all need to understand that there is a significant difference in people’s productivity (however you might be measuring productivity) which makes it’s vitally important that we get the right people doing the right things. But it’s also important that we understand what our 10X place is and seek to optimise our time there and try to remove the constraints that are keeping us from getting there (he writes after a day of endless interruptions and chats resulting in very little personal productivity 
).
I’ve upgraded to WordPress 3.3, it makes very little difference to those of you reading this blog, but it’s changed the world that I see as the author.
The upgrade was seamless, slick and fast.
Thanks wordpress.org
I tend not to write many list posts mainly because I’m not a big fan of them.
One I have taken to doing is the occasional ‘Top’ list, and I’ve noticed others have already started the top lists for 2011, so here’s my Top 30 posts by visits in 2011:
Generally they are posts that I’ve written in the last twelve months, but there are two items on the list from 2006!
I live near to a place called Fernyhalgh Lane and after more than 25 years I am still none the wiser as to the correct pronunciation for it. Even people who have been born in the vicinity pronounce it differently. One thing is certain though halgh is not pronounced halgh. This got me thinking about all of the other places that are pronounced in a different way to the way that they are spelled.
A few years ago we went on holiday to the North East of England and stayed near to Alnwick which is pronounced without the l and without the w. I’ve listened to countless America tourists struggle with the word Worcester. Then there’s Magdalene College at Cambridge University which is pronounced Maudlyn.
So I wondered how many places and things there were that required some level of local knowledge to aid you in the correct pronunciation. After a little bit of searching I came across what is possibly the longest Wikipedia entry I have ever seen:
List of names in English with counterintuitive pronunciations
How does anyone stand a chance of getting it right?
Did you know that sitting is a dangerous thing to do, especially when you do it as much as those of us who have office jobs do. A wonderfully sobering set of statistics via visual.ly:
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