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Zynga Awardville

Joining Zynga in 2009 was, well, interesting. I originally came from NetApp which operated at time scales that now seem geological if not cosmological. NetApp did things in the traditional way. Everything was so unbelievably different at Zynga.

One of most bizarre things, to my untrained eye, was our all hands. Basically we did quarterly reviews, and we had these awards that were not cash. I mean, seriously, who wants an award that isn’t cash?

And it wasn’t like we did awards in secret and hidden from view but Mark would call you on stage and personally hand you this statue.

It was, so, not NetApp.

And so in this paper http://www.forbes.com/sites/georgeanders/2013/03/29/can-your-boss-do-this-zynga-delights-in-madcap-bonus-plan/

Colleen shares what she told me when I complained.

All the same, McCreary says she and Pincus think Zynga is on the right track with awards that involve highly public recognition, combined with personalized gifts that have meaningful economic value. Cash alone tends to have a more fleeting impact, McCreary says. If there’s no official discussion of who gets awards, employees don’t get as clear a signal about what conduct and performance wins rewards.  By contrast, Zynga’s winners not only get trophies and applause from their peers — they also are lauded on an internal webpage called … what else? … AwardsVille.

And when she made that pitch back in the day, I didn’t believe her.

Except after my trip to Hawaii, courtesy of an Atlas award.

I actually remember that award more than any other bit of recognition, financial or otherwise, at Zynga.

So there is method to our madness.

Did software kill all the lawyers?

 

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Shakespeare’s Dick in Henry VI says: the first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers. I wonder what he would say about what’s going on in the legal profession.

One of my recent convictions is that computing systems will transform almost all occupations based on the ability to process, digest, and recall information.

If your job is to read a lot, understand what you read and then offer a summary, then your long-term employment prospects are uncertain.

suits

One of my favorite TV shows is “Suits”.  Mike Ross, one of the two main characters has the magical gift of perfect memory. In other words, he is a perfect computer.

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But in a few years,  wearable computing will emerge,  high bandwidth wireless networking will become available, practically infinite storage is already here and with ongoing improvements in search, we will all be like Mike. His unique gift will be, well, not so unique.

I originally thought medicine would be affected first. Medicine is very poorly managed. Most people are healthy. A trained practitioner can treat most people. The medical system should have a large number of cheaper employees filtering out healthy people who need experts to expensive doctors But instead we have very expensive professionals doing very menial work.

Of course, as I have learned in the last decade, the American Medical Association (AMA) is a powerful guild. The AMA and fear makes it very difficult to change the medical profession.

But I should have looked at the legal profession. What’s interesting to see is that lawyers, although essential, are not necessary. In other words, you are not required to use a lawyer to interact with the law. You are about 1000x better off if you can use one, but you are not required to.

In this article:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/08/education/law-schools-look-to-medical-education-model.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

The plan is one of a dozen efforts across the country to address two acute — and seemingly contradictory — problems: heavily indebted law graduates with no clients and a vast number of Americans unable to afford a lawyer.

This paradox, fed by the growth of Internet-based legal research and services, is at the heart of a crisis looming over the legal profession after decades of relentless growth and accumulated wealth. It is evident in the sharp drop in law school applications and the increasing numbers of Americans showing up in court without a lawyer.

“It’s a perfect storm,” said Stacy Caplow, a professor at Brooklyn Law School who focuses on clinical education. “The longstanding concerns over access to justice for most Americans and a lack of skills among law graduates are now combined with the problems faced by all law schools. It’s creating conditions for change.”

we see a disruption in real-time. Cheaper, good enough, alternatives are creating pricing pressure on lawyers. Essentially people are choosing to go it alone using software.

What is accelerating this process is, in the short-term is, the great recession. People have legal issues and have less money so they look to low-cost alternatives. The long-term prognosis is also grim. The increasingly poorer middle class will continue to look for cheaper solutions over the long haul. This will continue to push down prices.

I wonder if we are seeing the same process I talked about in medicine happening in law. Many matters being handled cheaply by computers and software, and only the more complex matters requiring human lawyers.

In this world we may have fewer and fewer higher priced lawyers handling a smaller set of more complex cases. Which means that over the next 20 years, the legal profession will look very different from what it does today.

The new Yahoo home page

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Interesting new redesign of the web page. Very clean, very elegant, Very Facebook – well until I get the new FB news feed.

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I wonder what she is trying to accomplish The new page devalues Yahoo properties but put’s aggregated Yahoo information much more clearly in full focus.

Regardless.

Kudos for moving the Yahoo home page into this decade. The old style was old, and dated.

How useful are algorithm questions in an interview?

I wrote this answer on quora.com.
Hiring a programmer is an incredibly risky process. In less than 5 hours you are supposed to distill the experience, aptitude and team fit of an individual. Even better you’re supposed to project forward how that experience will jive with the uncertain future of the company.

The three most important abilities in a software engineer are

1) An ability to master multiple technologies
2) An ability to communicate effectively on complex topics
3) An ability to work on a team, and by implication do what is necessary for the team to succeed.

An interview that focuses exclusively on algorithms reveals a narrow slice on (1) and a very narrow slice on (2) and it tells you nothing about (3).

But how useful is a strong mastery of algorithms? The short answer is it depends.

For most jobs for most people at most companies…

If we’re talking about the basics, it’s very useful … except that most data structures these days are a hash-map. Knowing other data structures is useful in certain situations but most of the time it’s a little bit of arcana…

If we’re talking about more advanced data structures? Probably not at all. In practice most software systems have very simple algorithms.

For pushing the boundaries of what is possible… And those are rare jobs or rare moments within rare jobs…

It’s actually very useful to have a good and deep understanding of algorithms that apply to your problem space. It’s really useful to be able to read papers and results and understand how they apply to your problem domain. But no one ever asks those in an interview becaue of the absurdity of asking that question…

And there are classes of jobs where it turns out that understanding algorithms is the job. These are not very common jobs. But they exist. However, they are certainly not the average job at the average high-tech company.

In fact what is more useful and rarely asked in interviews is how do you approach learning a new system? Questions about how you learn about software. Probing questions about the depth of your understanding of the systems you understood and how well you understood it…

And then too little time is spent on leadership and how people worked with other people and how they dealt with conflict… And how folks deal with ambiguity etc…

It’s my belief that the fascination with algorithms is a residual side effect of the fact that too many people went to schools where math competitions and computer competitions were ways in which people measured ability.

In practice, it turns out that being good at math olympiads is not well correlated with being a great mathematician… Which makes me think that being great at algorithms is good but not sufficient to be great at your job in software.

At Zynga, where I work when I write this answer, we try and cover all three areas. We have people probe CS fundamentals, design, architecture, and cultural fit.  Having five people ask five different brain teasers is not considered the right way to interview a candidate.

Greek Crisis

 
 
There are macro reasons, which are simple and easy: too much corruption etc.

But that doesn’t explain why exactly the Greek economy chose to implode in 2008.

The short answer is the following:

The Greek Economy starting approximately in 1984 started a massive expansion of the amount of money the government spent within the economy. This expansion continued throughout the next 20 years.

The problem with the expansion is that it was not fueled by taxes but through debt.

There were two sources of debt income. The first was the EU which gave the Greek economy a lot of money to improve the country. The second was inflation. What most non-Greeks and most Greeks under the age of 30 don’t remember, is that in the period around 1981->1992 we experienced rapid devaluation of our currency and our savings. In fact sometime in the 1988->1992 period — I can’t remember the exact timing inflation was on a hyper-inflationary trajectory … Stores were offering discounts if you paid in cash now, and prices were changing very rapidly.

Before monetary union access to EU debt was harder than it became after the union.

So up until EU monetary union the situation was unstable and heading to a fall but the rate of accumulation of debt was low.

However, the evil cocktail was brewed and drunk. The cocktail was the following: many Greeks derived some income from the state. This was either indirect – working for a firm that had contracts or directly for the state. The only way to increase income was to get the state to give you more. The only way the state could get more was to borrow. In the past when the amount giving out exceeded the amount coming we would have inflation.

Then monetary union happened and all of a sudden the government could borrow at will at low rates, and give out more money and not pay for it in terms of inflation. And so the government did.

This was a classic ponzi scheme. So the question is: how the hell did the government get the money?

There were three approaches.

1. The first was direct loans, which were not that interesting and limited in scope. Government to government lending is never fun or easy.

2.The second was forcing pension funds under government control to only buy Greek bonds. In fact much of the pension crisis in Greece can be traced to that fact when you couple it with the hair-cut that was imposed on the bonds.

3. The third was far more venal and poorly understood. Basically the Greek government installed it’s own leaders in the public banks and told them to get German loans at ridiculous rates to buy Greek debt. It was a perfect scam: the Germans loaned to Greek banks and the Banks loaned to Greek Government, the Greek Government then spent the money and the German tax payer was going to bail everyone out.

The reason this third scheme was so brilliant is that it made the Greek banks look stable: after all they were borrowing from Germans to lend to the Greek government. And the Greek government looked stable because it was growing — although the growth was fueled by debt.

So what happened? In 2008 as we all know the debt fueled intoxication of the growth period between ~1980 and 2008 came to a crashing end. It came to an end because of the mortgage backed security crisis that put a lot of pressure on the German banks which all of a sudden were unwilling or unable to lend to the Greek government. With the sudden cut-off of the debt fueled air-supply the Greek government started to see it’s growth slow and all of a sudden the debt to GDP ratio went from scary to terrifying to nightmare on elm street scary.

With the Greek government looking insolvent, the Greek banks became insolvent, and then the money stopped flowing in Greece. And if you remember the pension note I made earlier, because the Greek government was on the hook for those liabilities as well it just got worse and worse and worse.

The current set of solutions are not working because most governments are unable to fathom that the real, not-debt-fueled economy, is much smaller.

Let me explain.

In the 1980’s Greece was a poor country. If you weren’t working in some industry that directly extracted money from foreigners or sold to foreigners or dealt with with foreign industry you lived poorly. As the government shared more debt money with people through higher salaries etc, the broader economy took off. As a classic example in the 1980’s Greeks did not travel around Greece because they were broke. In the 1990’s Greek tourism was dominated by Greeks because they had money. That growth in income was fueled in large part by the debt taken on by the Greek government.

So what’s going on now is that people whose business are operating with the rules of the 1980’s are doing fine. If you’re a boutique hotel in Santorin where 90% of your clients are foreigners you’re doing fine. If you’re a hotel in Anafi dependent on Greeks you’re going broke.

Until everyone admits that the country is poorer than the loans assumed the country will continue to free fall. At some point in time either the Greeks will say enough or the debtors will take action. I hope it’s the latter. The former may create other bigger problems for Greece.

Props to Pincus and Zynga

Props to Mark Pincus and Zynga.

At our all hands Zynga once again announced that they will donate up to 1000$ for each dollar employees donate to charities.

It’s not a ton of money. But it reflects the commitment the company has to not just making money, but being a good neighbor. Combine that with the thousands of hours we invested in “community week”, it makes me happy to work at a company that hasn’t forgotten that we have stakeholders beyond our shareholders.

Enjoying software

Originally said on quora:

Everyone’s answer is different.

At the core, software allows me to understand the world I live in.

Why?
(1)  software is the closest I can get to mathematical modelling of the real world.
(2)  software lets me test my models very fast.

To be precise, software exists to interact with the real world that is messy and confused and broken. And to write software you have to create these simplifications and these abstractions. And while you create them you begin to acquire real insight about how the world actually works.

Unlike mathematics or physics or other forms of science, what I love about software is that you can test out your simplifications immediately. There is no intellectual argument or complex experiment that needs to be executed. The program runs, and the data starts to flow.

Because software allows for iteration, understanding can come quickly.

 

I’m going on Strike

I’ve been a hockey fan for almost 28 years. My emotional connection to hockey began in 1983 when Steve Penny out-of-no-where stoned the big bad bruins, and then lead Montreal to two straight victories over the New York Islanders in Long Island. 

When my family moved to Athens Greece, I still followed the Habs religiously. And to be clear, this meant driving to a kiosk that happened to have an overpriced copy of the international herald tribune so I could get 2 lines in an article saying what happened in a game. 

Returning to the US in 1992, thanks to things like Gopher it became possible to read the AP articles about hockey games. I remember waking up at 7am, and running to the CS department to check out the gopher scores. We didn’t have broadband or wireless in our dorms.

In 1998 the internet finally let me listen to games, again. And my love affair was rekindled.

Except that was the dead-puck era. And watching hockey was painful. 

In 2008, my wife took me to a game for my birthday. And ever since, I’ve been hooked to watching the game live. Growing up in Montreal, you couldn’t get season tickets, so I never imagined I would have season tickets to a REAL hockey team. That was like the coolest thing ever.

And now I have a son who CAN ACTUALLY UNDERSTAND THE GAME, and I was looking forward to taking him to the NHL, and the NHL has decided they can’t figure out how to split billions. So instead, he’s watching baseball. Hell, I was about to spend 1000$ (the balance of  the first quarter of the season) to go watch a baseball game, A BASEBALL GAME! My sone is going to turn into a baseball fan. A BASEBALL FAN!

The players have a right to strike, and the owners have a right to make money, but HOCKEY isn’t just a sport, it’s part of the fabric of our communities. There are friends who I meet on a regular basis at the rink, that I no longer meet.

And God Forbid the owners and the players consider the damage they are doing to their communities. 

In this era of profit maximization at all costs, I spit on the NHL players union, and I spit on the owners, you screwed over my winter. And you don’t care. 

So I’m going on strike. Oh I’ll watch your games, and I’ll buy your tickets but as for hockey related income, I am not buying a single piece of NHL merchandise (or whatever you’re calling hockey-related-income) for at least one year after the end of the strike 

Damn you for ruining the my winter. Damn you. 

I found the high.

I’ve been running off and on for almost 28 years.  And in all of that time I have been searching for that runner’s high.

I’m overweight, and have been my whole life. I’ve got flat feet. My feet pronate when they move. There is no grace to my body when it runs. Heck there is very little grace to my body when it moves. People like me run because they have to, not because of some joy they feel when moving…

I started running in elementary school. My dad, when I was a kid, was really into jogging and dragged me along for his runs. Then my parents desperate to see me exercise motivated me in any which way they could to go running.

I’ve run in the snow. I’ve run in the sun. I’ve run uphill and I’ve run downhill. I’ve never run competitively. I’ve run a 7 minute mile, I’ve even run 3×7 minute miles, and then promptly injured myself and haven’t run a 7 mile since.

I’ve run at altitude in Vail, and then at sea-level in sunnyvale and finally understood the power of blood doping and EPO.

But no matter where I’ve run I’ve never found that runner’s high. Runner’s high was like a Republican in the south bay, or a satiated labrador, something people talked about but never actually experienced.

And still I ran. I ran and ran. I ran to lose weight, I ran to keep weight off, I ran so I could eat. I ran. And I ran. And I ran.

The last 6 months I’ve been training for a marathon and I’ve run over 400 miles. And still there was no runner high. When folks asked me about running I said: Running has no high. It’s a miserable boring form of exercise. It’s painful, and pointless just efficient for health and weight management. You stick one foot in front of the other, and your body moves to the rhythm of the plodding. There is no magic, There is no beauty. There is no mystical wonderful moment. It’s just pure pain. Anyone who tells you otherwise is lying.

I was the atheist of running. In tune with the reality of running I had rejected the mysticism as nonsense. Drivel spewed by the high priests who used their mystical nonsense to get more people into their cult. There is no high, just pain, and in accepting that reality we are liberated!

But today, I found that runner’s high. That moment of pure bliss where you are moving and you don’t even feel like your doing anything, your body just magically glides forward and it all just fits together like a magical ride.

It took me 400+ miles of training to finally find the runner’s high. And it’s as wonderful as everyone said it would be.

Or maybe it’s the Tapering Crazies…