Social Solace

Facebook should be the perfect place for learned peoples to exchange ideas, debate from a position of their perspective, offer ideas for crafting better futures.

Something happened along the way.

The methodology for crafting a better world turned into a method of sport.

We started voting the weakest link off the island. The pretty girl, even if she is sweet and a wonderful cook wasn’t going to get the bachelor, and the extremely talented isn’t going to be a part of next weeks entertainment because they didn’t get enough phone votes.

There is a neighborhood bar not far from my house. There is always football on in the winter and baseball in the summer although you can’t hear the commentary because the juke box and conversation from neighborly strangers is more important than the last play.

It is a blue-collar bar. The people in there fix air conditioners, sell flooring, or they drive a delivery truck, you get the idea. People like me with a polo shirt and dockers are welcome but no one there is going to belittle me and show me the door just because I might harbor some suggestions on how our local governing bodies can make traffic better or improve garbage collection.

Most of the dockers and polo shirt crowd would call this a place a “shit hole”. There is no karaoke, the bar tenders don’t use a cork screw to serve drinks, and it is just across the county line so smokers are welcome. Not exactly the contemporary white-collar hangout.

This particular bar I’m telling you about I hadn’t been in for over a year. Last week I decided to stop by and drown some sorrows I’ve bee suppressing and I noticed there were a number of improvements. There was more lighting, a wall had been taken out and a room added for a pool table and assorted video console games, some new table and chairs that didn’t rock so much.

I’m guessing that someone convinced the owner that her place was thought of as a “shit hole” so her staff made some improvements.

Question: How do you get a teenage boy to recognize his room is truly a mess, unfit for humans to reside? Get a teenage girl to say ‘yuck’. All the preaching by his mother isn’t going to work, not until he recognizes that there is a problem will he address it.

The principle always works.

Not until an acholic recognizes he or she has a problem, when a drug-user hits ‘rock bottom’, not until the car breaks down on the interstate will someone admit the problem they have been ignoring needs to be addressed.

Not to be the simple stick-in-your-eye partisan on Facebook like everyone else I wrote a joke about a potential Saturday Night Live skit where leaders of different countries around the world were sitting in a circle of folding chairs admitting to one another that they had let their countries turn into something that was just ugly in the eyes of the rest of the civilized world.

I thought it was a somewhat funny joke that would help people who only want to point out the bad in today’s world that some things could manifest themselves as a positive.

You know, like a teenage girl telling a teenage boy his room stinks. Maybe he’ll recognize it as a problem and do something about it, and in a way that sticks; as opposed to when his mom complains the room gets cleaned, but two weeks later…

It was an intellectual joke, or at least I thought it was.

Facebook gave me the venue to float my joke; and open exchange of ideas between learned adults might see through the rhetoric behind the presidential comments being smeared in every direction.

Trying to bring focus back to the real issue.

The post got a few likes, perhaps less than ten. A couple of ‘that was funny’ comments but not much more.

Then early morning two days later someone employed the ‘vote him off the island’ tactics with an all-out personal attack.

Because of my attempt at humor everything was called into question.

All of a sudden, I’m a racist, my parents were racists, my grandparents were racists.  My personal status in our society was only based on the privileges bestowed upon me because of the color of my skin and not the fact that I put myself through college by spending twenty-years in the army. My attitude towards my fellow man were brought into strict question. Because of my attempt at humor a solid ‘off the island’ vote was cast by a friend-of-a-friend-of-an-acquaintance.

The saddest part of this is the gentlemen who posted the retort is a brilliant guy. He could have attempted to articulate where or why my joke was inappropriate and expound on his understanding of the world as he has experienced it.

January 1968, thirty-two years ago (from this posting) I was advancing my way through French Command School during one of the coldest European winters on record; the same month the Space Shuttle Challenger. I’ve stood for those in third-world “shit-hole” countries defending them from those who would push them down further into oblivion. I’ve followed the orders of men and women, color or not, who were my leaders guiding me to defend freedom. I’ve suffered the business end of a knife keeping women from being forced into situations of sexual assault or worse.

I kowtow to no man, to no woman, to no religion or political ideology. 

I’m not upset either; my attempt at these thousand-or-so words is to point out that having an opinion is everyone’s reaction according to their own world opinion; but if your opinion is based on real-world experiences then please provide a retort that isn’t an attack.

Don’t attack, engage. Don’t belittle, uplift. Don’t preach, embrace.

Consider the content of another’s character or at the very least the courtesy of their perspective before casting your vote.

I’m still on the island. I still have an opportunity for the really cool bachelorette. If it weren’t for my arthritic hands and failing voice I might get enough votes to appear next week.

ScrumMasters and Employee Retention

As we move into a projected period of prosperity a key job listing sites are employing 'poach' techniques to get individuals who are already gainfully employed to look at employer listings for other positions.

Sites like Zip, Indeed, Monster and others make their living by charging employers to post their job openings with the promise of supplying them names and profiles of potential hires.

It is only a matter of time when these sites match the skills of your team members with their job postings and start sending them emails with positions for their consideration.

As a ScrumMaster you are the first line of defense safeguarding the technical expertise of your teams from falling for those 'greener-grass' enticements.

The first thing I suggest you do is talk to the others in your company that fill a role of ScrumMaster and those who help create and maintain the work flow. Discuss quality of life enhancements that can be included when putting together sprint goals.

Sit-down with the human resource brain trust that oversee onboarding activities. An HR department professional can put an actual dollar amount as to the cost of finding and onboarding a new employee. They might even be able to help with ideas about those quality of life nuggets you are always looking for.

Use the numbers HR gave you as ammunition when you sit with managers and encourage them to sign-off on quality of life and job satisfaction ideas. Remember, the goal here is employee retention and we're using real-world carrot-and-stick techniques to keep our team members happy while at work.

Convince managers to invest in continuing education group plans like those offered by Lynda.com which have classes that extend beyond those for technology professionals.

It is the 'happy with my job' attitude by your team members that you as a ScrumMaster should have an eye on, you are the first line of defense to safeguard the brain trust of your teams and your company.

Shakespeare and the Hiring Process

Mid-summer of the year 2000, after the excitement of the Subway Series I was finishing up a programming project which took a set of code built by George Washington University called "Blackboard" and retrofit it to build NYUOnline.com.

It was a great gig, but the working conditions kinda sucked.  My desk was more-or-less in a hallway between the operations office and their sales office with the door leading to the elevator behind me. And it wasn't really a desk, it was one of those small reading tables you might find in a library. If I was going to use a reference book or read some of the Blackboard documentation I had to put my keyboard on top of the monitor.

The location was a perfect place to learn about 'The Big Apple'. It was on the 500 block of Broadway, NY which is between Houston (pronounced 'how-ston') and Canal Streets which put me right in the middle SOHO near the neighborhoods of China Town and Little Italy. It is this area of the city where at 5 p.m. the sidewalks are packed shoulder to shoulder with people trying to get to their train or bus so they can go home.

Regardless of the working conditions I had to stick-it-out, I rented a house on Staten Island having made the move from Taylorsville, NC.

At the end of 2000 the "dot.com" bubble was about to burst and NYU decided to take the endeavor in-house, reducing the funding. When they had released half of their sales and operational staff I saw the writing on the wall and went to Monster.com to find another ColdFusion position in New York City.

I had two job offers fairly quickly. ColdFusion programmers who can also do database work (now called "full-stack" developers) were a rare breed back then. It was only a couple of days before I had two interviews both of which turned into job offers.

The first was MarthaStewart.com. This was the time when Martha was at the top of her game and a full three years before she reported for a five-month term in federal prison for lying to federal investigators. They had a large staff working on her web presence, the offices were nice and fully decorated as an homage to Martha with pictures of her and food too pretty to eat.

The other was LAWTRAC.com. Their offices were on the eleventh floor of an office building on Montague Street in Brooklyn.  Here I would be the only programmer taking an older application and converting it to a web-based offering.

With both offers being exactly the same dollar wise the choice was easy. I went to work for LAWTRAC where I would be 'the guy' with, more-or-less, a free hand to simply develop.

For the next fourteen years I was 'the guy'. Not only did I do all the application programming, but I designed the database, made the hosting and delivery decisions, added modules and functionality that no one in our industry of matter management software for corporate legal departments had or were even close to having.

I was in Hog's Heaven, working most of the time from my house on Staten Island, then moving to Brooklyn after a stabbing incident (another story) and finally to a neighborhood on Long Island called Carle Place.

I was fully engulfed in ColdFusion and database programming and the world of corporate legal needs and using the programming to meet those needs. I traveled the country doing product demos, working with customers, tradeshows and had speaking engagements on both corporate legal data management and ColdFusion programming techniques.

By 2009 we had hired two additional programmers. One had a focus on creating custom reports for clients and the other's forte was writing the data exchange packages so the legal and financial data could talk to other programs.

Life was great - I was THE big fish in a little pond, making great money and had earned five-percent ownership in the company, a reward for sticking around during the lean times when the company was struggling.

By the time we received our buy-out offer from Mitratech and Vista Equity Partners the software industry had completely recovered from the 'Dot.com' downturn. This recovery period ushered in more structure to the methodologies software companies were using to produce their products. The older method called "Waterfall" turned to piece-meal structure called "Agile". The industry incorporated things called Product Managers who worked with the clients to identify needed changes to continue to meet client needs. The Agile methodology also used positions called Scrum Masters who took the needed changes and broke the requirements down so the changes could be done in a structured, more modular method.

A far cry from what we at Lawtrac were doing. After all, with a programming staff of three we didn't need all that additional overhead because I was doing all the things Product Managers, Project Managers, and Scrum Masters were doing. And we were doing fine, we had clients like Oprah, United Technologies, all the major oil companies, health care equipment providers, Federal Express, even the American Bar Association used our software to track their legal matters.

The American Bar Association, getting them as a client was like getting the contract to provide the candles to the Vatican. To this day I don't understand why the new owners haven't leveraged that to boost their sales.

Mitratech is a 'best practices' company using the Agile method to produce software. So quickly I had to adapt; I took classes on Lynda.com, bought books from Amazon and by February of 2014 I was up to speed and had brought the Lawtrac development and support staff up to speed as well.

I realize now that during the time I was the 'big fish' writing the software I did so in a bubble. My world consisted of writing code, caring for customer needs, speaking at conferences, doing trade shows, generally helping to enrich my meager five-percent ownership. The industry of software production had introduced business processes I was unaware of and the handing-over of Lawtrac source code to Mitratech felt like landing on the moon.

But I had helped to build a software company. I fought the good fight and afterwards walked away with enough money to buy and furnish a house in Austin, TX. I moved there thinking that I would fit in at Mitratech and could continue working on what was more-or-less my baby and help it grow even more.

I eventually had to resign because the person at Mitratech (VP of Product Development) removed me from the role of being a programmer who worked with clients to continue to build a better product had placed me in a role of doing nothing more than support ticket changes and handed the day-to-day programming tasks to complete strangers.

Three years have gone buy, I'm still trying to fit in where I can use the ColdFusion and database programming skills I have to earn a living.

But I'm finding that software companies don't want learned programmers. The conventional hiring practice follows the acronym "HIPLE" which stands for 'High Potential, Low Experience'. Recently I interviewed with a company which does corporate patent and trademark software (which would be right up my ally) called iRunWay and they actually said during the interview that they were concerned how I would fit in with a staff made up of all younger people. Two months ago, I meet with a company called CoStar; I had gone through four interviews before they meet me in person and I guarantee you that the only reason they rejected me was my greying hair. I'm still getting calls from recruiters about that position, CoStar had no other reason to reject me.

Since leaving Mitratech I've worked to bring my skills up-to-date taking courses for my Project Manager Professional certificate and Amazon Web Services Architect certification.

Getting past the young recruiter staff software companies employ too has been a challenge. If I remove much of my work experience and the dates from my resume so my age is not as apparent I get calls, but once they begin to since I'm over thirty those calls go downhill very quickly.

The whole experience reminds me of Shakespeare's St. Crispin's Day Speech, the ending….

And gentlemen in England now a-bed
Shall think themselves accurs'd they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks

Of all the start-up companies in Austin, TX you would think that one would like to have a seasoned programmer who would bring a 'been there, done that' attitude. One that has experienced programming pit-falls many on their HIPLE staffs will make.

But I really think Shakespeare was onto something. A recruiter or young hiring manager looks over my resume they experience their own feelings of having missed out on something, like the birth of the Internet and that history that has lead up to what the industry is today.


@TheCoStarGroup
@iRunwayInc

A Modern Shotgun Wedding

Many may balk at this story, but I assure you that every bit of it is true.

In 1989 I was eight years into my army career and everything seemed to be going great. I was on the promotion list to get another strip, I had an assignment as a drill corporal, the 97th Signal Battalion which did the communications for NATO headquarters and as an AIT instructor at Fort Gordon, GA.

It was at the end of my assignment as an AIT instructor that I came down on orders to attend Army Recruiting school at Fort Benjamin Harrison, Indiana.

I didn't want the assignment. I don't think anyone does, but couldn't turn it down. Only the top five-percent of any given peer group gets the assignment because it is a high stress job and the peer group rating indicates you a person who can handle the transition from soldier to salesman.

I was at the school to become a Recruiter during the San Francisco-Oakland World Series earthquake, there is another couple of stories there, so I include that fact now just to provide a time-frame. The school was intensive, especially if you come from a job where you are focused on taking care of soldiers and keeping them focused on a mission. This was thirty-percent rules and regulations and seventy-percent sales.

With school complete I received my assignment, my home town of Roseville, CA and my territory included my alma mater Oakmont High School.

Arriving at my new duty station I found I had inherited three seniors at Oakmont who had enlisted under the 'Delayed Entry' program and were just waiting for graduation so they could start basic training. My responsibility to those young men was more-or-less to babysit them and make sure they graduated. There was a secondary goal of getting these three to recommend their peers to join the army too; the best way to do this was to befriend them. So when I found out that one had missed three days of school because he was sick with the flu I traveled to him home in Granite Bay to check on him. It gave me an opportunity to meet his family and do my due-diligence and make sure he wasn't skipping school. Something we called a "health and welfare check".

Before I get much further into this I should mention that army recruiters, at least when I was in the game, targeted individuals in different categories because they were worth points. For example, a high school senior is worth a point, after graduation two points, a person in college would be three points. Additional points were awarded for a female, had graduated college, was a nurse or doctor, etc. So J*** was worth a point and I would get another point once he graduated and was shipped off to meet his drill sergeant.

His father was the pastor of a local Baptist church, so the house was the church was it's parsonage.
Being a recruiter I was wearing my dress uniform with all my awards and other appropriate acoelomates pinned in their proper locations. I checked on J*** and yes, he had been under the weather but was on the mend.

His father invited me to sit for a time in the living room and being polite I accepted. His wife brought a cup of coffee and conversation between dad and myself turned to items on my uniform as he too was army airborne, so we bonded a bit over stories of Fort Benning.

Also in the room was J***'s older sister, she was more focused on the needle point project in front of her. I had found out through previous conversations with J*** that his sister had completed two years of college, something army recruiters call a "high grad", and if I could sign-up a female with two years of college I would have been a hero as these 'categories' give you extra points.

I thought it a bit gosh to recruit there in their living room, so I thanked them for their hospitality and returned to Roseville and the recruiting office.

Over the next week or so I asked J*** to introduce me to his sister. His standing reply was to come to church and meet her there.

Being the ambitious, young, focused on acceding Sergeant I was guess what I did…

…I went to church.

That Sunday I went all out; spit-shinned my shoes, made sure my brass belt buckle reflected everything,  even a fresh haircut.

J*** was a perfect host. He introduced me to everyone; from the elders to the youngest members.

I remember the sermon like it was yesterday. The pastor (J***’s dad) must have been given the heads-up that I would be attending because he spoke of the pitfalls and evils of pride.

Picture it, I’m sitting in a back pew in my dress uniform being told my accomplishments, brightly displayed with shinny medals and ribbons, was a bad thing. I was wearing my pride on my chest for all to see.

I couldn’t wait to get out of there; when all was said and done I was the poster boy demonstrating everything the preacher just proclaimed was wrong with the world.

But I was there on a mission.

And the mission was accomplished; I had a lunch appointment with the high-grad female.
I say “appointment” because that is exactly what I intended; I was going to “put her in boots”.

Best laid plans of mice and men…

I’m still not sure about the exact sequence of events but I can assure it went quick. She was intelligent, got my odd-ball humor, and loved the uniform.

Right away I was smitten. Even as I write this I have to admit to this day I have never felt as in love as I was that spring.

And for a twenty-something army nerd it was perfect.

She loved me too.

In the early mornings on her way to work in Sacramento she would call and I would unlock my apartment door; she would stop by and we would make love.

We would every chance we could.

After church, before work, after work, anytime she could get away from the pastor.

We were in love.

She assured me she was on The Pill.

Everything was great. I had a job in the army where I didn’t need to slosh around in the mud,  I was in my hometown around family and friends, and I was getting laid more then anyone in the history of mankind.

The only thing I had to do to keep this up was go to church, which was OK because I was “getting some” afterwards as we would pretend a lunch date afterwards.

Nothing lasts forever.

In a Baptist Church once the preacher finishes his sermon and while the songs are been sung there is an “alter call”. This is where people who have been ‘moved by the spirit’ go to the front of the church and confess their sins and their love for God.

One Sunday in May while on of these alter calls my love left my side in the pew and approached the front of the church.

She left me sitting alone at the place we had carved out as a couple for ourselves, away from her family; after all we were a couple, building a future.

She confessed her sins.

If there is such a thing as a nuclear bomb in a church it went off that spring day.

She confessed premarital sex and informed the congregation she was pregnant.
This is how I learned my Love was with child.

Alone, at the right far end of a pew, on the right side of the church in front of a hundred or so strangers who’s focus changed from the sinner to the one who caused her to sin.

And there was a baby.

Let me pause one moment and remind you, this is a TRUE story.

I’m in a Baptist Church, and the preacher’s daughter just told everyone she is pregnant and I’m the one who is responsible for this shame.

Some of the church elders along with the preacher himself took this as an affront to their Christian since-abilities and their reputation in and around Roseville.

Some of them were old soldiers.

I’m sure they were thinking of the reputation of their church and community, but they started contacting the army expounding on their embarrassment and shame.

Called into the commander’s office in Sacramento I was reminded that I represented the US Army in my community.

Trust me, no one was more embarrassed then I.

Their phone press worked, and I convinced the commander I would do the right thing.

After all it was an easy decision, I loved her… embarrassed aside I was happy to incorporate M*** as the one with whom I embark on the next chapter of my life.

The wedding was quick, two weeks top.

In the month or less since the bomb and the wedding the calls from the elders to the army hierarchy took root.

I had embarrassed the army and their sensibility of their right and wrong.

Although I had married M*** my reputation in the community had been ruined as far as my First Sergeant and Sergeant Major were concerned.

I was an embarrassment to recruiters everywhere.

The Monday following the wedding I was released from my responsibilities as a army recruiter and after my son was born sent back to the 'regular' army as the First Gulf War had broken out and they needed me.

I never told M***. I wasn’t ever going to admit that a consideration for our wedding was my career, I’m sure her considerations for that alter call would have the impact it did.

With the community pressure on the Army and myself this was a modern shotgun wedding.

To this day I harbor anger at the elders of Landmark Missionary Baptist Church in Roseville, CA. Their meddling and busy-body backroom gossip has only stiffened distain for organized religion.