Unquiet Desperation

photo credit: Jonathan D. Blundell

Working as a team lead in any company is especially challenging. A lead developer straddles the gap between the coders and management, forced to take communication from one side and relay it in a manner the other can understand. It’s tricky business, and it’s not something you learn in school.

Here are a few tips I’ve picked up in the last few years, some of them learned the hard way. I hope they’ll serve you well.

1. Provide Solutions: Management is looking for your expertise, even when they think they know better. Temper your speech. It’s easy to get into the habit of saying “No, that won’t work because…” Don’t throw up barriers. You’ve gotten this far in your career because you’re good at what you do, so use your experience to find the creative solution.
2. Accept Input: Listen to your developers. There are days that they’ll know more about the current state of the codebase than you well. If you are lucky, you are leading people who are talented in disciplines that you are not. Listen to these people, accept their input.
3. Make The Call: Eventually, the discussion has to end. Take the data and make the best decision you can. That’s your job.
4. Play It Straight: Be honest. When you screw up, take the blame. When it’s your team, deal with it.  Trying to hide errors just compounds the problem. Without honesty there can be no trust.
5. Share Knowledge: The most fun I have with my team at Mahalo is when we are talking about tech, sharing ideas, new code, and new methods of getting the job done. This is real team-building. As developer, we prize knowledge above most other things. Share it with your team. Learn from them as well. Don’t be afraid to ask someone to teach you a skill you’ve wanted to learn.
6. Keep It Short: Management doesn’t really care how an HTTP Request Handler works.  Keep your explanations short and to the point. Ask if they want more detail. Understand that speaking techie will alienate non-techies, and will cause a slight distrust of what you’re saying. If you cannot avoid giving a technical answer, keep it short and sweet.  It’s not their job to know how it works, they just want to know it works.
7. Choose Your Battles: Your development team will inevitably want things that management cannot provide, and management will always mandate things that are not easy to do. It’s your job to find the middle ground. That will usually mean compromise, and while it’s not pretty, it’s how the sausage is made.  Save the digging in of heels for when you really need it.  An extra button or a different way of processing a form is not worth the trouble, in general, but a new form that causes the entire database to change is worth the fight. You’re not just there to take orders…you’re the caretaker of the project. Give feedback, and if you are overruled, determine how far you’re willing to take it. Be realistic in your assessment: is it a true battle to be fought or merely an inconvenience?
8. Keep A Journal: Keep a journal of the projects you run. Take notes, so you can remember why decisions were made. There will be times that you’ll look at some piece of code and you’ll have no idea why it’s doing what it’s doing. Your journal will save you from the ever-embarrassing “I dunno.”

As I said in a previous essay, I’ve been thinking a lot about the stories we tell ourselves. Along with that, I’ve been considering the way we see other people’s stories. How we watch then, listen to them, and if they have something we feel we need, how we try to adapt their stories to fit into our own.

This is a useful exercise. When we see a person’s life through the lens of history, such as a personal hero from the past, we do not see all their failings, all their personal struggles. We see an idealized version of them, and we take the qualities of their life that we seek to emulate and attempt to graft them on to our own psyches.  We learn and grow this way, trying on stories as we would garments, and when they do not suit us, casting them off.

These days, we live in an information-rich climate. The stories surrounding us, bombarding us at times, all seem to carry something that we’d like to make part of ourselves.  I’ve found this to be especially true with the people I’ve met through my work in the podcasting community, where tales of individual drive, perseverance, and passion have turned normally shy people into the writers, musicians, and broadcasters we know and love.  There’s much that’s worthy of being emulated there.

There are times that we select beliefs or qualities that make sense to us, only to have them cause dissonance with other, more deeply-rooted attitudes. In my life, that’s been Skepticism vs. Spirituality.

To explain: I know a number of atheists and skeptics. I’ve had a number of discussions with them, and to a great degree, their arguments make a great deal of logical sense to me. My own belief in a God (capital G) has been wavering for years now, and as I make my professional life in a world of logic, the arguments put forward by my skpetic friends are appealing to me. Facts make sense, and believing in things you cannot prove makes none.

However, on a deeper level, my inner life has always been one of mysticism, symbol, and faith.  I was raised Catholic, and when I hit the point in my life when I wanted to break out of the Church, I gravitated toward other mystical beliefs: neopaganism and the occult being a major part of that. In retrospect, I can see that I moving from one ritual-based practice to another because it was the motion and poetry of the rituals that I fell in love with, not the actual theology.

In the past three years, these two systems have been causing me some serious internal dissonance. In trying to find a way to make these things work together, I’ve worked myself into a cycle of doubt that has been crippling.  One side, the logical side, tells me that all my beliefs that I cannot prove with facts are bollocks, and the other side reminds me that humans work on a deeper level than mere logic, and that Significance is not fact-based, but instinctual and symbolic. It’s a battle that is deeply troubling.

The effect of all of this is that, when I take the skeptical path, I tend to be bitter and angry, and when I take the spiritual, I’m insecure and full of doubt.  I do not like the way my life tastes when I am purely skeptical, but I worry that I will float away into a never-neverland if the spiritual should take over.

I do not know where the balance point in my own life lies, but I’m reasonably certain that I’m not the only person fighting this internal fight.  If you are one of those people with this same inner turmoil, how do you balance it? What beliefs have influenced you, shown you where your strength lies, and how did you come to your decision?

Smell that?  You know what it is. It’s that New Year Smell. Go on, stick your head outside and take it in.  Drink deeply of the untapped potential and just envision all the wonderfulness this new year might bring.

Yes. I’m serious. Potential. Sure, it exists most of the year, but there’s something about starting “fresh” that inspired most of us to get our shit together, screw our courage to the sticking place, and solider on into the new year with a heart full of hope.

Naysayers, begone!  Yes, yes…we all know the success rate on New Year’s Resolutions, but just sit down and shut up. The New Year is about Hope, not about cynicism.  In fact, I’d encourage everyone reading this to drop the cynical attitude this year.  Imagine what could be accomplished if our inner critics were instantly silenced.  Kill the running inner monologue for a while and just live in the moment.  I bet you’ll smile more.

Deep breath, folks. It’s a new game out there. I’ll see you on the field.

My blog is rebelling. Check out what it returned as a set of random posts when testing a new plugin.

The irony is not lost on me.

photo credit: ishkamina

First, I want to thank everyone who posted comments on my article about the Amazon Rush. When I write articles like these, I’m looking to start some discussion, and the discussion is now happening. I believe that’s a good thing, whether I’m right or wrong in my assessment.

Second, there’s a misunderstanding. I’m not criticizing how past authors have acted. I received one very angry email, asking how I could turn on my own authors this way. If that’s what you thought, let me assure you that’s not the point. The point is this: I believe that this summer saw the last major lift that people will get from this marketing tactic. What has worked in the past will not work as well in the future.

Finally, when I talk to new authors coming through Podiobooks.com, I hear a lot of “I want to do what Sigler, Lafferty, Hutchins, and Selznick have done.” Well…so does everyone. After watching how much work past authors have put into their own marketing campaigns (of which the Rush was only a piece), I need tell them that this is not a magic pony you can ride into Never Never Land. Please, listen to I Should Be Writing #99, and hear about how the “magical success” of today’s biggest podcast novelists was the result of years of work, not a single marketing tactic.

The Amazon Rush is an arrow in the quiver. As Matt Wallace pointed out, NOT to do so just because I say so is a foolish move. As Mur pointed out, I’ve never done it myself. These criticisms have merit. To you new podcast novelists out there: all I ask is that you think of a full marketing strategy for your podcast, then for your published novel when it happens. Don’t try to fly away on a magic pony.

Update: Other blogs have picked up the topic. Check these out:

• Is the Amazon Rush Dead? at Indiana Jim’s Blog
• End of the Amazon Rush? at Jason Penney’s All the Billion Other Moments
• Amazon Rush Days Aren’t Dead (They’re Just Pining for the Fjords) at SocialMediaJunkie.com
• The Amazon Rush: Comes the Apocalypse by Kris Johnson
• What We’ve Learned – Why the World Needs the Amazon Rush