Nerdlife

Occasionally, I will go back and reread some of Paul Graham’s essays, of which I am a huge fan. Recently I re-stumbled upon Why Smart People Have Bad Ideas. I had somehow missed his recommendation to read How to Win Friends and Influence People, so I picked up a copy (the 11th printing, from 1937, as per his recommendation). What a worthwhile read. The book describes several things that will make you say “now why didn’t I think of that?” I tend to have a good temper (at least most of the time), and I feel that the points made in this book will allow me to take advantage of that to help advance my relations with others.

That being said, I would like to add to what Jessica Mah, who I have had the pleasure of meeting while in Silicon Valley, said about geeks, startups, and social skills. I feel that the social skills Jessica is (or was) looking for in a cofounder are by far not teachable by a mere book. I have met many of the types of people Jessica refers too (I go to Carnegie Mellon, which has more that its fair share of smart people, both with and without social skills), and have found that they generally fall into the following categories:

• Don’t Realize - These people simply undervalue the importance of social skills to their lives. They feel that the pursuit of knowledge is sufficient to make them successful entrepreneurs. For them, a book on human relations will at most allow them to realize the importance of human relations, it will not teach it to them.
• Don’t Know - These people realize that social skills are important, but for one reason or another (too shy, don’t know where to start, etc) aren’t developing them. The best a human relations book can do for them is help them build the confidence to start being more social.
• Don’t Care - These people are the real tough case, and I’ve been fortunate enough to only have met a few. These people consider themselves so high above the rest of society because they think they are better at something than everyone else (the most common is intelligence, but I’ve found “Don’t Care” people who are so because they feel they are more socially capable than others…paradoxical, I know). They see no need to be more social to people because they’re better than them anyway. These people are difficult to work with, and I have yet to be able to interact with them calmly (like I said, a good temper most of the time), so I will not give my opinion on them.

Note that most these people are more than capable of being successful, but problems arise when they try to go into business with these beliefs. Ignoring or undervaluing human relations is a huge problem, since by definition the field of business and the art of interacting with others go hand-in-hand.

The key here is that the basic concepts of human relations…those the allow for the concepts taught in human relations books to be applied, such as sincerity and kindness, cannot be taught. The attitudes and body language that convey these feelings to other people must be learned by doing.

So, to all the geeks out there, get the hell out of your rooms. If you’re in Silicon Valley, go to Super Happy Dev House and Lunch 2.0. If you’re at college, join a club, whether it be juggling, robotics, or debate, at least you’ll be meeting people. Even if you’re shy, merely watching people interact constructively will do a world of good.

Update - Apparently Jessica didn’t mean to imply that social skills can be taught by books…changed my wording to reflect this.

books, socializing, startups

I saw a neat feature about a month ago on a blog (I forget where exactly), a setting in Firefox called browser.search.openintab that would make all searches in that little search box open in a new tab. Since I normally do that, I figured why not save me a key press (I normally press ctrl+T, tab, then search, now I can just press F6, tab, then search). Well, a month later, it’s still not working out for me. I find myself still opening a new tab before searching, which in turn opens another new tab. Why is it? Why can’t I get used to this tiny little change to my internet browsing habits?

The answer’s because I’m used to what I’m used to, as we all are. I’ve been doing the same key combination for years, and I’m accustomed to it. This leads to an interesting point about software design: people do not want to change what they do, you must modify your software to make them happy. It’s been said by many people time and time again that if you say something to the effect of “my software’s fine, the user’s just stupid” then you will repeatedly fail at making popular software. If your target audience is Yankee fans, you don’t make a website with Mets colors. Similarly, if your target audience is average users, you don’t make your site so that only CS majors can use it.

So please, next time you design something for the average joe, and your mom calls and says “I have no idea how to use this,” instead of telling her she just doesn’t understand it, instead sit down and figure out why it’s confusing and, more importantly, how to fix it. That’s what field studies are for, and they do come in handy.

design, mindsets, startups

Today’s post is brought to you by the letter F, for failing. No, not because I am a failure or have failed at anything significant lately, but I did notice a pattern in failure worth sharing.

Everyone has failed and will fail at countless things in their life, no matter who they are (an obvious but often overlooked point). We will all do things we regret, be turned down for jobs, and have failed relationships (with the possible exception of one of my friends, who is a special case in and of herself…more on that in a future post). The entrepreneurial types will have failed startups, rejected business plans, and unattainable capital needs. You’d think with all this practice at failing, people would learn how to do it better. Still, many people are very bad failures, making an already sub-optimal situation even worse.

I’m openly guilty of it myself. Take my poker playing: when I’m playing well, I’m playing really well. Beyond just getting good cards, if I’m up I have the patience and poker face I would love to have all the time. But when I’m down, when I’m failing, I overcompensate. I act on emotions, call stupid hands, etc. I not only fail, I fail miserably.

On the other hand, in terms of relationships I fail quite well. I can read people well enough to see when things are going downhill. I can decide the best course of action and enact it as well as someone in such a situation could hope to. When I fail at relationships, I fail gracefully.

Which brings me to my point. Below I have laid out 5 tips for failing gracefully that I would recommend anyone, myself included, learn to practice:

1. Take a step back - If you see things going downhill, do not simply push in the other direction. Analyze what is going on and figure out a solution rather than a quick fix. For example, if you’re losing customers, don’t just spend more on marketing, see where and why the customers are going. Maybe a competitor just released a new feature that kicks your ass. Maybe your servers are overloaded and giving slow responses. There are a million causes for anything and it’s much easier and more effective to stop a cause then implement a fix. This is the difference between a solution and a fix, solutions stop causes, fixes add a counter-cause.
2. Get Input - At any given point in time regarding any given topic, there are most likely several million people who know more than you about it. Even with something you specialize in, there’s still probably a few hundred, if not thousand, who are better than you at it. And even if you are the best (and remember, only one person is the best, meaning it’s probably not you), someone will still know something you don’t about that subject. So swallow your pride and ask for some help. You’d be amazed at how helpful people are when you approach them as a student approaches a teacher. Pride only gets in the way of common sense.
3. Know When to Call it Quits - also know as “not throwing good money after bad”. If you see all the signs, if you know that things are not going to get better, why spend an obscene amount of time fighting a losing battle. If you are fighting every day with your significant other and he/she refuses to talk things out, it’s time to move on. If you’ve burned through $2 million in venture capitol and nobody even knows your product’s name, nonetheless what it does, you’re out of luck. That’s not to say you shouldn’t give it your all: by all means do more than that. You should try to talk things out, you should try to get more funding, but learn the point at which the chances of success are so astronomically thin that you may as well throw your last dollars into the lotto, and bail out before that point.
4. Learn Something - I know you’ve heard it dozens of time, but it bears repeating: if you do fail, learn something. Look back, determine where your main points of failure were, and vow never to repeat them. That way, given enough failures, your chance of success increase significantly.
5. Make Sure You Gave It Your All - If you’re not giving 100%, what’s the point in even trying? You want to be able to look back and say that you poured your heart and soul into what you did, that there was not a single thing you could have done to allow you to succeed, because if you didn’t, then all you’d be left with is regret.

Here are several real-life examples I’ve seen of what people do that make them miserable failures rather than graceful failures:

• Throwing Good Money After Bad - Always remember, you have to continue to eat (and feed a family, if applicable). Don’t risk your or your family’s well being for the sake of a dream (i.e. investing your entire retirement fund into a business that is falling apart).
• Hiding the Truth - If you know things are falling apart, don’t hide it from others. They will eventually figure it out and resent you for hiding it, whereas they would have respected you more had you had the courage to be upfront about it (i.e. a relationship where one person is not happy and doesn’t tell the other person)
• Losing Hope - My Mom always says “Hope for the best, and expect the worst”. This is much better than George Will’s stance that “The nice part about being a pessimist is that you are constantly either proven right or pleasantly surprised.” The problem with this view is that you will never take chances. Being a pessimist is fine for the here and now, but it makes for a very bleak view of the future. Instead, you should see the glimmer of hope, the chance of success, but recognize how slim it is, and appreciate Murphy’s law and all the potential for failure that goes with it (no real i.e. for this one, I just see too much hopeless pessimism in the world).

And there is one more thing worth mentioning: When Things Look Bad, Stop For a Moment and Reflect. Look back on how far you’ve come, and compare it to how far you have left to go. It may just help put things in perspective.

advice, business, failing, startups

IP Carrier: 25 Startup Commandments: Great Stuff

Has some funny stuff and seems to hits the mark pretty well. There is something that I feel is worth elaborating on:

“Your software sucks. So what. Everyone elses does also, and re-architecting is the kiss of death for a startup.”

This is a hard transition to make for students because the structuring of programming projects in school is so linear: you have a strict set of requirements that do not change from the beginning, and they must be implemented in the best way possible.

Real life is not like that. In real life, you start out with an idea and wind up with something completely different. Your product spec will change more times than you can imagine, and you will have to constantly adapt to the demands and requirements of users, partners, employees, VCs, and so on. Learning this early and accepting it is very valuable, because when someone says “we need to change this core component” you will be ok saying “do it however you can” as opposed to “well, I guess we better write up a new DB spec, rebuild our architecture, and create a migration plan to our new setup”. It is true that “re-architecting is the kiss of death for a startup”, especially for web based startups, where one day can mean the difference between being first to market and being out of business. You also need to be able to work with and modify existing code better than writing new code, because you only write new code for a project once, and the rest of your time working on it is spent changing code. This is far more difficult than writing new code, especially if you didn’t write the code you are modifying.

If I had complete liberty to create a truly useful course for a university, it would be a software engineer simulator. I would give students a program that was moderately well written, and every few days throw a new curve ball at them. The DB they’ve never had to touch will crash, one of their partners who they have integrated into the site will go out of business, they will have to upgrade all of their deprecated code to comply with some new standard, they will be asked by a major client to find a way to generate 2,000,000 images of charts in under two hours, etc, etc. I would spare them has-to-be-done-now deadlines and blackberries that ring at 3am, but it would still be one hell of a course. And the ones who finish it and say “well that was fun”, those are the ones truly ready for the world of software development, whether or not in the form of a startup. The rest will have to sit down with a bunch of lawyers, who will then inform them, in extremely monotonous voices, of every little thing they’ve done in the last few months that could result in a massive lawsuit.

Note: Every one of these stories is based off of something that happened in my department in the last month, many of which landed on my plate. I’ve come to expect it, and it sure was fun.

programming, school, startups

While I do believe strongly in the correlation made in my last post, I feel that Jared’s response was slightly off the mark. I really don’t mean to go back and forth on this one, so this will be my last post directly relating to the topic of startup/dating analogies, but I would like to throw in a more serious $0.02.

• The article Jared used is a sales pitch and, at least partially, inaccurate. The average online dating demographic is a shy nerd who, statistically, is much more introverted. He would therefore be a “Nice Guy” who does many of the things mentioned in this article. This article caters towards this demographic for the sake of garnering interest, newsletter signups, and god-knows-what-else. Many of these points are valid, but The complete opposite is also often valid. For #1, being a complete dick will not get you women (at least it won’t get you steady relationships). For #3, #4, #5, and #8, being a pansy is never a good idea, but neither is being completely removed, you must show at least some compassion. #6 and #9 basically say “know what to do”, which is some pretty dumb advice. Everything comes in moderation, if you stray too far to either side of the spectrum you’re in trouble.
• While I won’t go into rebutting every analogy, I will say that some of them seem very contrived and easily reversible. Arguing a difficult position is a good skill, but in this case it’s a little forced.
• I have not dated 20 women in my life (then again, I am young). I have many female friends, and women see me as “just a friend” more often than not, but that is more of a choice than anything else. I recognize that my actions lead me to friends, and I accept that because I believe that the strongest relationships are formed by those who start out as friends (I could write volumes about this, but I’ll spare you…for now).
• I don’t think the issue with CS majors in general is that they don’t “take the time away from the monitor to get into dating”, I think it’s an undervaluation of the importance of connections. I know several brilliant people who simply don’t meet people, fall into their mediocre IT job, and work hard with no chance of advancement. I believe that anyone can go from anti-social nobody to a social being (mostly because I have made the jump myself). Many CS majors accept their position because they are happy that way (which is fine, it takes all types), while others simply don’t have the right opportunity or drive.
• Not to contradict myself, but I think we as CS majors are overly stereotyped in our level social activity. While there are more anti-social CS majors per student than in other majors, we are more social then we get credit for. CS majors have a tendency to keep to their kind. They are very passionate about their trade, and as such like to talk about it often. Most people who aren’t CS majors don’t want to hear this day in and day out, so they stick to their own cliques. It only takes a small group of people to be considered social. While this creates a segregation between what CS majors consider socially acceptable and what everyone else accepts, there is most definitely nothing wrong or anti-social about it. This is very similar to fine arts majors, who tend to socialize with other fine arts majors and as such develop their own social norms.

On a more bloggy note, I do enjoy posting about relationships (one of my many failed blogging attempts was called “Perpetual Optimist”, where I would post about my failures with women and lessons learned. Expect more posts in the future along these lines. While I believe that when it comes to things like relationships one must walk their own path, you never know what could spark a moment of deeper understanding.

Disclaimer: Many of my thoughts are based on what I have seen in my limited view of the world. You may have seen something different. It’s my blog, and as such my opinions.

Disclaimer for my disclaimer: On the other hand, please feel free to disagree with me, but please do so constructively. I am a huge fan of friendly debates, and thank Jared for providing me with a good debate, which I haven’t had in a while. If everyone argued constructively we would undoubtedly be much better off as a society.

debate, girlfriends, nerds, relationships, startups