The true victims of phone addiction

That people are dying on our roads due to phone addiction hasn’t seemed to make anything change. But no one really cares about what happens to other humans. That’s why I think I’ve finally found a wakeup call about the state of phone addiction in America.

It may disturb the reader to learn that in this picture, out of the three dogs wanting to play with the ball I’m holding, only one dog will be thrown a ball.

My dog’s favorite game is catching the ball. His second favorite game is fetching. So I spend a lot of time at the dog park with a ball in my hand. There’s something about holding a ball at a dog park that really makes you a lot of friends. Every time I go, there’s always a small to large crowd of dogs waiting for me to throw the ball.

It always makes me wonder why their owners don’t come throw a ball with them. Today I found the answer. Phone addiction.

I was playing catch with Finn when a husky came running up to me. After watching us play catch for about 5 minutes it tried barking at me to get the ball. I then heard someone yell“quiet”. I turned and saw a person about fifty feet away sitting in the shade on their phone. They spent the rest of the time I was there in the same spot paying absolutely no attention to their dog. I felt bad that the dog got yelled at. Sure it wasn’t good behavior but it’s hard to blame a dog whose owner is that disengaged for having some bad habits.

It’s a trend I’ve noticed since getting a dog. I live right next to a big dog walking street and dog park so I’ve gotten a lot of opportunities to observe how people interact with their dogs. Dog walking and dog parking are absentee activities for a good chunk of people. I’m not really sure how people manage to walk the dog and use their phone at the same but somehow they manage to. The dog park is even worse. People get the dog inside and then head to a table and use their phone while their dog plays.

It makes me sad as walking and the dog park are such great times to bond with your dog and have fun with it. Let alone the part where you really shouldn’t let your dog play with other dogs totally unsupervised (I’ve seen dog fights break out where some dogs owner is nowhere to be found) it’s great for your relationship with the dog for you to be part of the fun. If you just dump your dog in the park and go ignore it, all you are is the thing that ends the fun at the end of the session when you take them out.

Personally I want my dog to see me as fun. Since I started playing games with him I’ve had way more control over him at the dog park as he knows that leaving a dog and coming along with me is not the end of the good times. I really can see the difference in the way he acts at the dog park and it warms my heart.

This is why every time a dog comes and looks at me for the ball while we play catch I just feel guilty. I’m playing with my dog and I can’t be the source of ball for every phone orphaned dog at the dog park. Sure I toss out a few for them but it’s not the same as what I do for my dog.

Aside from just that I feel bad the dogs don’t get to play, it makes me sad that our phones are more important to us now than our dogs. I think it’s a reasonably common opinion these days that phones are bad for how we socialize with humans but I really didn’t realize until I got a dog how much it had frayed the fibers of our relationships with our dogs too. In a way it’s more tragic to me than that phones have broken our ability to be with people. I know how silly it is that we take what happens to dogs more seriously than what happens to humans but I can’t help but feel it.

So really if you won’t put away your phone because it will help your relationship with your partner, because it may save someones life while your driving, or because it’s making you a less interesting person, at least put it away for your dog.

Bad teams don’t win

Maybe I’ve been reading too many Pat Lencioni books lately but I’ve had my mind on team building. One aspect of team building that I really resonate with in his books is making decisions. As do many of his theories, it sounds simple. You make decisions. But it’s so difficult and I do believe it is a common cause of bad teams.

Sure every team does make decisions. I think that’s the deceptive part. You can make a lot of decisions every day, but not really be making decisions. I know that sounds a little confusing but making decisions is just a necessary part of living. We all decide things constantly throughout the day just to function. Things as simple as changing lanes in a car or deciding which seat to take on the train. On a more workplace level, everyone has decisions thrust upon them throughout the day. People make them because they have to make them to get by. What should we do about X urgent thing that got thrust upon us. How do I respond to Y’s question. But this is all being reactive. You have to react to the things that are presented throughout the day or you can’t function.

Being proactive requires a different form of decision making. Things like “where should I allocate my free time to be happy?” or “what is the most important thing our team could be doing to achieve it’s goal?”. Even more importantly “what is our most important goal?”. These are tough questions and they’re hard decisions to make. They require seeking out and they’re hard. But they’re essential. Without those decisions you don’t get fired. You don’t stop functioning. You get through your day. But you don’t win. You just play. 

Tying back to team building, I think this is what leaders have to do. Without effective decision making and strong commitments to those decisions, teams lose clarity and strength. Yes, things will keep getting done. But they probably won’t be the things that elevate a team. Having a winning team means a team that knows where its going and why. There’s an elation that comes from being part of a team that’s in lockstep. That next level of team play is the root of great teams and great teams win. When important decisions don’t get made, the team stays as individuals. There may be some common goals and there will be a team but it won’t be one achieving at the highest levels and it certainly won’t be winning.

Thoughts on Attention Span and Focus

Some topics I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about lately are focus and attention span. I believe the world we are building is antithetical to focusing and shortens our attention spans. Our lives have become a constant blast of notifications, information, and communication. We have to always be connected but it’s easy to go through a day without consuming anything larger than bite-sized. Even scarier, one can go through a day without having to have a thought larger than bite-sized.

The tools we have chosen to use to build businesses and relationships are ones which both give us small chunks of information and also only ask us to provide small thoughts. Two examples from different spheres of life are Twitter and Slack. Twitter intentionally limits how many characters you can put in a tweet. That restriction has changed how we communicate. Not just on Twitter. Outside of it too. I think a restriction on characters doesn’t just encourage short messages though. It encourages short thoughts. It’s hard to express large thoughts in a short message, even if you can string a bunch of those messages together. I think it really changes how our thoughts come together. On the other side of it, consuming Twitter means you only are given short thoughts to interact with. There’s not much attention span required to read a tweet.

It’s not just that we think and read short things that has made it so hard to focus though. I believe the other big factor is our always on connectivity. To me, nothing embodies this more than Slack. Slack is setup perfectly to demand constant connectivity from people. It drives notifications at them. You can @here channels and send a notification to who knows how many people. Everyone has a green dot so you can see if someones not present. As a platform it really encourages a style of communication that is immediate. If you miss a conversation in a Slack channel you can’t contribute to it later. You may even be interrupted in the middle of your thoughts so if you start typing messages you better keep typing until you’ve finished all of them. This trains us to think one line at a time and there’s not much worse for building focus skills than that.

I don’t mean to suggest these problems are exclusively due to Slack and Twitter or these platforms don’t do some good. I just find them to be interesting case studies. I think it’s important to study them. There’s a war on to capture our attention and I believe it’s counterproductive to the goals most of us have in life. What I want requires focus to build and the ability to think deep thoughts. I don't think I’m unique in that way. I also do not think I’m unique in that I cannot focus as long as  I would like to. I feel like I’ve gotten worse over time and I think learning to focus again is the biggest advantage a person or business can have. Being focused and having a long attention span is now a scarce skill and the world is making it harder. I believe moving against that current is now a competitive advantage.

If you agree with that sentiment or find it interesting I’d highly recommend some of the following resources. Signal v. Noise has some great posts on the ideas of focus such as Is Group Chat Making You Sweat and The Presence Prison. Cal Newport’s book Deep Work lays out a good case that the inability to perform deep work is bad for business and also proposes some great techniques for learning how to go deep. 

What's in a name?

I want to talk about two specific terms — “the business people” and “resources” — and how they’re indicative of how engineers are viewed in companies.

Who sits on that floor? The business people

If you work at a technology company of any sort I can just about guarantee that at some point you’ve heard the company be divided into two sections, one of them being “the business people. The other section doesn’t really have a name. We can just say it’s the people who are not the business people.

If you’re an engineer I can predict with pretty good certainty what side of the division you end up on. Now that probably doesn’t bother most engineers. In fact I would wager most engineers do not want to be included in “the business people”. That’s where the suits lurk! It didn’t bother me for a long time. I wanted to be thought of as an engineer and to be left to solve my engineering problems in our engineering bubble. But I think you should reconsider.

I see the distinction between “the business people” and “the others” as a distinction between the people who make decisions and the people who receive the marching orders. This places engineers in the category of “not business people”. More accurately they are viewed in my opinion as interchangeable, albeit highly paid, laborers. Laborers employed to build the things that someone else has decided they will build. Just like a good old fashioned car factory.

How many resources does it take to screw in a lightbulb?

The concept of engineers being viewed as interchangeable labor is a good segue to the next term which is “resource. ”This is another one I am pretty certain we’ve all heard. For those who are not a programmer or do not work with or tangentially to programmers the term I’m referring to is used to describe engineers. “We need 3 resources for that project.” “We don’t have enough resources for that until next quarter.” “We will have to shift resources from X if we want to finish Y.” Those are all discussing living breathing people. Well that’s not entirely fair. Sometimes it refers to money as well. So money and people.

The intention here is not to say “don’t call engineers resources.” While I do not like the term personally and it’s certainly not much effort to call people “people”, the point I’m trying to make is the attitude the term conveys. That’s how engineers are seen by those not in engineering. While I’d certainly like to stop hearing “resource”, no matter what you manage to convince your PM to call you, until engineers create structural change in how companies operate that is how we will be viewed. As interchangeable cogs. As supporting “the business people”. As resources.

So what’s the point of all this? 

It’s not to get people to stop saying these things. So what is it? I would argue that instead of falling onto the side of“not business people”, people who produce software can be the business people. If engineers can move past their aversion to reading a management textbook or get over their irrational fear of Jira they can redraw the lines of how people see businesses.

I don’t mean to blame “the business people” either. This situation is constructed by engineers for engineers. Someone has to come up with new ideas. Someone has to decide what to work on. Someone has to actually sell the product. Someone has to manage the process. If it’s not going to be us then someone will be hired to do so. If you’re okay with letting someone else control what you work on then more power to you.

But if you chafe when you hear someone call you a “resource”. If you think you’ve got some great ideas for how to improve the business. If you think that you could do the project management stuff if you just put the time. Prove it. Start learning about management. Learn how to sell. Read a book on agile. Or even better write the book. Take control of what you work on. Be the business.

So what is all this?

This website is clearly pretty new and there’s not a lot on here. I’m going to be building it out as we go but I wanted to get things live and start publishing as quickly as possible.

The goal here is to find a space for long form thoughts focused on the software industry (what I work in) but with room for deviation to anything that get me going enough to write something down. For example the reading list I got started with. I’m not great at drawing fences around my ideas but I’ll do my best to stay focused.

I’ve got a good set of ideas pipelined around software management so look for that next.

2018 Reading Recap

At the end of last year I came across a Bloomberg best books of 2018 list which gave me some great holiday reading. Inspired by that I thought it would be nice to reflect on what I read last year by writing down all the books I read last year. Reading on my phone/iPad makes remembering this a lot easier as most of this was checking back through that history. There’s a few scattered paperbacks around the apartment and I did some book borrowing this year but I think I got them all.

With each book I included a few thoughts about them or what prompted me to read them. Going back through this list really brought back memories of 2018 and the various places my mind and body went last year.

I can see some broad themes in the list. My usual interests in aviation, war, and religion show up. I didn’t read as many technical books as I would have liked but 2017 was a very technical book heavy year for me so I must have needed a break. I got onto a good track of business and productivity books and I think I’d like to find more of those in 2019.

Under the Banner of Heaven, Jon Krakauer

I was coming off a big mountaineering reading kick at the end of 2017 and of course John Krakauer’s Into Thin Airis a classic. I was looking for another Krakauer book to read and since religion is a subject I enjoy reading about I picked Under the Banner of Heaven. I read this on a trip to San Francisco for my friends wedding. I really distinctly remember taking the Caltrain to and from San Francisco to the wedding and reading this book on the train.

No Man Knows My History: The Life of Joseph Smith, Fawn Brodie

Under the Banner of Heaven cites this book a lot so I picked up a copy.

In Cold Blood, Truman Capote

One of those books I’d always heard about and had never actually read. I think I got pointed to it by Under the Banner of Heavensince they both involve murder. I can’t entirely remember why I picked it up but it was a great read.

Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs, Johann Hari

The War on Drugs seems normal to anyone who grew up in our era but it’s incredible how recent of a phenomenon it really is. This book traces the history of modern drug prohibition and talks about alternative theories to drug addiction and ways to solve it aside from prohibition. I was reading this one on a trip to Milwaukee, Wisconsin in February. 

Ready Player One, Ernest Cline

There was a lot of buzz around the movie coming out and Fred recommended this book to me years ago. I always tell people I’ll read their recommendations eventually but it may take some time. Before the movie came out I gave it a read. I grew up playing video games so I thought it was a really fun read. The controversy around it when the movie came out rang pretty true to me.

War Diaries: 1939-1945, Astrid Lindgren

My mom recommended this one to me. It was only published recently and is a truly remarkable read. Astrid Lindgren wrote these diaries before she wrote Pippi Longstocking and anyone knew who she was. As a Swede I’ve always been aware that Sweden and World War II have a complicated history. It was interesting to read a contemporary Swedish perspective on the war and to view World War II from a different point of view. Most notable to me was hearing about Finland and the Soviet Union fighting multiple battles during the war. That’s something that doesn't really get brought up much in the US but from the perspective of Lindgren that was one of the most important events of the war.

Also at the end she mentions she made up a character for her daughter called Pippi Longstocking. What a foreshadowing.

Born on the Fourth of July, Ron Kovic

Bruce Springsteen talked about this book in his Broadway show and I read it because of that. This was a truly moving book. It’s inspiring the lengths that Ron Kovic went to to get out the message of how veterans were being treated and the cost of war. Reading this book will take you directly to the true meaning of“Bornin the USA”.

One Bullet Away, Nathaniel Fick

Born on the Fourth of July got me on a small war book kick and I’m a sucker for books about Iraq and the Marine Corps. I either read this on a flight to Raleigh or Los Angeles. I can’t remember.

I’ll Be Gone in the Dark, Michelle McNamara

The Golden State Killer was captured via a DNA testing website and I read the news stories about it. I’d never heard of the Golden State Killer before he was caught but when I read about him I was horrified on a very visceral level. His crimes and the way he committed them are truly chilling. This led me to the book. McNamara died before finishing the book but the book is credited with sparking interest in the case leading to the DNA testing that actually captured the killer.

Dispatches, Michael Herr

I can’t remember how I found it but this was one of the best war books I’ve ever read. Definitely the best about the Vietnam War. It blends truth and fantasy together so seamlessly that you feel you are there. 

Bad Blood, John Carreyrou

I saw an article about it when it came out. This book is a great example of reality is stranger than fiction. You really can’t believe the lies and deceit involved in this company unless you read the book. If someone had told you about them a few years ago before it all broke there’s no way you’d believe it. But it’s the truth.

For me this book was a good reminder of the dark side of Silicon Valley growth at all costs mindset and the human cost associated with it.

Kitchen Confidential, Anthony Bourdain

I think the reason for this one is pretty clear. Sadly Anthony Bourdain died and I read his book after that. I wish I had found it earlier. It’s both sad and inspiring to read someone’s works for the first time right after they die. It’s sad in that you didn’t understand them in life but also inspiring to see them live on through their work.

Deep Work, Cal Newport

Part of a productivity book kick. This year one of my big focuses was cutting out short attention span activities and trying to learn to focus again.

Remote: Office Not Required, Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson

I’m from Hawaii so remote work has a lot of appeal to me. I’m a big believer in the future of remote work and this book is a must read for anyone interested in working remotely or who has an employee interested in working remotely.

The Crisis of Islam, Bernard Lewis

Bernard Lewis was a famous scholar on Islam who died last year. I saw his obituary in the New York Times and I’d never heard of him before but the obituary tied together his work and the invasion of Iraq which piqued my interest. You may see it in other books here but the Iraq war is a fascination of mine so I was curious how the Bush administration used Lewis’ work to justify an invasion.

Are Your Lights On? Donald C. Cause and Gerald M. Weinberg

This is a great book about problem solving. It’s short and written in a very approachable manner. I actually read this right before Jerry Weinberg died. I saw it recommended on Hacker News I think and picked it up. A few weeks after I finished it I saw that he had died.

Friendly Fire, C.D.B. Bryan

I’ve always had an interest in war books and I think Vietnam is a fascinating cultural cross section of war, politics, and America. I’m too young to have been there but I think we still see the changes it made to our society. To me Vietnam is when American’s stopped trusting their government. Friendly Fire causes that theme by following the journey of an American family from loyal patriotism to questioning everything the government tells them.

Shade It Black: Death and After in Iraq, Jess Goodell with John Hearn

We think about soldiers in war creating death and suffering death but we don’t think about those who work with the dead after they pass. This book is the story of a Mortuary Affairs soldier in Iraq. Mortuary Affairs processes the bodies of servicemen and women in the field before their journey back to the United States. It’s a side of the cost of war that we seldom think of or see.

I remember reading this book on the flight to Traverse City, Michigan. It’s not a long flight but it’s not a long book either.

Rework, Jason Fried and David Heinemeier-Hansson

I loved Remote so much that I read their other book.

It Doesn’t Have to be Crazy at Work, Jason Fried and David Heinemeier-Hansson

This one came out after I started following DDH on Twitter so I heard about it there. I loved their other books so I read this one too. Short but to the point. It really packs a punch. I appreciate their willingness to look critically at how they do business.

Joel on Software, Joel Spolsky

I’ve read a lot of Joel’s blog posts but I finally sat down and read the book. It’s really a greatest hits of the blog so I had seen a lot of it before but few can write engaging and deep technical work like Joel Spolsky. Worthwhile for anyone in the software industry.

Designing Data-Intensive Applications, Martin Kleppmann

I wanted a technical read and I had a week long vacation to Michigan. The woods are perfect place to read and I spend hours every day reading this book including some lovely nights by the fire. This was a dense read and I think powering through it was the way to read it. I learned a ton.

Mindfulness In Plain English, Bhante Gunaratana

I was interested in meditation and I found this on the meditation subreddit. It was a fantastic book and I spent a month practicing meditation after it. The habit lapsed but the book taught me a ton.

Blind Trust, John Nance

Recommended to me by a pilot coworker after the Lion Air disaster last year. It’s an exploration of aviation safety focused on post-deregulation United States aviation. John Nance paints a pretty scary picture of the state of safety at that time but also talks about the path forward. 

To me this book is about failure analysis. It’s one that I was able to take a lot from outside of just aviation as the art of looking at a disaster and critically thinking about why it happened is valuable just about anywhere. True study of failure is the only way to improve and it’s impressive how aviation has studied failure with the goal being to improve safety. The situation has gotten much better since this book was written due to the techniques Nance writes about.

Mormonism: Shadow or Reality?, Jerald and Sandra Tanner

I was taking a trip to Salt Lake City for a football game so Mormonism was on the brain and I picked this up. It was about 10 times as thick as I expected and looked like a textbook. The level of detail they got into and the sorts of documents they accumulated really is impressive.

The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II, Iris Chang

Fred lent me this one. It’s a horrifying book not just because of the content but because of how little is known about the Rape of Nanking in the West. The book points out that it was the first Western audience book to actually explore the topic. It also talks about contemporary denial of the Rape of Nanking in Japanese politics. A tragedy is made far more sad when no one is able to learn from it and try to prevent it from ever occurring again.

Hawaii Under the Rising Sun: Japan’s Plans for Conquest After Pearl Harbor, John J. Stephan

Fred lent me this one too. I grew up in Hawaii but never for a second thought about what Japan wanted to do with Hawaii had they won the war. This one really changed my perspective on something I thought I already knew the gist of (PearlHarbor).

The Noma Guide To Fermentation, René Redzepi and David Zilber

I learned how to make yogurt last year and this was an interesting extension of those fermentation skills. I ended up fermenting blueberries, asparagus, and tomatoes from this book and hope to experiment with vinegars and miso in the future.

Without You There Is No Us, Suki Kim

North Korea was in the news a lot last year to say the least and I found this book recommended as a good one on life on the inside of the regime. It’s about an American teaching at a private school in North Korea (I think the only one there). A really fascinating look behind the veil.

Dungeons and Dragons 5th Edition Players Handbook and Dungeon Masters Manual, Wizards of the Coast

I’m including these since they were actually very long reads. My friends from Hawaii and I picked up DnD this year and played over video all year. I took a stab at DMing so I ended up reading all the literature. I had a blast. It was pretty different from what I expected and I’m glad I tried playing despite my initial aversion.