Software For Your Head

As I try to get things going at this new company, Yule, I’ve been reading some material that the boss has been consuming on the software industry. He found Yourdon’s Death March to be incredibly discouraging — if the industry is this bad, how can we be of any help to them? — but that’s what that book is all about. If you have been sent on a software “death march” (the term is one I wouldn’t have used, in deference to the souls left at Bataan) you recognize what he is saying, and indeed the only thing to do is quit. I’ve found that the manager almost always comes out okay in these: his or her workers are always blamed and the stain stays with them.

Sometimes you can accomplish the incredible even when on these. Jim did. He got fired. The boss is now the CTO of a large investment bank.

But the boss also found Jim McCarthy, the ex-Microsoft manager. McCarthy, who now runs a kind of consulting company called McCarthy Technologies or McCarthy TeamworX, or something, used to run the Visual C++ group at MS. He got it when it was Microsoft C version 7, and it stunk. While he was there, the team put out Visual C++ and Borland went from owning 80% of the market to struggling to keep 15%. These days Borland trades at around US$3. Back then, before Microsoft clobbered them, Borland traded as high as the mid-US$70s.

He and his now wife, Michelle McCarthy (another Microsoftee at the time) developed some interesting ideas, the key one being Software = Team. From this, many other ideas sprang that they believe can help teams create great software. They covers them on his website in a general way as The Core and The Core Commitments. They covers them in more depth in their book, Software for Your Head: Core Protocols for Creating and Maintaining Shared Vision.

They are obviously influenced by the psychodynamical approach. Here’s the check-in process as defined by The Core™:

1. Speaker says “I feel [one or more of MAD, SAD, GLAD, AFRAID].” Speaker may provide a brief explanation. Or if others have already checked in, the speaker may say “I pass.” (See the Pass protocol.)
2. Speaker says “I’m in.” This signifies that Speaker intends to behave according to the Core Commitments.
3. Listeners respond, “Welcome.”

The rest pretty much continues like this.

I was getting pretty worried about this process, especially if the boss liked it. I did the group therapy stuff for some time and we used this check-in process. I found it artificial, which was fine as long as it was viewed as a group that was artificial. But they started viewing it like it was real life. Leaving them was like leaving a cult somehow. But folks trying to kill you. After being with them in this intimate environment for a couple of years, I left and have had no contact since. The artifice had become tribal, to use one of Warren Kinston’s terms. For me, this group had a purpose: I needed to learn how to deal with humans in more ways than I had. But I suppose that I was never “in”: I’m not even sure that I can be in the way that they talk about. In the end, I see the self as socially created. Without social interaction, even imagined interaction with others that I once knew or that I create based on humans that I know, what I think of as the “real me” doesn’t exist.

There is no “authentic self”. There is only non-authentic selves. Your own self is a creation, a set of stories that you tell yourself. The unconscious may exist but I often don’t see how the term is any different from simply saying that someone feels remorse or guilt?

So I was worried until I read his book. Not that I’m all that comfortable with this process (more later) but under the heading “BOOTCAMP IS NOT THERAPY”:

… BootCamp is not psychotherapy. The two have different goals and different practices.

Generally speaking, therapy has the goal of optimizing your happiness. BootCamp has the goal of increasing your capacity to build products that make money. both of these goals is very important. In some cases, they may even be mutually dependent. Because of their different aims, however, it is worth stating clearly that some practices from the psychotherapeutic world with which you may be familiar are not effective (and therefore are not tolerated) at BootCamp.

Check-in is about your state vis a vis the work. Not some relationship crap.

(Okay, I’ll make the confession: my role in the group therapy thing ended up being “Jerk”. I remember getting so tired of hearing someone just whine that I told her that I was paying good money for this and she was wasting my time. I didn’t even want to talk about it. I just shut her down. The others were quite distressed: “I don’t feel complete in their discussion…” Like I cared. The funny thing was that one of the therapists took me aside later and said that he was happy I had said it. She wasn’t going anywhere, he said, and she was just wasting everyone’s time and money. Confronting her about it and then not letting her use her extensive passive aggressive style to continue getting attention was actually what he wanted to do but was restrained by his role. Apparently, one of the best things you can do when one of your pals is going on and on about the same damned thing is to say “I’m really bored with this.” This includes me. Why do we always want to stay a victim? What’s so interesting about that? So maybe I’m just a bitter person.)

I suppose that some of the fear comes from thinking about the workgroups that I’ve been in before. Hiding my identity and inner workings was a survival skill. Frankly, I wouldn’t trust them and that was borne out in others experiences.

So maybe this stuff can work. As I put together my team, I will have to think about that.