roy

a wha wha whaaatttttt?

mic check. one. two.

live keeps truckin' on. one battle at a time - you fight and move on. and on and on.

. . .

growing pains at mindtouch hurt, but they're necessary. i'm doing my best to adjust and make sure things run smoothly, but 'tis a tough job. i've been getting increasingly frustrated with a bunch of people, who are misconstruing my tapped-out resources as invitations to work around me. i've been calling people out on it a lot lately, and unfortunately i will have to continue to do so. if you ever wonder how the perception of asshole managers are made, i'm pretty sure this is it. the problem is, as always, information assymetry: i know why someone will have to be blocked, or a particular process is used. but others, who don't have the benefit of interfacing with the rest of the team (and thus knowing the goals of the team), have only their self-interest to guide their decision making. i tried to fix this problem first by using weekly all-hands meetings, but those meetings quickly degraded in value as people used them just to make a laundry list of things they worked on - and again, not their fault! whoever knows the whole story should be weaving it, not the individual strands. le sigh. 

voiced some concerns about the direction of the company (i'm in total sync with the engineering team, but out of sync with everybody else) today - good to air those out. as always, i'm so heads-down dealing with ops that i'm afraid that by skipping out on a few strategy meetings, we'll end up committed to another monstrosity of a project ... the echo chamber is a dangerous place.

historically speaking, i'm the guy who ended up cleaning up the mess made by other people. just once i'd like to be the guy who makes the mess and have somebody else deal with it ... that'd be so nice. (of course, i do this unintentionally, because i have the dev skills of a blind monkey)

quality in software is always a concern - i always wondered why big companies let shitty software get developed - i can see why it happens now, and how we could easily end up down that path. awareness is the first step, though ... so let's hope i can continue to have the energy to drive the team to build the best product possible, release after release.

generally speaking, when you look to invest in assets, you want to buy the best of breed. the best of breeds give you the best returns. (violating many rules of logic) i'm going to apply the same notion to software: the best of breed software is worth exponentially more than the mediocre ones. so i stand firmly in the corner, in full belief that the best thing i can do for mindtouch is to continue to stand up for the excellent of the engineering team, and not to compromise those goals for short-term gains.