So, we have a new phenomenon thanks to Return to Office: “Coffeebadging”
As the wiki article indicates:
(Coffeebadging) is the practice of employees clocking in for a brief period at the office, typically long enough to grab a coffee, before departing to work from elsewhere. This is done to fulfill office attendance requirements by hybrid and remote workers which arose following the return to in-person work following the COVID-19 pandemic.
I got my first taste of office life when I worked a Summer in the basement of the Breathitt County Courthouse as a gopher/assistant for my paternal Aunt Lena. Her office, like that of my maternal Aunt Lenora, handled paying people. That cigarette-smoke infested basement was so bad that one weekend I had nicotine withdrawl, and I wasn’t a smoker. But, everyone was congenial enough, a group of women who got along on a molecular level. They covered for each other, looked out for people in trouble, and generally had a “work to live” attitude.
So this is going to be odd coming from a guy working at a place with a Leadership Principle saying “Speed matters in business”
If I’m doing my job right, I consider myself to be a “slow” developer.
I’ve watched the recent explosion across my social feeds about AI SUPERCHARGED DEVELOPMENT ENVIRONMENTS! like Copilot, Cursor, Windsurf, Claude, and Warp Terminal. They all seem neat, and this seems like a Nova (if not a Supernova) of dev tooling we haven’t seen since Netbeans/Eclipse/IntelliJ battled it out 15 years ago to see who could make IT departments upgrade from 512 MB developer machiens fastest.
The world went to hell on 13 March 2020.
We’d been watching a slow-motion tidal wave from China come our way since January. We’d hoped it’d stop like SARS in mainland China, and we’d get to say “Whew! Close one.” Nope.
We saw it bloom in Europe, but hey–we’re still an ocean away from this thing, right? No.
On March 13, I got the email saying “Work from Home until further notice.” Then a few weeks later, it became “We’ll evaluate but stay home until May 1st at least.”
And so it begins
As I write this, it’s 5pm on St. Patrick’s Day. I’m not wearing green. I’m sitting at home in our spare bedroom, with a 24" monitor ahead of me, and Amazon Basics® Keyboard instead of my beloved CODE Keyboard, and the world aflame.
I agree with this tweet:
Basically, the news since last week has been Through-the-Looking-Glass bad. A Quick rundown for posterity:
Starting mid February, the stock market is down a third from its highs. February 19th, the Dow closed at 29,386. Today, it closed 21,237. Earlier today, it was under 20,000, briefly. Trillions of dollars of market value have been erased in six weeks. Yeterday in particular, the Dow lost 12% of its value, or about 3000 points. In one day.
Hackathon (n)
1. a design sprint-like event in which computer programmers and others involved in software development, including graphic designers, interface designers, project managers, and others, often including domain experts, collaborate intensively on software projects. The goal of a hackathon is to create usable software or hardware with the goal of creating a functioning product by the end of the event.
I posit Hackathons are Crap.
They are useless distractions from Actual Work® that have none of the intended outcomes for anyone involved.
Disclaimer: There’s probably a term for this, but I’ve this pattern in teams and I’d like to discuss it.
You have a high functioning team of 6-10 individuals. Team culture is great. Everyone is pulling in the same direction, and lots is getting done. Yet, in under 4 months half the team will be gone and the rest will be considering it. As a manager, you’ll realize you can’t deliver anything and it all seemed to crumble overnight. What happened?
I’m a 40 year old working software engineer.
I’m not a program manager, project manager, team lead, architect, business analyst, sytems analyst, or whatever other term means “Doesn’t code anymore.”
I make my living by telling machines what to do so the company I work for can make money (alot of it) and pay me money (a little of it, but an obscene amount still).
As I sit here, I’m 2 days away from ending a three year stint with one team, and picking up with another within the same company. The reasons aren’t complicated, but it’s impolitic to go into them. Suffice it to say, I’ve been looking around for about 6 months internally and it took about a month to get through the transition. Monday is ‘Go’ day.
Martin Lomasney, an old West End political boss from Boston, is best remembered for his warning to young politicians everywhere — “Never write if you can speak; never speak if you can nod; never nod if you can wink”.
So, a colleague brought in an espresso machine, a burr grinder, and some beans.
So, now I know how to make espresso.
Brilliant Idea: I need to setup an espresso bar beside a cardiologist’s office and take 10% of their profits. My EYEBALLS ARE VIBRATING.
I say this after 19 years making software: There’s always a date. Get over it.
I’ve lived through the Agile Revolution, and various schemes to sell consulting named: Spiral, Rational Unified Process, eXtreme Programming, Scrum, Kanban, and the Scaled Agile Framework.
Through it all, there’s always some sort of date. Words like:
Honestly, if they’re not there, you should probably be worried. Projects of significance require planning and planning requires dates. If you haven’t seen a date in quite sometime, you might want to join the rest of us getting paid oodles of money to ship features to customers who’ll pay us.
Herein, I shall commit heresy.
I’m going to suggest that “Software Strategy” is useless: Enabling success involves the very large, and the very small, leaving “Strategy” in the useless middle.
Who am I to say this? I’ve been in software for 18 years, and I’ve been in a leadership role for the last 8. I’ve spent innumerable hours in “Strategy” meetings. I’ve had just about enough of that and I’d like to suggest a better way.
I’ll never forget taking Tyler on a tour of our new offices in Building 001 at Lexmark HQ.
Back in the day, 001 had been a manufacturing line that made the iconic IBM Selectric Typewriter and the Model M buckling-spring mechanical keyboard. People still like those things today. Suffice it to say, it was a quarter-mile long building with a floor flat as a pancake, and roughly 35 yards wide.
For a good decade after I hired-on, most of that building sat empty, home to a disused loading dock and stacks of IBM standard issue desks and chairs. In 2012, our control-freak CFO decided we needed to do some “space consolidation” so he spent millions of dollars outfitting that area as a massive cubicle farm and moved us from our private offices and labs into that farm.
Just now, I had a lovely conversation with a gentleman who’d come to Amazon in 2005. He was working for another (very large) tech firm at the time and he saw that Amazon had the same revenue as CorpX but had 1/3rd the number of employees.
He made it through the interview process and they said, “Very glad to have you; now we just need to figure out what you’re going to do.”
I’ve been reflecting lately. Huge life changes will do that to you. You know, things like: Quitting your job of 17 years without another one handy, moving to a state you’ve only driven through once, working at one of the big 4 tech firms, and being fired as a Dad by my own son.
So, when do you decide to make a change?
Looking back on it, there were several discrete moments where I was ‘out’.
Double entendre….on darn, already off to a poor start.
So, as 11 month ago, I took the leap, signed the papers, and volunteered to leave my former employer. This came with some stipulations. For one year, I may not:
That’s right. In the course of one afternoon, I went from a a fully-employed Software Architect at a (nominally) Fortune 500 company to 4 weeks from out-the-door on the job market.
Once upon a time, my employer decided I was enough of a naive workaholic to put me on a list. This list contained other people who were naive workaholics. They decided they should herd us together and teach us to be more effective, slightly less naive workaholics.
The guy who taught the class had many nuggets of wisdom, but this one stuck with me. He drew this simple diagram on a pad of paper at the front of the class.
It’s 1:38 pm. But for a snowstorm on Thursday, this would be my 7th straight day at work.
I’m doing things that people variously term “unwise,” “strange,” or “nearly impossible.”
I’ve nearly gotten them to work, but not yet. That’s why I’m here.
“Well, sir, you certainly didn’t have afternoons like *this*, when you were doing the Architect Gig.”
Gotta love that inner critic. There’s always something.
My response: Indeed, but I didn’t *ever* have weeks like last week where we found and solved problems in realtime with a team of engineers, either. It was lonely, and devoid of the kind of dopamine-enhanced highs I got.
Last week was hard. Every day except for Wednesday, I was here ’til late. On two nights, mine was the last car out of the parking log. Snowpocalypse 2015 put us behind, and a Linux/PAM story that won’t die put us even farther behind.
Yes, I’m trying to create those little office placards in my spare time. I’m sure someone, somewhere has said this better, but it does seem to be true.
I was thinking about some senior people, and what seems to differentiate the goods from the greats is that capability of seeing the heart of an issue and keeping perspective.
