Facing the Inevitable

Layoffs, bankruptcies and people losing their jobs seems to be almost like a trend nowadays. For the previous generations it was possible to graduate, get a job and finally retire with a gold watch after working in the same company for all of your career. If someone now has something similar in mind it almost feels naive.

Of course there are always exceptions. And probably there's big variation between different companies. But I think everyone needs to admit that things happen faster than before. Fortunes are made and lost in mere days, maybe even faster. Robots handle transactions at the stock market. One of the big dilemmas seems to be that there's a lot more data available than before, but it seems increasingly difficult to distill the important messages from the background noise. Do we have time and wisdom to understand what we measure?

I have adopted some rules of thumb from what I've read. I don't anymore think that people will spend all their lives in the same company. For my own company and team I try to create best possible circumstances for them to work. Create a system that they can feel connected with and achieve something. Exchange their free time to a hopefully competitive salary (I don't have much power over this) and to tasks that are intellectually challenging, foster their creativity and when ever possible, can be identified as things that move the company towards some greater goal.

Another thing to consider is situation when company needs to let some people go. It always feels bad. But sometimes it is inevitable. I think about Nokia as an example. If you manufacture normal, non-smart phones and people don't buy them anymore, the situation is tough. There's no easy way to increase the sales. Maybe you can find a new market where people still would prefer these 'old school' phones, but that doesn't change the fact that globally the demand for them has gone down. And will not go up anymore in the foreseeable future. And if your organization consist mainly of experts in this field, management doesn't have a multitude of options. You can wait until your bank account is empty, but in the end the result will by inevitable and ugly.

In the end the choices are to go out of business or face the facts and adapt. Things that worked in the past do not work anymore and you need to come up with something new. You will need to develop new competencies and be bold enough to let go of the past.

For some this is a cruel message. For some it can be a wake up call. My best advice for everyone could be to keep challenging yourself and to learn new things. If you learned to do something 10 years ago and continue to do the same year after year... one day your services may not be needed anymore.

Stay curious and find out new things. Experiment. Stay agile and adapt to the changing environment. Learn everyday!

Scales and Emergent Properties

It is fascinating how things look different depending on the distance. From space Earth looks like a blue ball with some green stuff here and there. By zooming closer one can see the continents and mountains and some of the biggest man-made structures like highways. Going closer still and taking a helicopter view the individual houses are yet indistinguishable, but cities have forms.

Humans can't usually see the forest for the trees. Trees are closer to our scale and we usually look at them from the ground up, not from top down. Also we and all the organic material around us consists of small cells. Many of them have a specific purposes (like muscle or brain cells). They are visible with a microscope.

If you could magnify even more, you would see that even the cells aren't the ultimate building blocks. They could be further divided into atoms which could be further divided into quarks (and maybe even further, but let's stop here.)

Many of these levels have their own forces and interactions. Quarks can feel the strong interaction (or nuclear force). In their world, gravity or electromagnetism isn't very interesting. On the other hand, interactions and events on the cosmic scale take so long and distances are so big that compared to them the human lifespan is only a drop in an ocean.

The same fascinating scale related properties exist also in the corporate world. Individual people, teams, units and companies work on different scales. After saying this I do admit that some exceptional individuals might match the output of a whole team or even a small company. But I'd claim that there are such efforts that simply aren't doable without the appropriate size. And yes, on the other hand bigger scale usually makes things more stiff and slower.

I think a team has a lot better chances to really finish a software feature. And I mean the whole deal: thinking about the usability, implementation, documentation, testing, optimizing, refactoring and packaging everything into an appealing form. And if we go a bit further and think about productization of an idea, I think a company is better off than a team or an individual. Sales and marketing are essential activities. But such capabilities aren't often found in the standard developer skill set. For a company to be successful, both skills are needed. But individual people can be highly successful in their roles with only one of these skills.

No-one can do everything. By working together we can make great things happen. With the joint effort of brilliant minds we have been able to reach the space and descend into the deepest ocean depths. If we could work together as a planet who knows where we would end up... But currently I'm happy to follow the road ahead with my company. :)