Rockstars & Consultants, who needs 'em? - Aloha Ruby Conf

Rockstars &
Consultants
Who needs ‘em?
Aloha Ruby Conference, Oct 8-9, 2012
Tuesday, 9 October, 12

View Slide

Equal time for dogs, and dog lovers.

View Slide

Lori M Olson
@wndxlori
http://wndx.posterous.com
http://ror4real.com
http://rails4ios.com
Photo Credit: @etrever

View Slide

So really...
Who needs them?

View Slide

YOU do.
Because there’s an awful lot of job postings looking for them...

View Slide

And there’s even a reality TV show about them.

View Slide

Everyone does
But the simple fact is, at one time or another, pretty much everyone does

View Slide

Why?
The real question is why do we think we need a rockstar or a consultant? And why do we
continue to need them?

View Slide

What makes a
rockstar?
Let’s start with breaking the question down.

View Slide

They know
*everything*

View Slide

Photo credit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:The_brain.gif
But not just that. Rockstars are self-motivated learners. They learn new things, because they
enjoy learning new things.

View Slide

They’ve
“done it all before”

View Slide

Super productive
They’ll “get ‘er done fast”, and push that critical release out the door

View Slide

http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/hsinho/345518426/
Because we all need a superhero every now and then, right?

View Slide

They have no fear
The difficult we do immediately, the impossible could take a little longer.

View Slide

What makes a
consultant?
Actually, consultants tend to come in a couple of different ﬂavors

View Slide

*knows*
one thing very, very
well

View Slide

Photo credit: http://www.ftcwebconsulting.com/consultants/consult-a-seo-expert/
These would be your experts. They have deep knowledge of a critical piece of your
technology stack.

View Slide

know
*hard* things
Tuning that database. Scaling that app to 5 million users

View Slide

Photo Credit: http://www.motivationalmemo.com/how-to-unveil-your-inner-genius/
Your team thinks a problem is really too hard, then you bring in the expert(s). Things that
are hard to learn. Things that are difficult to understand.

View Slide

Consultancies
Consultants are frequently part of a group.

View Slide

deep knowledge pool
And as a group, Consultancies have a vast pool of knowledge to call upon, from their
colleagues.

View Slide

http://thoughtworker.com/fun-thoughtworks
This is the kind of work Thoughtworks specializes in

View Slide

Why not?
So, if Rockstars & Consultants are so great, why would you not want to hire them?
What, exactly, are the downsides?

View Slide

Risks
There are some risks associated with each of these types

View Slide

Boredom
Self motivated learners... once there is nothing new to learn, they get bored, and they run
away when the next opportunity to learn presents itself.

View Slide

Photo Credit: I can haz Cheezburger
Or worse, they don’t run away, and start...

View Slide

Burnout
Those rockstar ninjas know everything, do everything, work insane hours, burn out...

View Slide

@ezmobius: So don't forget to get up
from ur desk and get some exercise. 4
years of 14 hour, red bull fueled days
sitting in a chair can kill you!
I still remember hearing about Ezra (don’t make me say his last name). This was just last
year/

View Slide

the big payoff
Some of your rockstars are just looking for what I like to call the illusion of the big payoff.

View Slide

Fail to deliver promptly? they leave
http://alltopstartups.com/2011/04/25/twelve-reasons-why-businesses-fail/
If you don’t produce that, they’ll move on for another try.

View Slide

Succeed in delivering? they leave
http://media.photobucket.com/image/pile%20of%20money/xxandyshredxx/pile-of-money.png?o=6
You do? then they “retire”.
So that’s the problem with the big payoff. It’s a lose-lose proposition for most companies.

View Slide

Hit by a bus
This is often joked about, but

View Slide

Looney Tunes: Fast & Furryous
It’s only funny when it’s not happening to YOU or YOUR COMPANY.

View Slide

Prima Donna
Official definition: someone who behaves in demanding, often temperamental, fashion
revealing an inflated view of themselves, their talent, and their importance.
What if they are hard to work with? They can be mono-focused and not open to new,
alternative ideas.

View Slide

Don’t come cheap
Last but not least, the Rockstar who knows he/she is a Rockstar, will know their own worth.
They will never come cheaply.

View Slide

Wildly expensive
Consultants on the other hand...

View Slide

Buy In
Consultants will lack knowledge of your business, your operational limits, your long term
plans.

View Slide

Bait & switch
The ole bait & switch.

View Slide

http://kaufmanpost.com/2009/11/no-bait-and-switch-permitted-here/
You hire them for their expertise, and they send in the B-team.
Quality control becomes an issue

View Slide

Culture Clash
Culture clash. The Impedence Mismatch between your way of perceiving problems and
solutions, and your consultants way of perceiving problems and solutions may be difficult to
manage.

View Slide

Focus
You may not have your consultant’s complete attention.

View Slide

Photo credit: http://www.ou.edu/ouija/
They may be juggling 2 or 3 projects at the same time.

View Slide

Audits
Most taxation agencies will look at you cross-eyed, if all you hire are consultants. They’ll
watch you closely, to see if you are misclassifying your workers.

View Slide

http://pictures.howbits.com/irs-auditor-meets-a-rabbi/
The IRS or the CRA or whatever your local taxation agency is called... will come and get you.
Because if your relationship with a consultant can be classiﬁed as a “personal services”
contract, you and your consultant are both gonna have a bad time.

View Slide

Knowledge walking
out the door
All that knowledge that they came in with? Most of it walks out the door with them, when the
contract ends, when the better opportunity arises, when the payoff happens.
Knowledge walking out the door is an asset lost.

View Slide

Alternatives?
So what *are* your alternatives

View Slide

That’s Cinder, as a puppy. I dare you to not ﬁnd that cute.

View Slide

GROW your TEAM
How about you spend some time and grow your own team.
Grow is such an interesting word. It could mean expand, but I prefer to think about it as
organic growth. We’ll come back to it, and reﬂect on the many aspects of grow.

View Slide

KNOW your team
In order to effectively grow your team, ﬁrst you must know your team.
single? workaholic? married? kids? pets? aging parents? illness or disability?

View Slide

http://www.thetoyzone.com/2009/blocks-for-kids/
These are never things to be discriminated about, just ... knowing enough about your people
in order to make the most effective use of your team.
http://www.thetoyzone.com/2009/blocks-for-kids/

View Slide

KNOW your
ecosystem

View Slide

Identify core
technologies
everything involved in the devops of your application or project development

View Slide

Dev

View Slide

Basics

View Slide

Ruby
MRI or JRuby or Rubinius? Old projects on still lingering on 1.8 or new ones on 1.9?

View Slide

Rails
or Sinatra or...
AngularJS or Backbone.js or Ember.js

View Slide

ERB
or HAML

View Slide

CSS
or Sass
or Less

View Slide

JavaScript
or CoffeeScript

View Slide

Testing

View Slide

MiniTest
or Test::Unit
or RSpec

View Slide

Mocking framework
Mocha, Flexmock, Factory Girl

View Slide

Integration
or Acceptance testing
Cucumber, Capybara, Webrat

View Slide

Client side testing
Jasmine, BrowserMob, BrowserStack, Browserling, Sauce Labs

View Slide

Toolset
OS, Editor(s), VCS, debuggers, proﬁlers, CI
Ok, that was a handful, now...

View Slide

Ops

View Slide

OS, DB
Not just from the dev/user side, but the server conﬁguration and customization side of
things

View Slide

Deploy
Heroku
or VPS
Linux, Hardware, memory, RAID, ﬁrewalls, etc
or Cloud
EC2, S3
Capistrano, SSH
Apache, Nginx, IIS, Passenger, Unicorn, Load Balancer

View Slide

Manage
Backups, Monitoring, Analytics

View Slide

HOW?
How does any one person keep on top of all of that? Poorly, at best. What to do?
There’s got to be an alternative...

View Slide

http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/divadivadina/2726296562/
Because if you don’t, some day your rockstar

View Slide

http://johnnynotsid.buzznet.com/user/journal/1333031/favorite-musician-quotes/
is gonna start looking like this.

View Slide

Training
To go back to the organic/growth/plant analogy... Training your people is like using
fertilizer.

View Slide

TIME
Hard cash money is one component to that fertilizer, but training is as much about time, as it
is about money

View Slide

Learn, absorb, try
If you fail to give your people the time, not only to learn, but to absorb that learning, and try
it out for size, then your money is wasted.

View Slide

Types of training
Lets not forget, there are many types of learning. Remember how we were going to KNOW
our TEAM? If you don’t know your team, you won’t know which is the most effective type of
training to apply

View Slide

Self Learning

View Slide

web based

View Slide

screencasts

View Slide

read books

View Slide

Formal

View Slide

courses
like the Pragmatic Studios

View Slide

certiﬁcations
yuck, I know, but there it is.

View Slide

conferences
Conferences are great learning experiences.

View Slide

Sharing
If you spend money, as well as time, on all this training, make certain it’s shared. This
multiplies the effect of all that training, across your team. Make sure that anyone taking
training has the opportunity to pass that learning on to the team

View Slide

lunch & learn

View Slide

bar camp
Back to “know your team”. If they are all married with kids, Bar Camp = bad idea. Lunch &
Learn = good idea. Bunch of single workaholics? Bar Camp all the way.

View Slide

But?
What if they take all that training and leave?

View Slide

Replacement costs
Replacing an unhappy developer who walks away is almost always going to cost you more
than doing what’s necessary to keep them. Not just in terms of ﬁnders fees, but time. Lots
and lots of wasteful time.

View Slide

Valued people, stay.
If you prove to people that they are valued, they will be more likely to stay, than those who
think that they are just another warm body, down in the trenches, a replaceable cog in the
machine.

View Slide

Engage
So beyond Training, we have Engagement.
Make certain that every single person on the team is engaged, and feels ownership of
SOMETHING.
So how do we do that?

View Slide

Split Responsibilities
Collective code ownership is great, but as I think I have amply demonstrated, not everyone
can be an expert in every single piece of the puzzle.
For each of your core technologies, you need to identify a primary and secondary point
person

View Slide

The Primary
The go-to person for that piece of the puzzle.

View Slide

The Secondary
Remember when we talked about that “hit by a bus” thing? How about vacations? Sick Leave,
Mat leave?

View Slide

Not enough
Just declaring primary and secondary point person is not enough. You need more.

View Slide

Par-ti-ci-pa-tion
I guess given that so many developers are introverts, it shouldn’t be surprising, but... you
can’t just sit back, you need to step up and participate.
If you want to step up, and BE the expert, then you’ll need to participate

View Slide

Resources
There are hundreds/thousands of resources out on the web, USE THEM.

View Slide

mailing lists

View Slide

blogs

View Slide

twitter

View Slide

irc

View Slide

forums

View Slide

lurk

View Slide

ask questions

View Slide

answer questions

View Slide

Stay on Top
Everyone has to start somewhere. The point is to make the effort to stay on top of at least
one thing

View Slide

Know the Issues
What are the bugs? Incompatibilities? Stability issues?

View Slide

Plan for Upgrades
Unless your tool is stagnant and never changes (code smell! run away!), you’ll need to
manage your updates

View Slide

beta tests
Participate. Don’t have to inﬂict on your team, but try it out, get an idea of what the impact
will be. If you need a second opinion, that’s why you’ve got a secondary.

View Slide

release candidates
Then when release candidates come out, you will be well positioned to use them.

View Slide

contribute
As Wes mentioned yesterday, and as my Public Service Announcement of the presentation, if
it’s open source, then for gawd’s sake contribute back!

View Slide

TIME
Did I mention that this takes time?

View Slide

Sustainable pace
Factor all this learning, and growing, and developing expertise into your sustainable pace.

View Slide

Stagnation
Don’t let people sit back on their laurels, either. Some elements and projects will be more
interesting than others. Make certain you rotate people around, and let them develop
expertise in new areas. When you have primary and secondary experts, it’s a lot easier to do
this, and you’ll keep people from getting stale, bored, and frustrated.

View Slide

So, what does “GROW
your TEAM” mean?

View Slide

Training

View Slide

Participation

View Slide

Develop Expertise

View Slide

Training
Participation
Develop
Expertise
Looks to me like we’ve got one of those virtuous circles here.

View Slide

Continuous
Improvement!
Training, Participation, Developing Expertise... All these things combine into a continuous
improvement process for your team.

View Slide

GROW your TEAM
And that is what will GROW your TEAM into something better than all the Rockstars &
Consultants out there.

View Slide

And that’s Finnegan, saying, that’s all folks, we’re done.

View Slide

Thanks!
Lori M Olson
@wndxlori
http://wndx.posterous.com
http://ror4real.com
http://rails4ios.com

View Slide

Rockstars & Consultants, who needs 'em? - Aloha Ruby Conf

Rockstars & Consultants, who needs 'em? - Aloha Ruby Conf

Lori M Olson

More Decks by Lori M Olson

Other Decks in Programming

Featured

Transcript