What I learned about fashion.

Recently I’ve been reevaluating what I wear in preparation for graduating and moving into my new role as a product manager. Even though there’s no dress code at work I still feel inclined to update my wardrobe. Being an engineer largely only required that I look decent (a vague definition given the Valley’s bohemian and geeky culture) and smell nice. PMs at my company dress nicer than their counterparts in engineering, and even sometimes will throw on the formal wear for meetings outside the company. This is especially true for any sort of business dealings out of the Valley, where people wear funny weird, torture devices called “ties”.

Passion > Pension

I take advice from my friends very seriously. I don’t always agree with it, but I definitely listen and take it to heart. One of the pieces of advice I live by came from my friend Edlyn. While frantically packing for New York (a practice that yields a strangely deterministic spew of random clothes and belongings across her living room floor), Edlyn told me that “success isn’t about what other people think about it. It’s not about any of [that] bullshit – it’s about passion. It can’t be about anything else.” Even though Edlyn is light years away and firmly entrenched in another world, she’s absolutely right about passion and success in business.

You just can’t cut it doing what you do in tech it for anything else other than passion – especially for money.

I know one solid example of how passion wins out over wanting to get a pension (note: pensions are super rare in tech, but it’s alliterative so I’m going to use it). To empirically prove how passion makes you more successful, I present the following case study: Fasil versus Akash.

G[PUs] Gone Wild.

San Jose’s Adobe seems to have an  infatuation with graphics cards. The company’s famous CS4 suite added GPU acceleration to its feature list last year, meaning that you won’t have to have eight cores and a midget version of Good Will Hunting inside your computer to render videos in Premiere anymore. It was only a matter of time until GPU-acceleration hit Adobe’s other big product: Flash.

Tech Report recently broke news that the new version of Flash, due out later this year, will come with GPU-accelerated processing. This allows for some seriously cool black magic for a lot of the world’s Flash user base. For folks on netbooks, this means some serious performance increases in browsing Flash-based websites like Hulu and Youtube. The Atom processor is far from a workhorse, and its pithy amount of L2 cache, low clock speed, and energy efficient but wonky architecture usually made watching Flash videos and doing something else in the background impossible without some performance sacrifices. But most netbooks also pack integrated GPUs that can off-load a lot of the work. Nvidia ION-architecture chips (Atom-based processors with the Nvidia 9400M GPU – the same GPU inside the Macbook Pro 13″)  were built to rock these kinds of solutions. Even Intel’s integrated graphics, the kings of the land of mediocrity, can help increase some of the multitasking capabilities of an already stressed Atom-based chipset.

This also might be very interesting for Linux users. The Flash VM is natoriously unoptimized in Linux. If Flash can off-load some of that work to the GPU, this might lead to decent performance inside of a Linux environment. Nvidia and AMD both have decent graphics drivers out now in Linux; taking advantage of these resources could mean that every computer geek’s favorite time-sink (*cough* stage 2 Gentoo installs that take a week of kernel recompilings *cough*) gets closer to being a more viable alternative to Windows and OSX.

Apple doesn’t seem to be getting a lot of love with this news though. While mobile devices like the upcoming Zune HD feature GPU acceleration thanks to Nvidia’s Tegra platform, the iPhone and iPod touch are left out of the fun. Adobe addressed the issue of not including the iPhone coldly. According to Tech Report,

“The FAQ page on Adobe’s Labs site lays the blame on Apple, saying, ‘While we have been working hard to make the browser plug-in available, without increased co-operation from Apple, it will not be possible.’”

Yikes. This could be a serious problem for Apple if the development community decides to embrace GPU-enhancements. If game developers latch onto using the GPU for creating Flash games with better performance, you can be damn sure that the Zune HD, Symbian, Android, and whatever other mobile devices MSFT and Google are developing will work hard to embrace and nurture such growth for complimentary demand. That isn’t good for Apple, who will be left out of the fun until they can work with Adobe to build a solution for their mobile product line.

Come on, guys. You work in Cupertino. Adobe is literally ten to fifteen minutes down 280. They even have a Starbucks right underneath their corporate headquarters, and Cinnibar down the street has dollar PBR-s. There’s no reason why you can’t make this happen.

Incumbent Power and Total War in High Tech

Mario, a senior studying Political Science and History at the University of Washington, is one of my oldest friends. I’ve had the pleasure of learning a lot about political science from him.  In particular, I remember a discussion with Mario on the concept of total war – a type of warfare where every and any asset of a country is used to wage war – and how it’s changed since World War 2 with the advent of nuclear weapons.

Economics and Horror Movie Exuberance

Every horror movie has that moment. It usually takes place right as some beautiful girl hides in a closet, the killer tearing away at the door while she screams for help. But suddenly the violent pounding stops and goes away. Everything goes silent, and the background score fades. All you can hear as labored and fearful breathing and soon everything goes quiet and softens as you think the killer’s left the house. This pause is something I like to call horror movie exuberance. And it usually gets you killed.

Obviously the killer’s still there. The pounding suddenly continues, the door breaks in because our unfortunate victim wasn’t bracing it when they started relaxing, and a group of college students takes another round of tequila shots for their drinking game as one of the protagonists meets their end in a stupidly gory fashion.

Horror movie exuberance isn’t just for movies like Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer. I think there’s a lot of horror movie exuberance going on in business right now. Across the United States, the recession has toppled industries and left scores of families unemployed (or worse) as a result of the credit markets freezing and businesses being unable to grow. Everyone wants this to end: businesses want the credit market to thaw so they can get access to capital for growth, customers want business growth so they can see increased quality of service, and familities want economic growth so that they can get jobs and increase their income again.  The world eagerly awaits a turn in the winds of economic change and fortune.

The sails of the nation’s economy seem to be picking up something. Indicators of growth such as lay-offs and earnings reductions seem to have plateaued. And for many, this is a good reason as any to crack open the champagne bottles and start the party. Already, Wall-Street IB firms are getting into the habit of monetizing bad debt again with the introduction of “fixed” CDOs that have a higher expected value (thanks to introducing goods with low risk into absurdly “duh-they’re-going-to-f*cking-default” bundled assets such as sub-prime mortgages). Tech firms have turned off hiring freezes. Even consumer spending is up. It seems like good times have returned.

Well, no they haven’t. In fact, this is no different than relaxing because the killer’s not pounding at the closet door anymore. These secondary proxy indicators of economic success aren’t 1:1 with the end of the recession. The recession’s still raging hard, and even if we might have hit an inflection point we’re still locked into it for the time being.

Horror movie exuberance usually comes as a result of two things: wanting the bad experience to be over and being able to rationalize it being over (e.g.: thinking the evidence supports the killer leaving because there’s no more pounding). Business is no different. We want the recession over. And we’re able to rationalize the recession being over by looking at our proxies for indicators of growth. But this isn’t how it works.

There’s a few reasons why we’re still in a recession, even though the indicator lights are green for recovery:

• The second derivative is not the first derivative. The popular sentiment of a recession being two quarters of negative growth isn’t spot-on for the economic definition of recession. But it is a deciding factor in how we determine if we’re in a recession. These indicators aren’t referring to the rate of change of GDP though (the so-called first derivative of GDP with respect of time). This is more about how the rate of our rate of change of GDP is changing, the second derivative. If these indicators were about the first derivative, we’d see GDP rising and not “slowing down” in its decline. Sure, it may start rising soon. But right now slowing to an end in dropping is not the same as going positive; the second derivative is not the first derivative.
• The indicators could mean nothing. This isn’t the first time where we’ve used indicators such as unemployment and inflation rates to determine the economy’s growth incorrectly. The Phillips Curve is a great example of getting it wrong. Originally, we believed that there was a concrete inverse relationship between inflation and unemployment. Then along came the 1970s and stagflation, a period of stagnant economic growth with high inflation and high unemployment.  While recent amendments to this theory such as the NARU (Natural Rate of Unemployment) work to revise the Phillips Curve model in the face of such problems, the fact remains that macroeconomics still has a long way to go until it gets the same level of concrete mathematical understanding as microeconomics.
• Total Profits = Total Revenue – Total Cost. We see business profits rising right now and point to a proportional increase in business opportunity. This makes sense, right? Well, not necessarily. Especially in technology, huge layoffs are common to drop the total cost of a firm to ensure that lower revenue keeps a company in the green. If costs are decreasing more than revenue is decreasing, you can still have positive profits (albeit reduced compared to the previous period). This little bit of algebra shows that maybe everything’s not right in the world yet; maybe our costs are just very, very low. It’s important to note that firms like Intel and Apple who’ve reported excellent profits also posted massive layoffs during the last few years.

Just like horror movies too, the exuberance of thinking the recession’s over can be very dangerous. If a company tries to increase head-count and hire staff to deal with an increase in consumer demand that isn’t coming, you’re bound to have layoffs. In general, people that increase their cost curves significantly to try and grab market share improperly during this period aren’t going to find things radically turned around next quarter.

You could very easily get yourself killed right now by not leaning on that closet door hard enough for the next inevitable blow.

The Dangerous Business of Being Chip Leader

I grew up around poker. My dad paid for college with winnings against his Jesuit professors at Seattle U and his co-workers at the Seattle Times. When I was a kid I’d often be dragged along to watch him and his friends from undergrad play monthly at a farm in upstate Washington. I remember the sounds of plastic chips smacking together, plastic glass clinking, cards bridging in loud wooshes and snaps, and laughter mixing together into the early hours of rainy Sunday mornings. It seemed natural then that when I went off to college that I’d get into the game myself. And while I’m nowhere  near as good as my dad and still learning how to play, poker has been a regular part of my life for the last few years.

Politics Sucks

Since I was 18, I’ve been a declared independent for my voter registration. This isn’t because I simply forgot to tag democrat or republican, or couldn’t make up my mind at the time. Rather, I feel like I’ve been disenfranchised by both parties because I’m a moderate.

I see myself as something of a social liberal; I support same-sex civil unions, legalized abortion, am not a huge fan of Reagan, and even like the idea of government subsidized – not government-run, there’s a difference – health care. But on the other hand, I’m also very economically conservative when I don’t think that the ends justify the means. I think that deficit spending is a horrible idea, support deregulation in the financial sector and public services sector, and think that free market reforms are necessary for a stable economy. Combining these things together makes me something of a political pariah among friends of mine who more aligned with either the democrats or republicans.

For the democrats (who I voted for in the last election), my views on economics are naive and dangerous. The idea of using a lump sum subsidy as opposed to institutionalizing health care probably seem absurd when you don’t have the time to crank out a utility curve and budget constraint, and deregulation seems dangerous given the recent credit debacle. For the republicans, my social views stand in diametric opposition to the party platform. Thinking Reagan got it wrong is heresy, opposing the War on Terror is treason, approving of civil unions is against the neo-conservative opinions on the state, and supporting the government helping to provide health care definitely makes me one of the bad guys. On both sides of party lines my views earn me enmity and a swift “re-education” from folks that think that I’m just a lost sheep looking for a flock.

But not all who wander are lost. I think that the current state of American politics is stupid, and that the absurd loyalty to each party’s platform that both sides have is counter-productive. And in the sort of quasi-religious fervor that both ardent democrats and republicans have, so many good things that could be done are lost in a sea of bickering and heated pathos-fueled arguments.

A great example of this is the current government-sponsored health care argument. The idea that the Obama plan (however inefficient it is) sponsors some sort of “death panel” is downright absurd. Likewise, I’ve seen a lot of republicans exploiting this opportunity to launch rhetorical sorties against the entire democratic party (including weirdly attacking Bill Clinton) as opposed to actually dealing with the business of coming up with another solution to the business of ensuring egalitarian health care for all citizens. Democrats aren’t safe from citicism too. The state of deficit spending is absurd, and institutionalizing health care in the manner that is currently being debated won’t do anything but make that problem worse. Blaming the atrocious national debt on Bush isn’t helpful either, and this sort of behavior feels exactly like the exploitation of the affair that the republicans are doing.  What is a critical issue that can save lives across the entire country is becoming little more than an opportunity for both sides to bicker about unrelated topics.

In the 10th Federalist Paper, James Madison warned of the dangers of factioning. A faction, as Madison described it, is a union of people who are united around a common cause but ultimately act against the state by acting against the whole of the country’s best interests in their fervent dedication and short-sightedness to their cause. While we now commonly associate Madison’s warnings (mostly about how factioning acts against the state properly serving its citizens) with special interest groups, I contend that the modern political parties seem to be doing just that. Nobody really wants to listen to the other side. Constructive criticism and differing viewpoints can offer unique and novel solutions to any problem, and yet neither the republicans nor the democrats seem willing to sit down and talk things out like adults. Everyone is so damn busy just blaming everything on either Clinton or Bush to deal with the affairs of state in a sane and logical manner. Just because you’re from the other side of the political spectrum, it seems like your ideas are invalid and don’t matter.

I wish that the democrats and republicans would stop this nonsense and just listen to each other. Until then, I’m voting Beetlebrox for president in  2012.

When the Geeks Come Marching In

The Wall Street Journal recently did an article on Palantir, a Silicon Valley software start-up funded by Peter Thiel. Palantir (named after the wizard seeing stones from Lord of the Rings – huge geek cred bonus) originally wrote software for analyzing financial derivatives and securities, a booming business in financial irrational exuberance period of the last ten to fifteen years. But with the Credit Crunch,  Palantir has started to shift its focus away from the finance sector and towards a market that’s pretty unfriendly towards upstarts with disruptive technology: defense contracting.

Grinding XP until I Ding Vice President

A lot of Silicon Valley tech companies use numerical hierarchies that rank you into tiers based off of seniority and position. For example, if you start as a new college grad software engineer at NetApp you’ll start as a MTS 1 (Member of Technical Staff, Level 1). At SAP, you’ll be a SE 1 (Software Engineer level 1). Promotion increases the number next to your title. If you’re there for a year or so and do good work, you’ll see a salary bonus increase and an increase in the number next to you name. Boom, now you’re a level 2. You move up the ladder. You can tell people you’re a “level 2.” Everyone’s happy.

Whether you’re Google, eBay, NetApp or Microsoft, numerical hierarchies are all the rage. I imagine that it makes a lot of things easier for HR folks to so clearly delimit rank and order by number. But I suspect that there’s another reason why this kind of numbering system is used as opposed to the traditional “junior, associate, senior, executive” or “associate, partner” scale used in traditional firms.

My crackpot idea: it’s because of Dungeons and Dragons and Final Fantasy. It’s because we nerds love to level up.

There’s something cool about having an elegant and clearly defined line of advancement. Knowing where your rank ends and the next one begins is a great incentive to work harder for that higher number, and there’s a very real sense of accomplishment when you visibly advance from one level to another. This kind of appeal is one of the reasons why a lot of people play games like World of Warcraft. The challenge is clearly defined, and when you work hard and conquer it you’re clearly marked for your hard work (phat lewt, clearly a level 80, new titles, etc.)

Just like in WoW or in Oblivion, working hard at your job to get that next level is a sort of addiction unto itself. But unlike online or pen and paper RPGs, this type of fanatical obsession with incrementing a number is socially acceptible. Even for the non-geeks that don’t go crazy when they hear a “ding” sound and a glowing yellow halo appear around their avatar (I’m still waiting to see this happen in real life, by the way), it’s cool to get promoted because it gets you access to tons of new toys. You get new cars, new houses, new opportunities to ball out of control around the bay area. So unlike staying at home and playing WoW, working hard and levelling up in the office is a socially “good” thing.

Geeks love leveling up and all of the other cool things that come with it. If you tell a geek he can increase his STR or CON stat by working out in the gym with enough polish, I’m sure he’d pump iron like Arnold every day just so he can go home and change his character sheet every once in a while. So is it any wonder that smart companies tier their employees based off of RPG-esque numbering systems and arm them with flashy “phat lewtz” such as exclusive swag, all the while promoting a social structure that promotes workaholic tendencies because it makes you rich and thus cool? Call me a crazy man, but I seriously wonder if this appeal to the inner geek is another way to get us all to take the job all the more personally and work much harder and much longer.

I guess we should all be lucky though: at least we don’t have to run Molten Core for a living.

The Joys of Anti-Competitive Hiring Practices

There are a few things that’re iconically Silicon Valley largely because they’re unique everywhere else but common here. Talking about programming or math at a bar, having gigabytes worth of storage on your keychain, and masses of people with bachelors degrees in either computer science or computer engineering are typical things around here but oddities  elsewhere.

Another unique aspect of Silicon Valley is the practice of freely and frequently moving between tech companies. Loyalty is often a function of neat tech, good pay, and stock options. When tempted with cooler technology to play with, higher pay, and if your stock has already vested, the fact that being hired into another company only means you’re moving down the block  makes horizontal transitions all the more attractive. You still get to keep your friends and your life. But now you’re getting paid more, have a new title, and maybe even a bigger cube.

It’s really a win-win situation. You get more pay as companies try to outbid each other to get you. Your prospective employers get an opportunity to have a fresh and novel way of solving problems come into their company, and maybe even some accidentally-acquired IP (intellectual property) in the form of trade secret-esque solutions that can be applied to solve their problems. For example, if you go from working on the iPod to the Zune you probably won’t bring blueprints on how the iPod works with you. But if you’re confronted with a problem with the Zune that you had when you were working with the iPod, you can solve it efficiently and quickly using the stuff you learned as an engineer at Apple. This kind of stuff is pretty common, especially in software engineering where algorithms are hard to copyright and protect legally.

But just as a lot of companies welcome in skilled employees from their competitors, they often don’t like their rock stars leaving for this reason. When you get hired by some of the big names, you’ll often see CNCs as part of the big stack of papers you sign. A CNC stands for a Covenant to Non-Compete (or a Non-Compete). CNCs are agreements that stipulate that you won’t go to work for a competitor in the same industry following your service at your company. The reason? You’ll upset competitive advantage. To go back to the previous example, if I solve the problem on the Zune that the iPod had once before, the Zune gains competitive advantage on the iPod. With good marketing and advertisement, this technological gain could mean that Apple loses control of the market just because you solved a problem that’s been holding back their competitor’s product.

What most people don’t know is that CNCs are legally referred to as Unconscionable Contracts in California state. Basically, they’re illegal. They can’t be enforced  and usually are just a form of scare tactic to mess with your decision making process when you consider leaving. Without that ability to be legally enforcable, companies sometimes turn to  gentlemen’s agreements to not hire each others’ employees so as to protect each’s competitive advantage. This “no poaching” deal works out well enough to make the constant competition between firms seemingly professional and civilized (sort of like Victorian Age warfare), ignoring the fact that many companies will then sneak behind each others’ backs and hire recruiting firms that’ll do just that (again, sort of like Victorian Age warfare).

But now even this might become illegal given recent anti-trust rumblings from the Department of Justice. The DOJ announced earlier this year that they’d be taking a “harder look” into the technology market, particularly into recruiting practices that engage in these no poaching deals. Now, there’s a lot of drama surfacing that Palm gave Apple the finger on stuff  like this because they were supposedly afraid of  the DOJ’s new trust-braking campaign in tech. Given that the DOJ would probably investigate both companies anyway if there was some sort of collusion going on, this isn’t just a PR stunt from Palm to hurt Apple’s brand. The message on both parts is clear: something is coming.

I’m honestly a bit surprised that this is the place where the DOJ’s trying to make its stand against tech. That’s it? Huge M&A action has been greenlighted by them that dramatically threaten to yield extreme market power to companies like Oracle, and they choose to protect the resource market by tagging hiring practices? Maybe this is being designed to be some sort of RICO type of maneuver that allows them to hit eveyrone at once.

I hope so. Otherwise the lawyers running the DOJ might be drinking as much on the job as the engineers over here in the ‘Valley. And frankly, drunken programming in C++ is a much better idea than drunken corporate law reform.