Simon Kenyon Shepard :: justLikeThat.

Last night and this morning I conducted 2 experiments.

The first experiment was last night before I went to bed, where I timed how long it took my work laptop, running windows XP to shut down. 4 minutes 20 seconds.

I think you can probably guess that the next experiment was to test the time it took to boot up. 3 minutes.

Now, I’ve read people make the same point that I’m about to make several times. The most famous being Joel Spolsky, in his blog and books. The point was really driven home when I attended the Cambridge dev days conference 2009 and was told that at the first conferences, during the breaks they had set up a stall offering to upgrade the ram in your laptop to it’s maximum, for FREE. This was how important Joel thinks it is for people to have the best equipment available to him.

For two years I have accepted the equipment I was given as one of life’s little endurance tests. Everybody got the same. Accept it and move on.

But last night, after writing my hat change blog post, I realised something really obvious. For two years, I have started and shut down that laptop on average once a day if not more. There are 365 days in one year. 4.2 + 3 = 7.2 minutes a day. Waiting. Waiting for my equipment to be usable. 365 times 2 years is 730 days * 7.2 = 5265 minutes. 5265 minutes can also be said as 3.65 days, or if we talking working days (8 hours) 10.96 days.

Over the last 2 years I have wasted 10.96 WORKING DAYS of my F*UCKING LIFE WAITING FOR A CRAPPY LAPTOP TO SHUT DOWN AND BOOT UP.

To put that in terms a businessman can understand, my daily charge out rate for the company is somewhere in the ball park of £1,000 per day. That means, someone has paid £11,000 over the last two years for me to stand around waiting for my laptop.

Now, I’m no financial genius, but it seems to me, for £11,000 I could buy some pretty shit hot equipment. I mean for 3k I could buy a pretty amazing laptop and still have 8k to play with. The scary thing is when you multiply this by the number of people working in the company it gets into the tens of millions per year wasted.

I guess my overall point is the people who you work for are your most important asset, you should be proactively giving them equipment to try to enable them to do their job as efficiently as possible and grow them as much as you can as they are what is making you money.

Update

I just finished watching Bill Gates’ latest TED talk on his new mission to solve the energy problem.

Thinking back to this blog entry I started to wonder how much of an impact the inefficient equipment we provide people wastes valuable human resources and adds to our carbon debt, and how efficiency is actually every bodies problem, not just the concern of the rich. Also it was annoying because my broadband connection sucks making the video take 45 mins to watch rather than 27 mins. I wondered how much extra carbon shoddy services from Giant companies like Virgin media and BT end up pumping into the environment.

I’ve been fairly quiet recently in terms of posts, this is mainly because I’ve just resigned as Senior front-end developer at Sapient and accepted the post of “front-end specialist” at Nokia in Berlin.

From April 1st 2010 I will be working on the Ovi maps project. Ovi maps interests me for several reasons, firstly it’s got a massive user base and so is a chance to really get stuck into a application that’s just getting into it’s stride. There’s a great opportunity to start making small engineering changes that really a big difference in terms of performance and usability. It’s served to such a wide variety of different devices/platforms that I will get to see the realities of large mobile app development as well as hopefully bringing in some learned best practices from the web app world regarding CI and Continuous testing. I would also like to do some developer relations promotion, as before interviewing for the job I had no idea what Ovi maps was. Obviously now Ovi’s had a bit more PR but the developers remain relatively anonymous. Something I’d like to change given the quality of people working there.

I will be sad to leave Sapient, although it has it’s problems there a few really spectacular people there, whom I wish all the success for in the future and hope that some things begin to change.

All I have to do now, is figure out how to move my entire flat and life to another city, ekkk.

I am just filling in my companies annual self assessment form and thought I would share some of my thoughts regarding 2009.

Value and Quality

“Quality is doing things right when no-one is looking” this is a quote from John T Ford, mentioned in the infamous software book “The Mythical Man Month” by Fredrick Brookes. This year I have strived to fulfil this meme to it’s upmost. I believe the quality achieved by automating things that previously used unreliable human methods to achieve adds the same level of value to the client as the entire creative process. A relevant historical example of this can be found in the automotive industry and the subsequent collapse of poor quality American vehicle engineering as the Japanese and Asian markets obliterated them with durable, reliable, inexpensive import cars. The same is true of software and the beginning of this trend can be seen in companies like Goggle.

Productivity

This year, I have learned about the most important form of productivity as espoused by the agile and Lean principles. “Sustainable development” is a quality generally completely misunderstood in this certain circles, but is in fact the source of a large amount of client dissatisfaction. Selling projects in under budget and with the assumption that developers will work overtime to get them completed is a fallacy perpetuated by incompetence. Rushed, ill thought out work leads to unrealistic expectations for the client and ultimately disappointment in the output which is then reflected onto our company and the production staff. Even more harmful is the attrition it leads to as experienced developers leave unfulfilled and frustrated. In which case productivity should be measured by a lack of overtime and encouragement of advanced thinking.

Strategic Context

With a marketplace of vendors that are consolidating into large inefficient groups driven by bureaucracy and nepotism, trying to win the business of other larger inefficient monoliths, there are few things that will allow one to distinguish themselves from the crowd. Honesty, integrity and reliability are the three main things that will allow us to stand tall above the rest and are the most important things for our strategic context in terms of winning the business of the companies of tomorrow.