Bruce F. Webster

Today’s New York Times reports that Japan is “running out of engineers“:

After years of fretting over coming shortages, the country is actually facing a dwindling number of young people entering engineering and technology-related fields.

Universities call it “rikei banare,” or “flight from science.” The decline is growing so drastic that industry has begun advertising campaigns intended to make engineering look sexy and cool, and companies are slowly starting to import foreign workers, or sending jobs to where the engineers are, in Vietnam and India.

It was engineering prowess that lifted this nation from postwar defeat to economic superpower. But according to educators, executives and young Japanese themselves, the young here are behaving more like Americans: choosing better-paying fields like finance and medicine, or more purely creative careers, like the arts, rather than following their salaryman fathers into the unglamorous world of manufacturing.

The problem did not catch Japan by surprise. The first signs of declining interest among the young in science and engineering appeared almost two decades ago, after Japan reached first-world living standards, and in recent years there has been a steady decline in the number of science and engineering students. But only now are Japanese companies starting to feel the real pinch.

Read the whole article.  ..bruce w..

I received an interesting e-mail today, with the following paragraph:

Please accept our formal congratulations on the high achievement represented by this Peer Review Rating. You, Bruce Webster, are one of a select group of attorneys to have achieved this level of excellence and you deserve to be recognized.

This offer — to sell me a plaque signifying my “Martindale-Hubbell Peer Review” rating — comes as something of a surprise, since (for starters) I’m not a lawyer nor have ever attended law school.

I went to the indicated web site — mhur.com — typed in my “ISLN” (an identification number), and sure enough was presented with several styles of plaques that I could order, with the name “Bruce Webster” on them. Furthermore, according to this site, I was not only “Peer Review” rated, I had the highest possible rating (”AV”, as opposed to “BV” or “CV”):

Here’s what the martindale.com web site has to say about this rating:

AV® Peer Review Rating — An AV® certification mark is a significant rating accomplishment - a testament to the fact that a lawyer’s peers rank him or her at the highest level of professional excellence. A lawyer must be admitted to the bar for 10 years or more to receive an AV® rating.

According to the mhur.com web site, I received this rating on October 7, 2007, or about seven months ago.

I’m familiar with Martindale-Hubbell (now owned by Lexis-Nexis), since I have often used their “Lawyer Locator” feature to track down lawyers I know who have changed firms. And some poking around on the martindale.com website does turn up a page discussing the Martindale-Hubbell Peer Review rating and even confirms that mhur.com is, in fact, the only authorized seller of the corresponding award plaques (click on the “Acknowledgments” tab”).

I then went to the Martindale-Hubbell “Lawyer Locator” and did a search on my own name, which turned up three lawyers with the name “Bruce Webster” (all with different middle initials than I have), none of whom live in my state and — I presume — none of whom have my e-mail address.

Being a software engineer, I wanted to see this e-mail was meant for one of those three lawyers. The mhur.com front page gives you the option of either entering your ISLN (which was in the e-mail I received) or of looking up your ISLN by entering last name, first name, city and state. I used that second option with the information that I had gathered from the Lawyer Locator about the three “Bruce Webster” lawyers — and got a hit. Two name/state combinations yielded nothing, but the third was not only a hit, it came up with the same ISLN from my e-mail.

Curiously, though, the M-H Lawyer Locator had no information on this particular lawyer other than his city and state location — which raises anew the question of just how this “AV” rating was awarded. I attempted several other means of locating this particular “Bruce Webster” in that city and state, but with no real luck.

I am half-tempted to buy the plaque, but the price ($179) seems a bit steep for a gag that few would ever see or understand. Instead, I’ll forward the e-mail on to the relevant parties at mhur.com and martindale.com (along with a link to this post).

But it was a nice thought. ..bruce..

[Copyright 2008 by Bruce F. Webster. All rights reserved. Adapted from Surviving Complexity (forthcoming).]

Humanity has been developing information technology for half a century. That experience has taught us this unpleasant truth: virtually every information technology project above a certain size or complexity is significantly late and over budget or fails altogether; those that don’t fail are often riddled with defects and difficult to enhance. Fred Brooks explored many of the root causes over twenty years ago in The Mythical Man-Month, a classic book that could be regarded as the “Bible” of information technology because it is universally known, often quoted, occasionally read, and rarely heeded. Most publications and books on IT since then have debated, discussed, and deplored these same problems. And they are with us still. Their causes stem not from technology but from human frailties. Indeed, when asked why so many IT projects go wrong in spite of all we know, one could simply cite the seven deadly sins: avarice, sloth, envy, gluttony, wrath, lust, and pride. It is as good an answer as any and more accurate than most.

– Testimony given by Bruce F. Webster before the Subcommittee on Government Management, Information, and Technology, United States House of Representatives, June 22, 1998.

Many, if not most, information technology (IT) failures result from human factors, not technical ones. In my dual roles as an IT consultant to large organizations since 1995 and as an expert witness in IT systems failure litigation since 1999, I have spent thousands of hours reviewing documents, interviewing developers, managers, and executives, analyzing software lifecycle deliverables, reading deposition transcripts, pouring through error tracking logs and even reviewing source code. The goal in all this is to figure out (depending upon my role) why a project is or was troubled. In some cases, it may be because of reliance upon software or hardware that was unexpectedly flawed or insufficiently capable, or due to some unexpected external circumstances. But in the majority of cases, it really does come down to human factors — and usually one or more of the seven deadly sins cited above.

I now recite those sins in a different order and with slightly different wording — pride, envy, greed, lust, anger, gluttony, sloth — because that way they form the handy mnemonic “PEG LAGS” (with apologies to all Margarets and Peggys reading this). That’s the order I’ll address them in subsequent posts. ..bruce..

In my post on the “Dead Sea Effect“, I talk about why the overall quality of personnel in large corporate and government IT shops declines over time (short answer: the great IT engineers leave for greener pastures, the not-so-great ones stay and entrench).

So, why would IT engineers leave one of the most highly regarded, high-quality, and successful IT organizations on the planet, viz., Google? This collection of ‘farewell’ notes from departing Google employees gives some clues (hat tip to Valleywag):

For the last two years, I have had a fantastic time helping to build Google Webmaster Central. I have loved working with the (ever-expanding!) team, writing about search on the blog and for the help center, and designing features for the webmaster community. (…) Now I have an all-new opportunity to work on the unique challenges of the vertical and local search space at Zillow. (…) Making the move was a very difficult decision, but the challenge of creating something new in a space that’s so young and evolving was too great to pass up.” (Vanessa Fox, Google Webmaster Central Product Manager - June 14, 2007)

“Today’s my last day as an employee of Google. I’ve been on leave since December, so it’s not really a big change this day. But now the decision’s made. It feels a bit strange leaving such a great and productive company. But I’m ready to do something new with a smaller group of people.” (Nelson Minar, he created Google’s first APIs - April 7, 2006)

Valleywag summed it up as “to be in charge”, but the postings also make it clear that in many cases it has to do with the size of the organizations. Setting aside my own firm, I’ve worked for organizations ranging in size from 2 employees to over 150,000 employees (PricewaterhouseCoopers in the 1999-2001 timeframe); I still lean towards the smaller size. I suspect in many cases there is a third reason as well: a shot at more valuable stock options, particularly for those who joined Google relatively late.

On the other hand, The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs has a somewhat harsher (though not necessarily incompatible) take on it about a month ago:

You’ve got these weirdly smart and semi-nasty super-spoiled children who really believe they’re superior beings who shouldn’t have to work too hard and who really don’t take criticism well (because they’ve never received any in their sheltered little lives, and it just totally knocks them on their ass) and on top of all that they are almost entirely incapable of focusing on anything for more than a few minutes at a time. You’ve got an entire corporate culture built on ADHD and entitlement. Nice work, frigtard.

Plus you make a big deal of only hiring these super-high-IQ kiddies and the fact is that most of them truly are smart, but then you put them into this horribly dull and easy drone work on AdWords and AdSense and they’re all bored to tears and totally disappointed because they really really really thought they were going to do something meaningful with their lives and now they’re just worker bees — pampered worker bees, sure, but still — and maybe they should have taken that offer from McKinsey but they really thought Google was going to be so cool and blah blah blah.

So, maybe it’s the Dead Sea Effect after all — just on a much higher level. ..bruce..

Alex Papadimoulis over at The Daily WTF (one of my favorite IT blogs) has posted a lengthy and thoughtful solution to the problems I raised in my post on the “Dead Sea effect“. Specifically, he refers to the “Up or Out” model, pioneered over a century ago by Paul Cravath and well-known to anyone who has worked in a law firm or one of the Big Eight Six Five Four (how many are left now?) Consulting Firms.

In fact, I’m quite familiar with it, because I spent two years as a Director (one level below Partner) at PricewaterhouseCoopers, which definitely used the “Up or Out” model. In addition, I’ve been serving off and on as a expert witness in IT-related litigation for nearly a decade and so have spent many long hours in law firms and with lawyers (ranging from associates to partners), and as Alex notes, law firms tend to use this same model as well.

So, how well does this model work in developing and maintaining top talent? Well, that depends upon what you define as “talent”. I haven’t read Cravath’s book, so I don’t know what he originally proposed. But in modern law firms and large consulting firms, “talent” is mostly defined as “bringing in clients with lots of money” and “keeping the staff under you fully occupied with billable hours” (though, to be fair, it also includes your actual performance over the course of multiple engagements). Let me explain.

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