Category: Tech

“Developer half-life” is a rough term for how long, on average, it takes for someone at that company to burn out and quit (technically, for the quit-rate for a given cohort to be 50%). It’s possible to get salary data from places like glassdoor, salary.com, etc. but sometimes I wish there was a way to get this metric too. During my tenure at NYTD it seemed like the senior engineering people tended to last two, maybe three years before moving on to greener, less stressful pastures. I made it to about two and a half years. Some shops it’s more, some places it’s less, but it seems there are constants of organizational behavior that are relatively invariant and add up to a “fuck you, I’m out” at predictable intervals for everyone in a given cohort. Like radioactive decay, it’s a random process that still has a certain mechanistic predictability to it in aggregate (really hoping I’m remembering the science right there; it’s been a long time). I sometimes wonder what it might be like to work at a place where people reach “escape velocity” and orbit forever without tracing an eventual bright trail back down the gravity well of demoralization.

(I should footnote here that I’m reasonably happy with my current gig. The only thing that bugs me about the company doesn’t have much to do with them, just that we’re in a soulless office park with no particularly good lunch options around. On the other hand, I’ll take “management I don’t want to throw off the 8th floor” over “the cafeteria serves excellent sushi” any day of the week.)

Conversely, as engineering management, it pays huge dividends to keep an eye on your average tenure because recruiters are screamingly expensive and finding good people is hard — all the moreso if you have a reputation (*cough* Zynga. EA. ShitiGroup.) for being a meatgrinder for technical talent — to say nothing of the harder to quantify long-term benefits of organization continuity. I haven’t progressed far enough up the ladder to be managing managers yet, but if/when I do, you can bet I’ll notice if turnover under manager A is 0% for a given year and 60% for manager B.

So O’Reilly is publishing a new book, called Codermetrics. The sample first chapter is linked from the product page there. I read over that and some initial thoughts made their way into irc:

 3:08 PM < volkadav> haha so there's some new oreilly 
book called Codermetrics
 3:08 PM < volkadav> which appears to be some sort of 
"we can track and quantify people and yay!!!" for the 
manager set
 3:08 PM < volkadav> i read the first chapter online 
(sample via ora's website)
 3:09 PM < volkadav> it's depressing how well it fits 
into the stereotypes i have of idiot frat boy managers
 3:09 PM < volkadav> a) lots of sports analogies
 3:09 PM <@BSDCat> stop.
 3:09 PM < volkadav> b) desperate attempts to 
quantify the unquantifiable
 3:09 PM <@BSDCat> oh please let there not be more 
than a+b
 3:10 PM < volkadav> c) main example [given in the 
first chapter] is of a team that had a series of serious 
setbacks so OF COURSE it's the fault of the two junior 
members who quit after the first year
 3:10 PM < volkadav> with METRICS and NUMBERS to prove
it couldn't POSSIBLY be management's fault
 3:10 PM < volkadav> HURRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR
RRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR
 3:11 PM < volkadav> sigh.
 3:11 PM < volkadav> i mean, yes, sure it's great that
you hired people better able to answer their own questions
 3:12 PM < volkadav> buuuuut i doubt two junior people
on a team of six+ could have run the whole thing off the 
rails by themselves, brah!
 3:12 PM < volkadav> it's like every generation has to 
discover for themselves that "Scientific Management" is and
ALWAYS HAS BEEN complete and total BULLSHIT 

[Seriously, Taylor’s methods were deeply flawed to the point of it being fraudulent to even call them science. Go read up on this stuff because it expands beyond my desire to replicate here. Then cry yourself to sleep because that egregious codswallop has been cited thousands of times in scholarly works and is the basis for a lot of so-called modern management.]

Then I got off on another rant about the differences between leadership and management that probably deserves a longer blog post at a later date. Suffice to say “frantic casting about for simple measuring tools, however desperately flawed” is a perfect hallmark of a pure-strain Manager woefully unsuited to leading human beings in any ultimately productive enterprise.

“You lead people, you manage things.” ~ Grace Hopper

After fighting with various parts of ALSA, PulseAudio, Skype and so forth trying to figure out why my webcam microphone wasn’t picking up any sound when trying to make test calls, I finally figured out the answer: when PulseAudio’s mixer for the input level on this is 100%, the device is actually muted (the why of that I haven’t gotten around to figuring out). If you leave the “Allow Skype to automatically adjust my mixer levels” box checked in the sound devices dialog of its options pane, it will set the input level to 100%, hence muting the mic.

To restore (or enable) sound recording, all you have to do is open up PulseAudio’s settings to set the input level on the webcam’s microphone to something less than 100% and make sure the checkbox mentioned above is unchecked/disabled. How you get to your PulseAudio configs may vary by distribution; there is a shortcut to them on the Skype preference pane and you can bring up the dialog from the command line by entering “pavucontrol”. The microphone settings will be on the “Input Devices” tab, and the mixer level for the webcam mic is the slider located in that device entry.

I realized I never got around to making a gnupg keypair specifically for my address on this host, so here’s my new public key:

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(or you can retrieve from say pgp.mit.edu, key id 63041F5B)

Our ticket/task tracking system at work has achievements, which is fairly awesome (e.g. “Gulag Archipelago — work on one project for more than 2000 hours in one year”). Recently a thread came up on the SomethingAwful comedy forums centering around (mis/ab)use of a Valve-style achievement tag generator. Here are some of my contributions to the thread, for a quick laugh. :)

This pay cycle I decided that it was my birthday month, and I was tired of my old desktop struggling to keep up with things (like, say, flash videos on youtube, or even low end gaming). With Kirsti’s encouragement, I spent about $700 on newegg.com and got the parts for a new build which has gone super well so far. (Ironically since they arrived during the work day and I was pretty busy, Kirsti did most of the actual putting together of the stuff I’d intended to. I think my total contribution was installing the power supply in the case, putting in the motherboard offsets and installing the optical drive.)

CPU: AMD Phenom II x4 955 (3.2ghz quad core)
RAM: 16gb ddr3-1333 (4x4gb, G.Skill)
MB: Asus M4A87TD
Video: Gigabyte GV-N450OC2-1GI (Nvidia Fermi 450 card, 1gb vram)
HD: WD Caviar Black 1TB (sata 3, 64mb ram cache)
DVDRW: an old but still functional ata133 LG dvdrw, recycled
Case: a ThermalTake black atx mid-tower, forget the model number
Power: antec 650w green (so named for high conversion efficiency)
OS: Ubuntu 10.10 Desktop

So, so happy with how it’s turned out. :) I’ve done things with it like have two operating systems installing into virtualbox in the background (various testbed VMs) while playing Portal via Steam on wine fullscreen in high res and it never stuttered. Ripping a DVD took less than half an hour (and I’m not sure that I found the right config options to tell HandBrake to go multi-core). OS install went smooth as silk, the hardware is super-performant, and best of all it’s quiet! The loudest sound it makes is the very faint noise that comes from really thrashing the crap out of the hard drive. I kind of wanted to get an SSD for main storage, but the $/GB ratio was still just a bit out of my reach, and I’ve heard of just enough bugs and glitches still being worked out with them that I felt that sticking with spinning rust for now was the safe call. With sata-3 on the motherboard, I’ll probably still be able to upgrade just fine to an SSD in a year or two when all the software and hardware kinks have gotten worked out.

Because I constantly forget how to do this whenever I’ve got cause to fool around with SLIME mode in emacs (usually when working through Land of Lisp, which is on Safari too), a note to myself:

1. in the SLIME buffer, press “,” to enter a slime command
2. enter “sayoonara”
3. press enter to exit

This is enough to exit back out to ordinary emacs (from which ctrl-c ctrl-v exits, naturally).

I figure LJ was my home for long-format writing (or at least, longer than 140/420 characters that twitter and facebook respectively support in the standard post) for several years, so I might as well mirror whatever I write here back over there for tradition’s sake (and who knows, there might be people who only ever read my LJ). This is mostly a test post to see if the mirroring plugin I’ve installed is working. Right now only my p3rlm0nk LJ is set up as a post mirror but if any other users on perilouscodpiece wish to set this up I’ll be happy to (of course, so far I’m the only one using this blog…).