Every week I try to ask myself: What did I do this week to make myself more valuable? Am I moving forward toward a goal, or further from it?
I spotted this the other week in Philly. I didn’t try to sort out the politics of the creator.
In technology, communications, or any other job that involves one of those two things you are either moving forward or moving backward: standing still is not an option. You are either learning new skills, trends, tools, and concepts, or you’re falling behind as other people build new tools that drive new ideas and trends.
I read lots of advice that says to plan your career two or three moves in advance. That is good advice, but I don’t think it’s wise to trust your gut that far out. The technology landscape changes too fast and too dynamically to believe you know where everything will be in three or five years. On the one hand I think it’s important to deepen my skills for the path I want to be on, but at the same time I try to broaden my skills into areas other areas that have things to teach me. In the back of my head there is always plan B and C, just in case plan A doesn’t come together they way I hope. In part, because I’ve never been able to stay on plan A very long: life always intervenes.
When I was 23 (and sure I wanted to be teacher) I was advised to read an hour a day in my field, and that it should not just be reading about the kind work I was already doing. At the time I was the new kid in IT of a mid-sized international nonprofit organization doing whatever no one else wanted to do: which is a great way to learn a variety of things. I didn’t really know anything yet about how to have a career – I had a job, and I liked my job, but couldn’t envision a career path.
But I took that advice to heart and tried to find ways to constantly learn about things I don’t know. I read books, listened to podcasts, and taught myself new skills. I learned about communications planning, economics, corporate strategy, algorithms, and a variety of other topics. The ideas I pick up from those sources help me think about technology more creatively, and helped me understand the importance of making sure I build tools that are useful not just cool to me.
For several years I also taught myself a new programming language every year. I taught myself ASP, C#, PHP, Python, Ruby (on rails and off), R, Haskell, and JavaScript because I heard other people talk about them as important or interesting. I have used five of those professionally to create actual software people used. And the others all forced me to see programming differently and helped me be a better developer. I don’t force myself into learning whole new languages annually, it was too broad and prevented me from deepening my knowledge of individual languages and the ecosystems I work in frequently (although I’m probably overdue to teach myself something like Go, Swift, or Rust.
The biggest thing I’ve learned from all these different inputs is that I need to live in constant fear of getting behind, outmoded, and sidelined. That fear keeps me motivated to learn more and push myself harder. By the time I retire I cannot imagine I will still be paid to be a full-time Drupal developer, I doubt that’s what I’ll be doing five years from now. Certainly by in 30 years Drupal, and the web as we know it, won’t look anything like they do today and I will be doing my job very differently. This is the blerch that keeps me motivated.
So every week ask yourself: what did I learn this week? Did I move forward or fall behind?
This week I was working with a new colleague on our account team. As with all people knew to working with technical teams and bug tracking, she’s having to learn how to create good trouble tickets for when clients report issues. This is a challenge I’ve seen played out in every place I’ve ever worked: developers want detailed tickets so we can dive in without asking 16 follow up questions, and people creating tickets don’t actually know what we want and assume we know how to find and fix the problem. And so I’d like to try to offer this explanation of what we’re looking for and why.
At the most basic level I need to know at least three things to find and fix a problem on a project (either a web site or some other tool I’m supporting):
Where in the program is the problem? This is usually a link to a sample page that has the problem.
What happened? I need a clear explanation of what went wrong. Is there a picture missing? Is the text format wrong? Is there a big red error message at the top?
What you expected to happen? What is the picture of and where exactly was the picture supposed to appear? What formatting was supposed to appear on the text? Did you do something right before the error message appeared that helps me see that message again?
These things are part of allowing me to reproduce the problem. If I can’t reproduce the problem, I can’t promise you I fixed it. If you can’t reproduce the problem, you can’t check that I’m right.
Developers will often say that if you can’t give me the step to reproduce a problem I can’t fix it. But in my experience sometimes a problem is actually really hard to reproduce, and you need a developer or a professional tester to actually figure out those steps. So it’s okay if you can’t give me perfect directions, but give me what you have.
If you find yourself writing a ticket that doesn’t say more than “Search is broken” or “Blog post didn’t look right” the problem better be massive (think big red error message level). As an account/support team member that may be all you got from the client but someone has to fill the gaps – and developers are terrible people to have fill those gaps.
As a developer there are several reasons that’s true.
First, rarely do developers get the luxury of working on one project for an extended period, and when they do those tools are large and complex. So we probably don’t have every detail in our heads at any moment. If we could store all that information we wouldn’t need task tracking systems, you could just call us and tell us about a problem as we’d call you back a few hours/days/weeks later and say “fixed”.
Second, we’re terrible at finding mistakes in our own work. Like everyone else, we need editors. If I could see the problem you are reporting, I would probably have fixed it, or at least reported it to you so we could open a task to get it fixed later.
Third, we probably don’t spend as much time in the project documentation as you do. So if someone needs to track down the original design to check for a discrepancy between the design and what’s happening a developer is probably going to be much slower at this task than you are (or you will become soon).
Also remember your developer probably will not look at the problem today unless it’s mission critical to the client. So they need to be able to figure out three weeks from now what you were talking about. If it just says: “search is broken” and I run a search in two weeks and everything looks fine, you are going to need to tell me what’s broken about it (maybe a result is missing, maybe it’s formatted wrong, maybe it’s working perfectly but the client doesn’t like the results).
Even with all that context, I know it is intimidating for many new support or account team members to crack the code developers use when talking. We over explain this, using technical terms, and get annoyed too quickly when people don’t understand us. And we often forget that teaching by analogy is helpful.
My new colleague is a baker, and so as I was trying to help her understand what I needed to be helpful on tasks I switched to bread:
If I came to you and said “my bread didn’t work out, please tell me how to fix it” how would you start?
That helped her make the connection. Just saying my bread didn’t work out, doesn’t tell her enough to help me do it right next time. She’s going to have to ask several follow up questions before she can be helpful.
Did it taste wrong or look wrong?
What kind of bread was it?
Did you follow the instructions or do something different?
Are your ingredients fresh?
Did it rise enough?
Did you knead it enough?
Did you set the oven to the right temperature?
On the other hand if I come to her and say:
I tried to make sourdough oatmeal bread over the weekend. I followed the recipe closely, but my bread turned out really dense instead of having the bready texture I expected.
Now she knows there was a problem getting the bread to rise. So we can focus questions on the yeast and other details of getting air into bread. Yes, there are still several things that could have gone wrong, but now we know where to start.
Frequently new support staff are intimidated by all the technical things they don’t know. And too often developers brush aside new staff who don’t give them the information they need and just say things like “Oh I’ll figure it myself” instead of helping their colleagues learn. Part of the solution is to help people understand that the first set of questions aren’t actually technical. Baking isn’t the right analogy for everyone, but it helped in this case. And hopefully next time I’ll do better at getting to a better explanation quickly.
I’ve been struggling with what to write about our new president, the protests he’s triggered, the ban on refugees he’s ordered, the families he’s dividing, the hateful things he has said about many groups, and all the related news. While this is mostly a technology blog and much more articulate people are already saying things worth hearing, these are not events I can allow to pass without comment.
For a variety of reasons I haven’t been able to attend the protests, except I accidentally attended part of a rally in Philadelphia (I thought the rally pictured above was over when I met a friend for dinner right in the middle of it), but it’s been exciting to watch the sustained energy the last few weeks.
Last week my wife paraphrased some of the memes that have been going around: Remember all those times in history class you thought “If I had been alive during ____ I would have ____”? What you are doing now is exactly what you would have done then.
She didn’t mean it as a direct challenge to me, but I haven’t been able to let it go. In part because while I’ve had good answers in the past, I’m not sure I have a good answer at the moment. Besides, the challenge takes on another level of importance when coming from a historian.
While I was in Philly I visited American Friends Service Committee’s Waging Peace exhibit marking their 100th year.
For four generations my family has spent time working and volunteering for AFSC, and there were markers of some of our work in the exhibit. Our widely different roles matched the times and events we were living through. As young adults my great grandparents worked in post-World War I Germany and France, and my great-grandfather later led the construction of a housing co-op. My grandfather and father served as conscience objector with AFSC during World War II and Vietnam. Most of my father’s siblings and their children have volunteered in various ways with some AFSC program or another, often packing donated clothing in the basement of Friends Center in Philadelphia. I spent ten years working in the IT and Communications departments in Philadelphia.
Alice Forsythe in Hamburg in 1922.A Hurford Crosman’s passport picture from the AFSC Archives
My great grandparents there was little formal training or planning. They both took on roles I can barely imagine doing now, let alone doing them at 22 in countries destroyed by war. Later in his life my great grandfather described part of his work after the armistice:
I was sent with an English boy to Bethlainville, near Verdun, none of the now returned owners knew who we were or why we were there. “To plow our land? Oh no! Americans come to take our land away from us?” My two high school years of French were put to a real test. We are here for Love. We are not the Americans you have met with during the war. We want no pay. But one young girl who had lost both her father and brothers, completely alone, said she would take a chance. “Oh but you’ll be raped said the others” O.K. she will have a gamble. So Jacoby plowed from day break until noon and then I plowed from noon until I couldn’t see at dark. Land all plowed, now we will see what these young men really want. Nothing? Nothing but love. Not the kind she expected. From then on everybody wanted their land plowed. Later on another crew of Americans came with seeds, tools, clothing, etc. So the people of Bethlainville were restored to almost normal living.
Relief work has grown a bit more formal in the last century.
My great grandfather helped this program in Ohio and Philadelphia.
He later returned to AFSC to support the self-help housing program, first in Ohio, and then leading the program in north Philadelphia which renovated a building to create a co-op that still functions today; my cousin, his wife, and daughter are members of the co-op.
My own work at AFSC was much less exciting: I sat in relatively comfortable offices and made sure the technology needed to support the programs worked. I supported mostly communications, and fundraising, and my program involvement tended to be limited to supporting their public facing functions. I was in entirely administrative roles: I was overhead.
Friends for Peace was a fun project, and successful in many ways, but creating a web site for sharing peace images and raising money isn’t the core work of the organization.
Now I easily see what I couldn’t always see then: the value I contributed over 10 years. Too often we denigrate administrative functions at nonprofits as wasteful distractions from their true mission. But the truth is that well done administration is critical to the success of any good organization. They need money to pay the staff, they need web sites to inform people about their work, they advocate for systemic change, they post pictures of their own pets to grab your attention so you will help their work.
Now I’m struggling to find ways to help as the world seems to spin out of control and the US government does things even worse than we did while I was at AFSC (the US went to war twice, admitted torturing people, and openly spied on citizens, so this is a fairly high bar to cross).
I’m amazed I was able to get much done for peace or anything else in that work space.
While I’ve been pleased, and frankly surprised, at how effective the current protests appear to be, I believe over the next four years the resistance the administration’s fermentation of hatred and distrust will have to be a community by community movement. The lack of trust between communities, and the lack of political power make sustained broad-based movements hard to imagine. There are communities under new attack, and others that have been under assault for decades now starting to find their voices: many are voices of pain and anger. Even as we see mass protests we also see infighting within them and outside resistance from communities with shared interests.
I’ve written in the past about my sister-in-law’s students in Maryland. My wife and I posted similar messages to all our personal and social media networks, and hundreds of postcards and letters have poured in from all corners. The teachers read them to the kids, and sent them home so their families also know there are Americans who welcome them. Some of those letters came from other immigrant children, and her students are now writing back to share their warmth and stickers, with the other children. It doesn’t fix everything, but provides some of what that community needs: love, the kind my great grandparents carried to post-war France and Germany.
There need to be people in the world who are willing to go into the most dangerous places, but we can’t all be those people. We also need people working actively in their community to help spread love, respect, and basic dignity.
I’m still struggling to find ways to have a positive, and effective impact, but here are things I’m trying:
Making hats for a newly arrived Iraqi family I learned about from a woman at church this morning.
Calling and writing to my elected officials to thank them for the things I think they are doing right and asking them to change what I think they are doing wrong.
Writing and speaking openly about my concerns.
Attending rallies when I can, and supporting those who do when I cannot.
Donating to organizations taking the kinds of action we want to see in the world including Planned Parenthood and likely others (we’re still working on who all that will be).
Please share with me (and others) what you’re doing and what else you think can be done.
I believe that to work for positive change we all need to work in and with marginalized communities and help find positive solutions for their problems – even those expressing their frustration through hate toward others.
