As you’ll see tomorrow morning, I fully support the effort to black out as much of the Web as possible to protest SOPA/PIPA. Protests like this serve two purposes — one is to let Congress know that we are serious about our opposition to this legislation, but the other is to inform people who aren’t aware of these bills that something is going on that will almost certainly affect them down the road. I assume the people who read this site are already aware of SOPA/PIPA, but I bet a lot of Wikipedia users aren’t. If they try to read an article on Wikipedia tomorrow, they will be. I’m going dark on this site for reasons of solidarity if nothing else.
Clay Johnson is going to be hosting an online seminar tomorrow that will teach better activism. SOPA/PIPA have stirred up a lot of activism, but the key is to make sure that the activists are as effective as possible. It’s great that Clay is rising to the occasion to help make sure that’s the case.
Oh, and if you are going to black out your site tomorrow, be sure to follow Google’s advice on how to do so without messing up search engines.
Update: Matt Haughey explains how a DMCA takedown notice affected his site, Metafilter. SOPA/PIPA are designed to enable copyright holders to take sites offline even if their hosting provider is not willing to comply.
Today I was talking to a friend about his job. He said his company had just had a meeting where the management told his team that they were not satisfied with the overall sense of urgency and that the team needs to be getting things done more quickly. Reading between the lines, it was clear that what the manager meant was that the team needed to be putting in more hours.
Working more than forty hours a week is hardly outside the norm in software development, but directly demanding more hours from people is a bad idea for a number of reasons. I won’t get into basic issues of justice and decency and instead focus only on effectiveness. Even if your only goal is to get things done as quickly as possible, demanding that your team work more as a group is still a bad idea.
The first issue is morale. Members of the team will not readily accept “work more hours” as a possible solution to any problem if other solutions that don’t require them to work more hours are apparent. If there are process changes that would make the team more productive, they’ll wonder why those aren’t being made instead. If there are underperforming members of the team, others will wonder why those team members aren’t being specifically urged to do a better job or being replaced.
And, of course, some team members will start asking themselves why they’re working at a place where the management tries to solve problems using the blunt instrument of “work more hours.” In the end, you wind up with an unhappy team that starts losing its strongest contributors to other jobs. If you do plan to go this route, understand that the team will hold you accountable for every second of their time you appear to waste, so you’d better have your ducks in a row.
The second issue is quality. This is an issue I touched on when I talked about the problem with all-nighters. When someone is working and they know they could be doing something else, whether it’s having dinner with the family, going to their kid’s soccer practice, or sleeping on the couch, chances are their focus is going to be on doing whatever it takes to finish as quickly as possible. Corners will be cut. The longer the team is working extra hours, the more technical debt you build up, which in turn makes it harder for developers to get things done, requiring even more work to maintain the same level of production. It’s a losing proposition.
The third reason not to fall back on “make them work more hours” as a strategy for increasing productivity is that it reduces the organization’s capacity to manage a crisis. For one thing, there are fewer hours to throw at unexpected problems. If your lead developer is already working on Sundays, those Sundays aren’t available when you get a surprising feature request from a big customer. If the team is already burnt out from previous death marches, they’re going to be pretty cynical when their confronted with an actual crisis. And finally, when the crisis arises, that crappy code people were writing at night when they were trying to watch Glee at the same time is going to be an impediment to solving whatever problem is at hand.
The funny thing is that on a good team, you never need to ask people to work more hours at all. If you have good people and they understand and have bought into the team’s goals, then they will do what needs to be done to ship, even when it means putting in extra hours. One way to make sure that never happens is to coerce them into working more hours.
Every time you’re tempted to do so, sit down with members of the team and ask them how many hours a week they spend dealing with stuff not related to shipping and work to make those things go away instead.
The good news is that all of the complaining is working — politicians are backing away from SOPA/PIPA.
The bad news is that the politicians still don’t really get it. The President challenged the technology to again come up with new ways to prevent users from copying things. Don’t miss Nat Torkington’s response.
Back in July, I argued that Apple’s labor costs should be higher. The company is very profitable, and it wouldn’t cut into their profits much to better compensate employees. This week, there have been a lot of developments on this front. Employees at a Foxconn factory in China threatened mass suicide if they were not given better pay. Also, Mike Daisey, who has travelled to China to observe working conditions there himself, appeared on This American Life to perform part of his one-man show, “The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs.”
Today, Apple has made some announcements that indicate it is taking more responsibility for labor conditions in its factories. They have released a full list of their suppliers along with a detailed report on working conditions in its factories. Apple has also joined the Fair Labor Association and will allow independent inspections of its factories. Hopefully other electronics makers will follow suit.
Addressing the issues Apple has found in its inspections will cost the company more money, but they can afford it. Here’s to them spending even more in the future. As an aside, I can’t help but wonder whether this is happening now because it’s something that’s more important to Tim Cook than it was to Steve Jobs.
Then God, there was I. Holy smokes.
Patron X, whose ringing iPhone interrupted a performance of the New York Philharmonic this week, comparing himself to other attendees who have annoyed him during performances.
There’s a lot of discussion of Google’s deep integration of its Google+ social network with their core search product, but Danny Sullivan is the guy who has actually drilled down to show how it works.
My main takeaway is that this is a major loss in terms of usability. Google is anteing up a huge strategy tax payment here, favoring in some cases useless Google+ pages over the content that users almost certainly actually care about. Google obviously feels that their lead in search market share is big enough that they can risk frittering it away in order to promote their social networking efforts.
Update: Danny Sullivan has posted an interview with Google’s executive chairman Eric Schmidt about Google+ integration.
Grassroots efforts to let Congress know what a bad idea SOPA/PIPA is are continuing all over the Internet, and I wanted to make sure people know about them.
Fred Wilson is suggesting that people use #BlackoutSOPA to register their protest via their Twitter avatar.
Reddit is blacking out their site on January 18.
I would encourage everyone to directly contact their Congressperson and their Senators — that will probably have a greater effect than any form of online protest. There’s a long way to go — only 5 Senators are on the record as opposing the bill.
Smart Football is one of my favorite blogs. If you’re a football fan at all, you should check it out. Unfortunately, the site’s owner has run into a problem. Some person (whose name is supposedly Anil Jayanna) has registered the domain name smartfootball.net and put up an exact copy of his Web site, apparently to make money on ads (but potentially to distribute malware).
From the whois results, I can see that the registrar is Melbourne IT and that the DNS for the domain appears to be handled by Yahoo. A lookup on the site’s IP address reveals that it’s hosted in Russia.
The obvious steps are to email the registrar to report the abuse in homes of getting the domain name revoked and to email Yahoo in an attempt to get the DNS turned off. Maybe I’m cynical, but I don’t believe that emailing the hosting company in Russia is going to do a lot of good.
What else should Chris do? I hear about content theft fairly regularly, but I haven’t seen too many instances of an entire site being copied in this fashion. For all the horrible misuses of the DMCA, this is the sort of thing it was actually designed to prevent. This incident demonstrates its ineffectiveness, though, because the registrar and the hosting company are overseas and are thus out of reach. I guess if SOPA were in effect the Web site could be blacklisted — but in a thankfully SOPA-free world what recourse does the content owner have?
My favorite article I read in 2011 was not written in 2011. It was published in The New Yorker in 1987. It’s John McPhee’s piece on human efforts to control the Mississippi River, Atchafalaya. He also wrote a book on the same topic, The Control of Nature, which I have not read.
I have long had a passing interest in the ongoing disappearance of Lousiana’s wetlands, which I already knew were caused by degradation resulting from the construction of canals used to access oil drilling equipment, subsidence (a natural process that affects all river bottomland), and levees along the Mississippi that prevent the river from restoring the wetlands. After reading the article, though, I realized I hadn’t really understood the problem at all.
The article works brilliantly as a straightforward explanation of the mechanics of the Mississippi River and human efforts to control it. Before reading it, I had no idea that what the river really wants is to shift its course to the west into the Atchafalaya River, abandoning Baton Rouge and New Orleans and washing away Morgan City. Nor did I know that the only thing preventing it is a manmade structure that prevents the change in course. I didn’t even know that boats use locks to travel up and down the river as a result of this engineering effort to control the river. The entire description of how the river is managed is completely fascinating.
McPhee, perhaps unintentionally, provides an allegory that should prove educational to anyone who builds things for a living. It is a fascinating look at path dependence. Once the first levee was built in New Orleans, they unknowingly insured that levees would be built higher and expanded further indefinitely. All a levee does is make it easier for water to travel in another direction rather than over the levee, so everyone along the river who wants to prevent their own land from flooding has to make sure that their levee is not the most vulnerable along the river’s course. The lessons contained in this article are among the most important any engineer or problem solver can learn.
The article is long and information dense, but I cannot recommend it more highly. It’s my favorite thing I read last year.
Fred Wilson exposes the truth about piracy — all too often it’s about convenience rather than money. Many people download illegally or watch pirated streams because it’s the easiest (or frequently, only) way to get the content they’re after rather than because it’s saving them a buck or two. Sports is a great example — I am a huge University of Houston fan, and often the only way to see their football games where I live is to find illegal streams online. I’d gladly pay, but there is no legitimate way to see them. That’s a pretty huge market failure.
On a related note, I agree with Matthew Yglesias that piracy isn’t even the appropriate term for this sort of thing.
Update: Every company that makes money selling access to content that can be digitized, whether it’s software, movies, television shows, music, or live performances, should organize a contest for employees to go out and find the most convenient method to get a copy of whatever it is they sell, through legal or illegal means. The only rules should be that the means should be available to the public, and they could stipulate that cost is not an object. I think most would be shocked to find that perhaps outside the world of software and music, the contestants who use illegitimate means would win the race almost every time.
Update: Here’s a post from music site Bandcamp that gets at what I was saying.
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