Mar 16 2009
Observations on the perceptions of personality
Recently, I had gotten together with a bunch of friends from my former company Digital Railroad (DRR). DRR had such a great team – such squandered opportunity. Among the numerous subjects brought up were estimates about how accurate my predictions were about what DRR ought to do overall, and in particular what important product features DRR should build and what they should look like. Now granted, the former DRR folks were out to have a good time and were relaxing over a few drinks so I listened to their flattery and rather generous estimates of my “DRR must do so-and-so …” dictums as being 80% (or more) on the mark. A few of these folks have remained in the “business” of professional on-line photo archives and basically have seen first-hand a number of “my ideas” become realized by other companies. At one point I was asked point-blank: did that reality upset me? My answer was a direct and succinct “no, not in the slightest.” Sure, I would love to have been the one to build a lot of cool stuff we didn’t get to do at DRR, but I’m not doing that, and I’m glad that even though I didn’t have a hand in it, what was blatantly obvious to me was at least as blatantly obvious to some other team of engineers and now professional photographers are able to use tools that remained mere twinkles in my eye at DRR.
But, what was unrealized by DRR is not the main subject of this post, rather the phenomenon of how/why people, in retrospect (and even when DRR was still in business), seem to attribute such a high accuracy to my claims as to what, why, and how DRR should do things. The reality is that if 50% of my claims turned out to be the things DRR ought to do (and are now being realized by other companies) I would be astonished. Furthermore, my former colleagues grossly underestimate their roles in “my” output of ideas. I recall vividly being wrong about my (literally) ideas most of the time. But, as it was discovered in the Biosphere 2 experiment that trees need wind to grow strong, I refined and iterated my ideas with input and direction from the very same colleagues that attributed those ideas to me. Many of my “original” ideas were merely direct extensions of what was already there in the photographic data we had available to us. For instance: all embedded metadata in photographs should be imported into our system and made available for viewing, editing, and searching is not really an Earth-shattering idea, such data is already in the file it only makes sense to make it available within a system like DRR, but we didn’t, we always worked with a very restrictive subset of the data. Many other ideas I expressed about UI, and work-flow, and our cart and licensing were distilled results of iterated conversations I had with my various colleagues around me, they did not spring forth from my head in their final form. The staff of DRR had (have) remarkable talent, that talent was exploited by me to help congeal succinct statements about what DRR ought to do through an iterative process; these ideas that seemed to have come from me were mostly refined and focused version of their own ideas. Somehow though, those ideas have been attributed to me. To my fellow DRR alumni, the next time you are sitting quietly at home or wherever and are reflecting on things DRR, tune in to memories of your own thoughts and the chatter in the office, realize that it was us, together that came up with great, unrealized, ideas not me. For crying out loud: give credit where credit is due, and you all are due a lot more credit than I am for those “ideas” you attribute to me.
So, what explains the phenomena of attribution to me? Even at DRR I was aware of some of the phenomena I described above, so the recent reiterations are not unexpected. I think that such an attribution comes down to personality and timing. For better or worse most who know me know that I’m brutally honest and often startlingly direct, I have no future in politics. I was just as tuned into the problems and stresses that flowed through the DRR aether as anyone else. When I picked up on chatter that related to something I could possibly do something about I got proactive (in my meandering sort of way) to talk to people about problems with our product. I could and did talk a lot, it is often said that talkers are not good listeners, perhaps we should have a talk ;-). I would listen keenly to what people would have to say. My friend Oren says that the best products spawn from the “that’s fucked up” mentality, so I listened to what people thought was fucked up about our product. I would often throw in my ideas and have them shot down, but in the process I learned something. Eventually, a reasonable idea would form that would clearly address a particular problem. Now, mind you, my “investigations” of this sort were not tied to any of our release schedules, often I would be directly digging into what I perceived as real issues with our product as opposed to the crap-o-rama featuritis product release circus that DRR got into (at the expense of fixing core problems with our site). After I had refined a solution to a particularly vexing problem that I thought got solved as a collaboration I did the blatantly obvious thing: I told people about it. Heaven knows that a number of my friends DRR were burdened by email tomes describing in painfully bad language sweeping plans to solve X or Y at considerable detail and length. Typically, like earthquakes, these emails arrived unannounced. These emails were not the typical “I’m fed up” kind of manifestos that often come from engineering types, but detailed designs on a fix and proposals on how we could accomplish the task. Some of these ideas we did like the DRR search system, and eventually the new image delivery system, most never got off the drawing board.
What I think happened at DRR (which was not unique in my history), is this:
- “Big” ideas would be injected by me into the aether of DRR in a way that was not synchronous to other activities at DRR, therefore, the ideas stood out with stark relief against the normal background activity. But everyone at DRR should know that those ideas were merely a collection, refinement and amplification of their own ideas put through preliminary engineering and design phases to provide a way for the engineering team to discuss them.
- Many people are uncomfortable with speaking plainly or taking risks with putting out ideas solo, I have neither fear nor discomfort in doing that. Many of the ideas that DRR scheduled were the result of featuritis and were pushed though with insufficient time or incorrect processes to develop ideas well. I took a slower route and bounced ideas back and forth until I got a square-ish peg to actually fit the squarish hole.
- I didn’t tolerate bad ideas, and would fight them tooth-and-nail, even if we were well into a feature design cycle. In my book momentum behind a clearly bad idea is not justification to move forward with such ideas. DRR’s design process would introduce so many “corner cases” and “edge cases” as to produce a tragic comedy. At one point I forbid the use of the phrases “corner case” and “edge case”, you simply fucked up, back to the drawing boards. I explained to people that thinking in terms of percentages of users who would encounter an “edge case” is the absolute wrong metric: with any sufficiently large population of users some significant minority of users are suffering because of your mistake. Solve actual problems, not convenient subsets of them.
- Finally, I explained to many people I was close to at DRR: it’s just a job, if I get fired, I get fired, I don’t care, but for as long as I’m there I plan to care about using my time in a way that I can look back and be happy with my accomplishments.
The confluence of the above points created a number of perceptions of me, among them: crazy, reckless, and bold. I would say that most people who worked in the New York office learned to see past the crazy and reckless aspects because bold certainly is closer to what I was looking for. Eventually those people realized that I really am just trying to help make what we were building better and trying to find ways, with their help to do it, but they also knew explicitly that I needed their help to get it done, I could not do it on my own: you could work with the cantankerous old fat guy. I think that most of the Seattle office basically hated me, which is a shame for the feeling was not mutual. The main reason I think is that I has no direct way to get past the crazy and reckless image with them so I came off as an asshole. Perhaps someday that gap can be bridged. But the other side-effect of the above points is that I came across as a distinct personality associated with ideas so undue attributions have been made and are still made to me. The reality of course is I has the singular pleasure of working with a number of fantastic people who were the true source and inspiration for ideas I thought were important to DRR’s customers, all I did was to try to do what I thought I could do best to get those ideas realized: open my big mouth (or write an email) and make some noise.
