coffee and a smoke

At work there's a new tenant in our building. Originally the site was built and fully occupied by my company. It's a five storey building. After several rounds of restructuring and such a decision was made to seek tenants to rent out some of the space.

It took a few months but IBM has now moved in and taken over the 5th floor entirely. Welcome IBM! We've seen them around the elevators and 1st floor cafeteria a bit. They seem like decent blokes. There were a few stragglers up on 5 and they were just absorbed into the lower floors a few months ago. There's still a good amount of space so it wasn't disruptive in my area.

Someone mentioned to me last week that the Halifax site is the only IBM facility in the world with free coffee. Apparently that is a global IBM policy. This is because the cafeteria has free coffee from the existing contract with my company. Don't be upset IBMers worldwide, the free coffee is awful, sludge, pretty much undrinkable. It's free and you get what you pay for.

Still something occurred to me and IBM may have already done this. What they could do is set up a jar on their floor and anytime someone gets a free coffee downstairs they have to put say 25 cents or whatever into the jar. Every few months or so the jar is counted up and donated to some local charity. This would then respect the spirit of the no free coffee rule while being a feel good initiative for the employees.

There was another change in the wake of IBM's arrival. The outside smoking area has been restored. There was an original smoking area about 100 feet outside the side doors. One day a couple of years ago or so HR announced that worldwide all staff smoking areas were ended and the employees had to go off-campus to smoke. But now with shared space IBM cares more about the tiny percentage of employees who are smokers and requires them to be accommodated on site. So the designated smoking area is back.

I'm glad the smoking area is back. I don't smoke myself so it might seem irrelevant to me one way or the other. I was concerned about the safety and security of my coworkers while at work. After all let's consider the unintended consequences of the HR decision to kick the smokers off campus.

Well first of all by going off campus they immediately lose the protection of the corporate security guard patrols. By definition security's realm is limited to the campus grounds. When employees step off campus they are on their own and thus exposed.

The other major issue with off campus smoking is that they were moved out of sight from the cubicles. With the on site smoking area we can see them from where we sit. Thus if there's some disturbance or security problem we can raise security from our desks or rush outside ourselves. With offsite smoking a bad actor can easily walk up to the smokers unseen from the building and create trouble. Again the smokers are exposed to additional risk.

So I'm glad IBM put the safety and security of their employees ahead of the agenda of certain anti-smoking busybodies in HR.

don't have time

Once in a while something will come up. Perhaps a code review you need someone to do, or something like that. Now sometimes you'll find there's a snag that the person doesn't have time for it.

So I got thinking about that a bit "I don't have time". First of all the statement is obviously false. You have plenty of time. There's eight full hours available each working day and the task would take less than one hour. What the person is really saying is "I don't have priority" - this isn't important enough to bump some other task.

It might seem unimportant to make this distinction, but it is valuable to describe the situation accurately. Because by describing the problem properly then it can be a start toward some resolution. After all saying "don't have time" is absolute, final, intractable, unrecoverable. After all it's not possible to create time.

Now "don't have priority" is much more manageable. For example it could be possible to de-prioritize some other task. But more likely it allows an honest conversation. If your task isn't important to the other person, then great. Eliminate the dependency, get someone else to do the code review or whatever, and move on. Accept that roles have changed and someone has bigger fish to fry now. Realize that an error in your area is less catastrophic than an error in some other area, thus we assume the lower risk to focus resources on more critical things. In any case by breaking the dependency on your priority isn't my priority it allows everyone to move ahead.

interviewing again

I attended an interview a little while back. No I'm not seeking new opportunities. I'm getting settled in with a new, better team since January and things are going pretty well so far.

The team is looking to add a new person to backfill for turnover. A candidate got through the first interviews with HR and the team lead. The TL asked the developers to do the next interview. It was a good interview I thought. The candidate was pretty solid and I thought he came across pretty well. Myself and the other developers had some probing questions. After the interview the team lead escorted the candidate out and we had a quick meeting to give the instant feedback and offer a thumbs up or thumbs down hiring recommendation.

It's a good experience to be on the other side of the desk. I didn't think I'd get to do any more interviews. In the first couple of years with the company I did a number of interviews for everything from co-op student through to team lead. I enjoyed doing them and I believe I was good at it. Then one day HR announced that in order to do interviews we had to go to some sensitivity / political correctness training class. I of course declined and that was the end of interviewing. I'm not sure what happened between three years ago and today, I didn't bring it up when the TL mentioned about us doing an interview.

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I'm glad the disastrous HR policy is apparently no more. The closest I heard to a rationale at the time was something about what if a rejected candidate comes back with a lawsuit? yes let's talk about that. The company is large, with thousands of employees. So it's safe to say there have been around 100,000 interviews. Of these how many lawsuits have there been? Probably zero, none that I ever heard of. In the worst case even if some settlement ended up being paid to a troll lawyer then we can quantify the cost of these settlements over the population of interviews. And in the worst case the cost is probably about $1 an interview for these theoretical lawsuits.

Now let's compare that to the cost of a bad hire. Even for an entry level programmer or tester the cost of a single bad hire is staggering, well into the tens of thousands. And at the intermediate level and above it's certainly upwards of and into six figures. So what's more important financially, avoiding some imaginary theoretical small lawsuit that legal/HR would have to deal with, or avoiding a bad hire that development and the entire company would have to deal with.

Obviously the value of avoiding bad hires is orders of magnitude more important (and hazardous, as bad candidates are many and can often get quite deep into the recruiting process and even all the way on board). Yet HR/legal had the power they added this policy in order to make their lives theoretically easier. The term for this business antipattern is local optimization, where some department will put in some new rule or procedure that makes their workflow easier or faster while the overall cost to the business as a whole is worse off.