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It's easy to lose momentum during a change process.  I've only been at this company for five years (I'd be the most recent hire in some groups), but the entire time I have been here there have been discussions on how we have to change to meet the evolution of the marketplace and the strength of the Internet over a walled garden.

Our new CEO is really the first person to take the helm who actually seems capable of doing it.  But along with the promise and excitement that builds around putting new things together is the question of who gets left behind to support the old stuff.

When we migrated my project from a proprietary platform to something new last year, the development team made a conscious decision not to leave anyone to solely support fixes and tweaks to the old system.  It's important to give everyone a place at the new table when migrating and evolving a business or product model.

We don't have any specifics for how any plans might be implemented yet to drag the company kicking and screaming into the 21st Century.  But I fear that there will be people who get left behind, whether by their own desire to continue working on legacy projects or through some consensus that we "need" them on this old product.  We don't "need" anyone to continue to waste 100% of their time on an old project that isn't evolving.  Our company loses a lot of enthusiastic, talented employees who want to move on, learn new things, and innovate. They should be encouraged to do so, pushed off of, and uncoupled from their old projects. 

If a project is important enough to leave running, it's important enough to train a new person on before the subject matter expert leaves out of boredom or frustration.

Where we run into problems is through the natural attrition that occurs in a large company.  We have a huge installed base using products that no one fully understands anymore.  It's one thing to continue to enhance the customer UI of a product, or add features to modernize and compete in a product space.  However, the sad truth of what devastation lies behind that mask has the power to damage the company's reputation with some of its core customers.  Services can be broken or unusable for far longer than they should be if the support structure isn't cohesively and actively managed.  For many of our products, it might be too late to resurrect what once was - the brain drain has been heavy for several years.

 We have to be able to balance dedication and loyalty to the classic brands with the enthusiasm necessary to really move forward, not just pay lip service to the idea.  For some people that means making a difficult decision: 

Do you work here because of the project you are assigned to, or do you work here to do your part to make the company great?  Will you stay and continue to contribute if your product isn't part of the future vision?

There are a lot of brains in the company.  People are a huge resource, but they have to be deployed in a smart way to reap the most benefits.  I don't have any answers.  I know I've lost many of my smartest coworkers to other companies through bad management, frustration, and boredom, and that's sad when we need them to help us be great.

I've been at AOL for four and a half years now.  When I started in this job, I had no expectation of staying for any length of time; my longest prior employment was just over two years.  I wasn't intentionally bouncing around or anything, I just hadn't found the right thing yet.

By AOL standards, I'm a newbie.  There are more people who've been there longer than I have than have joined since I did, or at least it seems from my vantage point at the bottom of the well.  Being that the employee demographics tend to skew under-40, that means a lot of folks have spent most of their careers at AOL.

There's nothing inherently wrong with sticking around when you have a good thing going.  And AOL can be a lot of things to a lot of people.  There have been opportunities for technical training, academics and schooling, moving to management, some number of ex-pat assignments, and various other doors for interested parties to open.  Or, if you prefer, AOL will allow you to sit in the corner and only do the minimum amount required to not make your teammates' lives a living hell.  Your choice, and it's largely up to you to ask for what you want.

One thing AOL has always traditionally been is a home-grown shop.  There's a reason for that; when AOL put up the systems and infrastructure that run the products, there were few options for COTS software to solve the necessary problems.  Over  the years, many of these systems haven't matured, they've simply aged.  Reinvestment and refresh is key to keeping up, let alone getting ahead, and many systems at AOL just weren't getting the time and resources needed to stay modern.  So, too, the employees tasked with taking care of those systems.

I spent three years running systems based on AOLserver with some proprietary modules baked in.  When I got some of the first projects transferred over to me, I was pissed.  What the hell was I going to get out of running crappy AOLserver with some half-baked, proprietary extensions in it?!?

There were some number of learning experiences to be had; AOL still managed to run some gigantic sites on AOLserver, regardless of how infuriating it can be, and the lack of new builds, and the politics of the publishing department in 2006.

However.

It's not the proprietary aspects of the projects that make a job into a career, its the ancilliary topics that are transferrable to new platforms that give you an edge when it's time to move on.  I don't expect anyone to hire me for my AOLserver knowledge, and I wouldn't want them to. 

But step back, and look at the project you're working on.  Would you be able to take that project and run it somewhere else?  Somewhere that doesn't have whatever random tool XYZ that you rely on at company ABC?  What would you do, even if you stayed at ABC, and all the people who knew the inner workings of XYZ quit? (it's more likely than you think)  Do you know enough about your tools and platforms, and what they give you, to go looking for a replacement?

It's a hard question to look at objectively.  It takes some truth-finding and self-awareness to look at what you do and address your weaknesses from an environmentally-agnostic point of view.  Can you look at whatever you're working on, and say "We're using Weblogic.  We know we're dependent on feature A, feature B, and feature D.  Feature C we only use a little bit.  If we had to convert to another Java server, we'd need similar features" rather than "We have to use Weblogic because we've always used Weblogic and it's the only thing we know so you have to use it"?

Homegrown stuff has the added bonus of being horrific to teach to someone from outside the organization.  Honestly, nothing looks stupider to a new employee than a gigantic infrastructure built around a central system that could be replaced with some well-chosen OSS package. Inbreeding happens in technology.  Without a reason to go looking for a new solution, old projects will sit and fester, becoming more and more expensive year after year.  New projects will look like the old ones.  They'll all be susceptible to the same health issues, as modern demands outstrip what the old systems can provide.  The incumbent employees are caught up in the status quo, and any dissatisfaction on the part of a newcomer is simply chalked up to not understanding just how awesome the homegrown system is.

If only.

If Wal-Mart suddenly became a software dev shop it might have enough employees to match the number of people looking at and working on open source software projects every day.

Your engineering team is likely much smaller than that.  What are you missing out on that someone else in another part of the world has thought about?  You don't even know.  Your proprietary platform becomes an anchor instead of the solid foundation you told yourself it was.

In June, I participated in O'Reilly's inaugural Velocity Conference.  My slides from last year are here on my site, http://linuxchick.org/velocity08/

Velocity 2009 will be held in San Jose, California in June, 2009.  We're looking for presentations from folks in all areas of web operations and performance. 

• Are you the person who gets paged when your company's site is slow or has gone down?
• Do you know how to improve performance and balance efficiency and availability?
• Have you overcome a major scaling challenge?
• Have you been slashdotted, dugg, or techcrunched...and lived to tell the tale?

We want to hear about it!  Share your stories, best practices, lessons learned at Velocity 2009! 

Read the full Call for Participation here:

http://en.oreilly.com/velocity2009/public/cfp/53

Deadline is midnight, January 5, 2009. 

My apartment is a mess, i freely admit that.  Martha Stewart and I don't really have much in common.  One thing that is really getting out of hand now, though, is my books.  They're everywhere.  The place is starting to resemble the office of the crazy professor in the English department who did his PhD thesis on the impact of science fiction on hippies or something.

There's sort of a system.  I have "incoming" books, which I gotten through various methods but haven't yet read.  Some of these I've purchased, some I've gotten from bookins.com, some are from my mom, who reads all the freaking time.  Then there are the "outbound" books, which are anything from old novels, to textbooks, to stuff that's come in from bookins and is listed to go back out again.  Some of these are listed on half.com, some on bookins, and they are all sitting in boxes in my living room. 

On the two massive Ikea bookshelves are what I call "the permanent collection".  In what is generously referred to as the "dining room" in my apartment is fiction, and non-fiction that doesn't relate to computers.  Here I have stuff from my favorite authors, things I re-read from time to time, and some series like Stephen King's Gunslinger.  Also Calvin & Hobbes, Sandman, important stuff like that.  There's also some wine, my martini set, the box my camera came in...

In the spare bedroom is the "technical library", my out of control collection of technical books.  I've culled this herd several times over the years, and I don't buy many tech books anymore since I have a Safari subscription.  But every now and then something makes its way home with me.

In my bedroom are about two dozen books that i'm in various phases of pretending to read.  They're fairly well contained in a bookshelf, thankfully.

Then, there is the METRIC TON of stuff for my current classes.  Right now, I'm not entirely certain how many classes I'm taking.  I have books for a statistics class, a management class, accounting, operations and supply chain, and business writing.  Additionally, there are two personal-development packets that go with the management class, and binders for business strategy, accounting, management, and the stats class.  I don't know what to do with all of this yet.   Sure, there's probably room on my bookshelves for it, but i'd have to move my wine.  Or candles.  Or the various rabbit and penguin knicknacks that i receive all the time from my mom.

So, right now there is a leaning tower of MBA materials on the sofa table.  Beside a foot-high stack of unread magazines.  Which is beside a pile of additional office supplies and notepads for school.

I bet I could do a PhD thesis of the impact of having a lot of unorganized books on the psyche of the borderline OCD 21st century woman.  And no, I don't burn the candles while they're on the bookshelf.  That's just where the stash lives. 

Welcome to my new blog powered by Movable Type. This is the first post on my blog and was created for me automatically when I finished the installation process. But that is ok, because I will soon be creating posts of my own!