It's Not How Well the Dog Dances

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Copyright © 2019 Hugh Brock

Flexible Expectations

A big part of my role at Red Hat these days is supporting events that connect researchers on topics we care about. One great example of this is the first-ever Microarchitecture Workshop, a one-day mini-conference on hardware security vulnerabilities that are exploitable via what is called “side-channel attacks.” The most celebrated of these attacks to come about recently was the Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities, explained nicely here by my colleague Jon Masters.

The Microarchitecture Workshop, which happens next week at Boston University and is shaping up to be a great success, is a perfect example of something that happens to me all the time: I start off pushing to make a thing happen with a vision of what that will be, but because I refuse to pay close attention to the details (I am a Connection Tilt, after all), the thing morphs into something quite different from what I was expecting. For a manager, this level of uncertainty can be quite terrifying, and I often promise myself things like “Next time I’ll make sure to get the details right on this thing!” But of course I never do.

Fortunately for me, it normally doesn’t matter whether I dig into the details or not, because what I do actually pay attention to is the people I hand things over to. In this case, I found a researcher at BU, Ari Trachtenberg, who was willing to be involved although he had a quite different vision for what the event would turn into. The result? A smaller, more focused gathering than I had imagined, but I think one that will turn out to be more effective than the larger symposium I had originally envisioned. I was also very fortunate to have help from the very capable Jen Stacy at BU, as well as my new team member Sarah Coghlan. (Sarah keeps telling me how much she loves her job, to which I say “Guess I’d better give you more work then.” So far this is working out beautifully.)

I’ll report back here on how the event actually went, but it looks like it’s going to be a really smart collection of people. Gatherings like this sometimes prove to be turning points in the path toward solving real research problems — maybe this one will fall into that category. Good thing I didn’t try to micromanage it.

(Like that would ever happen…)

What Makes Me Happy?

Like many folks my age (I suspect), I am engaged in a constant battle to eat less, drink less, exercise more, and use my time more productively. A lot of angst and self-disgust flows through this process. It is hard to shake the feeling sometimes that I am managing within myself a team of recalcitrant workers who mostly do random things that advance no agenda at all, but occasionally exhibit such brilliance that I can’t just show them the door.

So for example I have the guy who loves to drink too much wine and have a good time… but that also drives social connection and building friendships with people. I have the guy who is compelled to eat every last bite on the plate — I think this is some form of OCD, honestly — but also motivates love of cooking and all kinds of food. I have the guy who is always starting new hobbies and wants to try just about everything, to the detriment of success at anything — but also is responsible for some of my most important experiences and personal growth.

Of course, I realize that there is only one “me,” only one responsible party for all my actions. What I find interesting though is the idea that there can be such a thing as “self-control” or even “self-management,” which there certainly is, and which implies that no there is not one responsible party, there is a big untidy bag of drives and needs and interests that somehow are yoked together into something that gets up every morning and tries to act in a coherent way. And somewhere in there there is a manager, the poor bastard who has to try to point this motley crew in a single direction.

Interestingly, the lesson that comes out of this is not unlike one of the big lessons we learn about managing people, which is that confronting yourself head-on is often not the right thing to do. You have to be smart and tricky and manage your energy and pick your battles. So, for years and years I wanted to write a daily personal journal, but I never did, because I always thought it should be the last thing I do in the work day. When my coach suggested I try writing it first thing in the morning instead, I was sure that wouldn’t work… but it did. So I am now a dedicated journaler, because it is the very first thing I do every day. And I didn’t get there by force of will or self discipline or effort, I did it by tricking myself and creating a routine. And I have learned that that routine makes me happy, because I guarantee myself time to reflect — to think about my own wants and needs and priorities and what actions I should take to meet them.

What else makes me happy? I’m not sure… I’m still trying to work it out. There are some obvious things, like my wife and my cat and a great meal and a lovely glass of wine. Then there are achievements, like playing the Bach Chaconne on the vibraphone, or getting a private pilot instrument rating. The rest is a balancing act and I fear it is not nearly as well managed as I want, but I will get there. It’s just a matter of finding the right tricks.

The Future

As I mentioned earlier, I’ve been in a management off-site this week. A lot of the work there has simply been about communicating where we are right now, with a fair amount of time also devoted to communicating plans for what we will do over the next eighteen to twenty-four months.

This is all necessary activity and if we weren’t at least trying to be serious about planning for the future we would be negligent as managers. The problem of course is that any manager with any experience at all knows planning is mostly futile. As many hacks have pointed out, it is a rare plan that survives the first shot on the battlefield. (And yes, we always revert to tired combat analogies in having these kinds of discussions, which is counterproductive at best. Business is not war, and selling free software is most certainly not war — more of a parlor trick, I sometimes think.)

I don’t need tired combat analogies to demonstrate the futility of planning — I can use my own career in software. Since I got into this dodge back in 1999, I’ve been involved in at least ten different software projects where the work we were doing was based on realizing some imagined future state that was more than a year out. Not a single one of those projects ever realized that planned state. That doesn’t mean they were failures, although many were — this is software after all. It simply means they didn’t go to plan.

So what is the point of even discussing “roadmap” (as we call it) in an industry where even our CEO says things like “Planning is dead?” I guess one alternative is just to be totally reactive — build a team that is super flexible so it can quickly jump on whatever opportunity arises. Nice idea, but hard to pull off in nature, partly because teams like this are expensive. Also, “totally reactive” doesn’t feel like a great way to be when people’s careers are depending on your leadership. We are compelled to try to imagine the future and try to position ourselves and the people who depend on us to take best advantage of it.

No, I think it’s best to continue planning, knowing all the while that the plans will be wrong. It’s just important not to depend on the outcome.