simple actually

I unabashedly love the art of metaphor.  I find it to be uniquely powerful in that it allows one type of thoughts to be overlaid or substituted for another.  In discussing testing regimes with our Q/A manager at DecisionDesk, I stumbled upon a new and useful metaphor; web-application as a pirate ship.  



We’re wrapping up the massive engineering effort that went into the new version of our system.  It’s a rebuild from the ground up with a new database and a new API-centric client/server architecture.  Our new stack is Mongo, Django, Tastypie, Backbone, and there are a lot of unknowns to account for and that means lots of testing.  

One use I have for metaphor is to grant heuristics for classifying things according to collections of semi-arbitrary groups like the ones mentioned above.  A good metaphor serves for a model to determine what category something is.

A company can be thought of as the crew of an old sailing vessel, kept afloat by it’s hull, and propelled by the wind in its sails and for a web company, the ship itself really represents the web-application through which the company’s service is offered.  On this, the good ship metaphor, a serious issue is like a hole in the hull, actively letting water in in the form of bad customer experiences which drive people to other services.  A less serious issue could be thought of as a hole in the sail, it decreases the capabilities of the ship but not so much as to prevent it from functioning (unless there are a lot of them).  In the hostile waters of a competitive market, the good ship metaphor would be under threat and so need weapons; cannons in the form of new features to crush competition with.  

Through the lens of this metaphor (meta-metaphor much?), we can see clearly the classification and prioritization of engineering work to be done.  One wouldn’t work on the new cannons while there’s a hole in the hull, nor would one fix the sails while the enemy approaches.  

As crucial as testing is to us as a reliable web company, it’s also important not to let ourselves get so bogged down in bugs and testing that everything else grinds to a halt.  I’ve been doing some thinking to help us avoid getting stuck in that mire, and come to the conclusion that there are three categories of engineering work we need to be doing right now.  

Zero Day Fixes

For “brown-pants-moments”, issues that need to be corrected immediately in our existing product or risk providing an unacceptable experience to our customers.  

Two Week Fixes

For aesthetic, workflow, or other minor issues that represent a sub-par but acceptable experience for our customers.  Many of these are the kind of thing that customers don’t even know aren’t the way they should be because it does work, just not optimally.  

New Feature Development

Work on new stuff that our customers may or may not expect.  Some of these have a timeline for delivery to specific customers whereas others are exploratory attempts.  

All this kinda gives new meaning to the phrase “ship it”.  Yarrrrrr arrrr arrr ar.

I just got a chance to read  the NYT article The Ivy League was Another Planet and it really resonated with me.  The fact is, getting a position, be it as a student in a college or as an employee at a company, is a preponderously difficult task fraught with artificial barriers and requirements for tacit knowledge.  As such, it’s no wonder that “…even the most talented rural poor kids don’t go to the nation’s best colleges”.  This problem is complex, so lets break it down.  

There are more applicants than positions.  

The economy is tight so jobs are scarce; the pressure to go to pursue higher education has driven larger and larger groups to apply but the number of colleges has remained comparatively static so supply is far outstripped by demand.  

Globalization makes competition even more fierce. 

With the advent of the internet, information is no longer bound to a geographic location.  A job or college in California is indexed, tagged, re-posted and in all ways available to every internet citizen on the planet.  In some cases, the positions are even available over the web, as is the case in telecommuting jobs or online courses.  All of this means even more people competing for the same positions.  

Artificial barriers. 

As the article says “…competitive colleges have far more applicants than they can handle.”  Institutions drowning in applicants have responded by placing artificial barriers in their way, booby traps designed to halt the progress of all but the most determined.  Standardized tests and convoluted application processes with extensive essays are great examples of this.  Some people are exceptional test takers, some are great essayists, but should every applicant really need to be both?  The problem is that in doing so they end up selecting for the applicants most skilled at navigating the processes, not the applicants most talented at mathematics, biology, sales, or whatever.  

What a mess.  As with all messes, there’s really two main categories of options for coping.  We can leave the mess as it is and try to educate everyone in the art of mess-navigation or we can try to clean up the mess.  Guess which one I favor?  

Cleaning up the mess. 

Obviously, magically creating new jobs and colleges would clear this case of mess right up, but I’m out of fairy dust.  What we can do is get rid of the need for artificial barriers by getting talent-acquirers focused on filtering down their applicants by attributes that matter.  Full disclosure, I’m a co-founder at DecisionDesk and we do exactly that.  It’s pretty much universally accepted that an in person meeting (interview, audition, try-out, whatever) is the best option for acquiring talent, in fact it’s the only way everything used to be done, but gradual increases in competition and the more recent explosion I mentioned above has made it impossible to meet-in-person with every applicant.  

For a long time paper applications that were mailed in were the de-facto application process for all positions, sorting through them and choosing a subset to invite in for an in-person-meeting was THE way positions got filled.  Well now it’s 2013 and paper is out, but the questions in online forms are usually the exact same as the ones on paper and the process after the form is submitted is typically unchanged.  Frankly, this is silly, the internet is a conduit for vastly richer content and that conduit should be utilized.  

Why trust an applicant’s score on a physics test when you could get a video of them solving a problem?  Why look at an applicant’s grade in band when you could hear a recording of them playing the flute?  If the process isn’t wasteful, does it have to be expensive?  The less an application process is about applying the more it is about finding the best talent, and that’s what everyone wants, because sometimes the best talent is an hour outside of Las Vegas not knowing how to beat the system.  

My friend Gary and I came up with a simple design for an appliance that would recycle plastic grocery bags into plastic usable for a 3D printer.  The thinking on my end is that we typically use the bags for 20 minutes but they last thousands of years.  If we could make plastic bags into a commodity useful for in home manufacturing, maybe it would be worth it for people to recover them from garbage dumps, reversing the flow of waste on a small scale.  Looks like someone beat us to the punch though.  

Here you can see our two designs.  Feasibility proven by this instructable.