Why you shouldn't be reading this blog

Last March I wrote a blog entry called "A few ideas about Negotiation". It wasn't too beefy, was a simple collection of things I've learned, and from the feedback, a few people even got some information from it.

As is common, it found its way onto a few Internet news and/or blog aggregator sites. On one of those sites, someone posted a comment to my article. It was:

"I haven't heard of Paul Tyma -- what's his credibility in writing this article?"

Original here.

Wow. Good damn question right there. And I'm pretty confident I have a pretty damn good answer. Which would basically be "none, nada, and zip". Who the heck am I to tell you on how to negotiate? Nobody - that's who.

Now I'll note that my article wasn't called "How you should negotiate" it was just "a few ideas about negotiation". To get technical, I suppose anyone is qualified to write such an article. Heck, my ideas could have been dead wrong, but true to my title - they were still ideas.

Regardless, there are most definitely more qualified people in the world than me in the area of negotiation. I've certainly done a bit, but guys like used car salesmen do it nearly every day. They're the ones who should be writing a negotiation blog.

What got me more about the commenter's post is that particular site was an entrepreneurial news site that commonly referenced blog articles. Many of those articles were giving advice - and just like my article, I basically had no reference as to the "qualifications" of any of the authors.

Some of the authors had started many companies and gave experiential reports. But other ones, in fact some of the popular ones, were someone who made a website over a few weekends, called it a "start-up", then wrote down a post-mortem about why their grand launch had failed. I was a bit surprised that my commenter saw fit enough to question my qualifications in writing that article. I mean, thats what the Internet is - isn't it? A collection of anyone saying anything for any reason they want.

They say that the Internet has started to make us dumb. I'm not sure I agree with that statement. What I do think is happening is that the Internet has given everyone (or anyone) a voice. And although that sounds all democratic, it might not be all its cracked up to be. What I mean is that the Internet is fantastic at disseminating information - but nothing is even partially guaranteeing that that information is correct.

Before the Internet we read things in books or magazines or newspapers. Now by no means were we sure that the authors of those works were correct or even worth listening to, but they did typically have an editor or boss or someone supporting their work. That editor's job, at some level, was tied to the writer's work being good (and if intended, accurate). In other words, it is by no means a sure thing - but there was a human on the planet with a vested interest in that writing being what it intended to be. Whether that be factual, entertaining, or blasphemous.

On a large scale, I think its safe to say that writing in that context is going to be higher quality than someplace like the Internet where any single person can write down anything they like and publish it for all to see. Then according to the snazziness of the title or the controversy of the topic, it may be read by thousands or even millions (or of course, maybe no one).

Quoting from the Internet is like quoting a 9-year old. I have nothing against 9-year olds, but in my experience their viewpoint tends to be limited and their agendas rather linear. Even if what you're quoting isn't from a 9-year old, you basically need to treat that as the lowest common denominator. If you don't have assurance of the source, then you simply can't be sure.

So, to my fair commenter who strongly questioned my qualifications on writing that article on negotiation, I'll meekly admit that I have none. On the other hand, from an opposite perspective I could claim that I have plenty - or at least as much as every other random blogger on the Internet. So either you really shouldn't be reading this blog - or - if you feel it brings you value, then logic be damned. I'm glad you're here.

The Internet itself isn't making us dumber - but it is muddying the waters between facts, lies, and misinformation. Surely at times we find written works that are great, but there's less guarantee than we ever had before that they are worth anything at all. The Internet has added a whole new dimension to the phrase "Don't believe everything you read".

And ironically, if you think my whole idea is flawed and what I've written here is total garbage - then I dare say, we are in complete agreement.

A thought experiment on the end of Humanity

Pretty slick title huh? Thought of it myself.

My girlfriend used to be a high school teacher. She told me an interesting fact - she said one of her bigger issues was that sometimes when a student handed-in an assignment, it wasn't uncommon for it to be something the student simply found on the Internet, cut-and-pasted into their word processor and handed it in. If you're like most people I tell this too, you're a bit unhappy about the laziness of these students. Instead of learning something for them self, they simply used Google to find it, and (effectively) recite what they found. Pretty weak, eh?

Einstein was once asked how many feet are in a mile. He replied something like "I don't keep information in my head, when I can just open a book up" (I googled that). Einstein apparently didn't have google.

Funny thing is that when Einstein was alive he'd look up simple facts (i.e. 5280 feet) in a book. Ten years ago we had the ability to look it up on our computers. Now I can look it up on my phone that's with me at all times. What do you think is next?

Let's say that what's next is mind interface to the net. Surely, this isn't a new idea and people are working on this right now.

But think a second - what happens when we have instantaneous access to the Internet without moving a muscle. If you ask me how many feet are in a mile and I answer - you won't know if I knew it, or if I "looked it up". And at that point, it pretty much won't matter. If it takes more effort to memorize it (to my real memory) than it will be better and faster to just leave it on the Internet and grab it there whenever I need it.

Like all technology this promises to have its glitches at first - but eventually, it will be pretty reliable. And what then? Well, if our minds work like our flabby bellies, then our human memory will atrophy. We'll slowly but surely lose the ability to remember things.

We tend to describe the idea of "knowing things" as wisdom. And we tend to describe the idea of "figuring out things" (like math or connecting disparate concepts) as intelligence. A way to distinguish this is that you can be born intelligent, but you can't be born wise.

Tomorrow's Internet has the potential to fully replace wisdom. We won't be any less wise - in fact, we'll all be instantaneously super-wise. And equally-wise (which may be weirder than being super-wise). Even children.

If you think this is crazy - I argue its already happening. Those kids in my girlfriend's old class already find memorizing things to be more effort than simply googling it. As soon as they get a faster interface to that information, they'll take it.

Most people that disagree with me on this don't actually disagree, they simply fear it. It does spell a fundamental change in humanity - and that's rather frightening. Surely things will change fast. At a minimum, all business that relies on hiding information will be, ya know, gone.

But it doesn't end there.

If we all gain super wisdom, then the only mental differentiation between us is intelligence. How fast can you multiply two numbers? How many times must some explain particle physics to you before you get the relationships between the elements involved?

The first computer beat the first human chess grandmaster in 1998. We pretty much always associated chess with intelligence, but chess is actually a pretty unfair example. Humans approach chess abstractly. In some sense considering the board as a whole, processing it in parallel, and extrapolating opportunities from it. Computers work far differently. They simply examine every possible combination (with some smart algorithms to not examine useless moves) of the game from this point forward. Chess has so many possibilities that it took awhile for computers to get fast enough and computer programmers to get clever enough to search enough possibilities to beat a human.

Computer "intelligence" is likely farther off than computer "wisdom". But you're fooling yourself if you think it isn't coming. The human brain is in essence, just a machine - damage it and it stops working. Give it alcohol and it gets off kilter. Computers will reach it - maybe not computers as we know them, but computational machines will. Ray Kurzweil predicts this sometime in the 2020's or so (per the book I read anyway, he might have changed his estimate - incidentally, he predicted computers would beat a chess grandmaster in 1997 - he was off by a year).

So what happens then? To us I mean.

By that time we will have farmed out our personal memory long ago. And then, we'll start farming out our thinking. We already happily do this with calculators or spreadsheets. We all know computers kick our ass when it comes to math. Who wants to do long division anymore? Let the computer do it. We've already farmed that part of our intellect out. If you told me I could get a chip put in my head that let me do all math instantly, I'd sign up for sure.

What happens when computers can do more? I mean, literally think for us. It won't happen overnight. But just like long division and multiplication today - we'll do it little by little. As computers get smarter and smarter, and as our interface to them gets faster and simpler, we'll slowly but surely, give them our thinking tasks.

And just like the dumbification of our kids today - and just like our fat bellies and long atrophied human memory, our unused thinking capacity then gets lazy too.

What happens then? Seems like, in some sense, we sort of cease to be as we know us. We become conduits to some consciousness we created elsewhere. You can call this extinction, paradigm shift, or apotheosis - it probably doesn't much matter.

I'm not smart enough to know what happens in this borgian future - but I have a feeling, that in 20 or 30 years, I sure will be. And so will you.

Kurzweil is a great read on ideas of the future:
Age of Spiritual Machines

Finally figured out my own view on Agile/Extreme Programming

Personally, I've always felt agile development (and previously extreme programming) simply took credit for a few existing good ideas, added a few dumb ones, and then WAY overhyped it.

I've always met some resistance to this - which made me think two things.

1) It acted an awful lot like a religion - faith with no proof and overzealous defenders.
2) Anytime lots of people disagree with you, you're likely wise to reconsider your position - its not infallible, but its a decent indicator you could be wrong.

Anyway, with almost no surprise on my part, Don Knuth has made me realize my own position via a recent interview:

"With the caveat that there’s no reason anybody should care about the opinions of a computer scientist/mathematician like me regarding software development, let me just say that almost everything I’ve ever heard associated with the term "extreme programming" sounds like exactly the wrong way to go...with one exception. The exception is the idea of working in teams and reading each other’s code. That idea is crucial, and it might even mask out all the terrible aspects of extreme programming that alarm me..."

- Don Knuth, quoted from
http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=1193856

Never send your Application out alone again

Anyone that reads my blog knows I was one of the founders of a company called Preemptive Solutions, Inc. Preemptive was my first startup and has a very been very successful in evolving its DashO and Dotfuscator product lines. Those products are near and dear to my heart as the initial incarnation of DashO was spawned from my Ph.D. dissertation work. People often now associate it as a Java Obfuscator, but to me that was largely an afterthought. Its a static analyzer of an interesting sort for Java. I had originally set out to write a Java bytecode optimizer, but I quickly realized that given Java's nature, you fall pretty flat on how and when you can do static analysis.

Java (and .NET) have very many dynamic components (the more you look, the more you tend to find). My dissertation (http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1087610) was most interested in a scheme to identify closed systems inside of Java applications. Basically cordoning off open hooks into Java applications and not trying to optimize across them. In essence, it identifies sub-applications within Java and .Net applications and optimizes those one at a time.

This is all well and good, but its basically old news.

Whats new news is Preemptive's new product line. As Preemptive evolved those static analyzers, they got really really good at instrumenting code. In fact it became second nature. Preemptive's new product line takes advantage of this know-how.

They call it "Runtime Intelligence" - I call it fricking cool.

I explain it like this... In past decade application servers popped up to provide an application services cradle for which you to drop your business logic code into. Basically, you write a nice little piece of business logic, put it into an application server, and that server took care of all boilerplate details like database access, fault-tolerance, load-balancing, etc. Its a silly idea to think every website had to write code to handle these generic ideas.

The heyday of application servers isn't what it used to be as many discovered that they added a ton of overhead for applications that weren't using all those shiny services. In fact, new web or server frameworks pop up all the time to literally "part out" application server functionality. You used to ask someone their server infrastructure and they'd say "Weblogic" - now its not uncommon to hear "Spring, Hibernate, Struts2 and GWT".

Runtime Intelligence is sort of the inverse of the idea of an application server. Simply put, Runtime Intelligence allows you to "inject" prebuilt functionality modules into your application. So, does your super application need licensing? Does it need to update itself through patching? How about statistics on how people are using the product?

You got it.

Write your code like you planned to without worrying about "generic" functionality pieces and "inject" them later.

Whats more is that Microsoft has bought into this idea in a big way for .NET. Microsoft today announced a joint press release (See it here) with Preemptive at PDC about this product. If you're familiar with how Microsoft works, you know that joint press releases are pretty rare. Its clear to me that they "get it". This is big.

Preemptive's first round of injectable functionality is pretty slick too. Basically a statistical package for your application. Like web analytics, only for applications. Ever implement a feature and wonder how many people really use it? How about finding out that 33% of your customers never get past the 2nd page on your wizard (maybe its design is too confusing?) How about finding out that 68% of users tend to do 5 features in the same order everytime - and you could easily add a new feature that does that for them. Simply put - releasing an application into the wild unknown and "guessing" how users use it is a thing of the past.

Surely, this kind of application monitoring makes a lot of sense for certain types of applications (of course, its not right for every application just the same way other boilerplate functionality like licensing or patching would or wouldn't be). Either way, this opens up all new possibilities in development planning for applications. I expect plenty of meetings between sales teams and project managers discussing this data.

Some people have compared this to aspect oriented programming, but that's quite inaccurate once you look deeper. I've used both and aspects feel like a sledge hammer (and at least for the packages I've used, an annoying-to-configure one at that). Runtime intelligence is surgical (as far as I know, no one is doing feature stats with aspects). You write the code and inject real business boilerplate functionality anywhere and anyway you want.

As you can tell, I'm really excited about this - and I'm doubly excited that Microsoft is on board with it too. If you're going to PDC this week, definitely check these guys out.

Disclaimer: I have an unhealthy crush on this company. It has gone farther than I had ever imagined and I'm continually impressed of their accomplishments and future.

Probably the hardest sales job ever

The VP of Marketing of my old company is an absolute master at analogies. One of my favorites was when he described to me the idea of selling a new product that creates a brand-new niche - often a very difficult task.

He likened it to the first person that had to break ground selling thermometers. Not the "How's the weather" thermometers, I mean the "Do you have a fever thermometers". Surely nowadays these are digital little gizmos, but when they came out they were the old-fashioned mercury based ones.

I can imagine the sales-pitch:

Customer: So, whats it good for?
Salesman: It will tell you your temperature.

Customer: Why do I care about that?
Salesman: Well, then you will know when you have a fever.

Customer: Um. I already know when I have a fever.
Salesman: Yeah, but now you'll be sure.

Customer: Erm.. k.. What's it made of?
Salesman: Glass

Customer: Whats that stuff inside it?
Salesman: Mercury - careful, its toxic.

Customer: How do I use it?
Salesman: You just put it in your butt for 2 minutes.

Customer: Um. So basically, you want me to take this toxic-substance filled thermo-thing made of breakable glass, stick it and leave it in my butt for 2 minutes so that I'll know something I pretty much already knew.
Salesman: Yepper.

Customer: Awesome - I'll take 2 !

That had to be a hard job. Solve a problem that was perceived as not needing solving and then do it in a new, dangerous, and highly uncomfortable way. And you thought software was hard.

Left Google, Starting up

If you know me personally, you know I left Google a week or two back. I learned a great deal there and had a blast all along the way. It was by any measure a fantastic experience - and although the perks were great, the experience of working with the smart people there is the true draw.

I thought through this decision a long time and it just came time that circumstances finally tipped in the direction of me leaving.

Prior to Google I was in my own startup. And thats what I plan to do now. I was fortunate enough to be introduced to a start-up idea that I really like - and for me, thats a pretty rare thing these days (if you read my previous article, this is most definitely an old-man's business model). I'm also very excited about the people involved. Everyone involved has rock-solid successful track record of already building successful businesses. We're really off to an exciting start.

Technically, we'll be on the cutting edge with scalability and performance and of course, turning a billion dollar industry on its head. If you're a crack-shot Java developer with experience in things like Mysql and hibernate, have a near-obsession for clean and fast code, and are interested in getting in on the ground floor of a new startup in San Francisco, California - send me your resume (paul.tyma at gmail.com).

Edit: Thanks to Bob Cringely for writing about my new web service Talkinator - but the startup I mention above has nothing to do with that. The startup is far bigger and I'm very excited at the impact its going to have.

The Young Man's Business Model

I've had an idea bouncing around in my head for awhile that randomly came together recently. And given I have a blog, I thought I'd write it down. This idea came from 3 experiences I've had - and here they are:

Mini-story #1:

In my early 20's I pretty much did 2 things. Ride motorcycles and code. Oh, and given my motorcycles were always sort of junky and I beat the snot out of them, I spent plenty of time fixing motorcycles too - I guess that's 3 things then. (If you think I forgot dating or went to bars or some such - nope. We're good. 3 things).

Every now and then we needed an "old man" (like in his 40's or something) to help us fix something when it was beyond our self-taught abilities. Now when I say "old man" here and throughout this article, I don't necessarily mean "old" (and I don't necessarily mean "man") - I mean "experienced". Experienced at whatever I'm interested in at the time - or more specifically, experienced at what I wasn't experienced in at the time.

And as far as fixing motorcycles, what struck me was the way he'd go about it.

A rather common case would be something like there being one final screw holding on some engine part that we needed to replace, but it was buried deep inside the engine - i.e. you could barely see it. My first reaction was to wedge a screwdriver in there as far as I could - and see if, with luck, brute force, and karma, I could turn it enough to get it out.

The old guy on the other hand never went this route. He merely looked at it a moment, then immediately started taking off the neighboring easy-to-remove piece of the engine. Once that was off, he then effortlessly put his screwdriver in to remove the now exposed screw. Now mind you, the old-guy's way was my back-up plan - but I was betting that my brash exuberance would payoff in a slightly quicker result. Sometimes it did - sometimes it didn't - and sometimes I broke screwdrivers.

This trade-off of investment up-front versus brute-force hope became so obvious that my friends and I used it as vernacular. "Do you want to try this the 'young man' way or the 'old man' way?". It was surprising how without any further explanation we would know all the precise steps involved in both for whatever situation.

Ok. That was mini-story #1, here's mini-story #2. This is a business story but its actually surprisingly similar to the previous one whether you know it or not.

In 1997, I was writing a Java optimizer (this made a lot of sense when Java was interpreted) called DashO. Somewhere along the line I was introduced to a guy at Adobe, who (I was told) wanted exactly what I was building.

When I finally spoke to him, it turned out that the Adobe guy didn't really want Java optimization at all. What he wanted, was Java application size reduction. It had literally become a show-stopper for what he was developing. He was clear that money wasn't a problem - if I could solve his issue, he was a customer.

Wanting to please my newfound (big-time) customer I said "Sure! I can add that in!". Then I shrewdly secured the Adobe guy as a beta tester. This changed the direction that my product took and added about 2-3 months of development, but given the payoff, it seemed worth it.

About mid-way through those 2-3 months my partners and I had lunch with a veteran ("old man") business guy that for some reason seemed to like us and liked to keep tabs on our progress. As I excitedly told him the story of Adobe waiting anxiously for our product, his reaction wasn't as I expected. I thought he'd be excited for us, but instead he had a look of disappointment on his face.

Me: What? What's wrong - this is awesome - Adobe is our first customer!
Old-guy: So you spoke to Adobe. Directly to an internal guy that's a customer
Me: yeah!
Old-guy: And he has plenty of money to solve his problem.
Me: yeah, tons!
Old-guy: And how much of that money are you going to get in the best case?
Me: erm. um. We'll sell a copy.
Old-guy: Right. A copy. Maybe a few if you're lucky.

Old-guy went on to discuss how that deal should have gone. Adobe had effectively contracted me to build them a product that didn't exist (this was true). It was possible that no other customers would ever want that functionality (possible). Simply put, they had a specific business need, lots of money to solve it, and had hand-picked me to be the solver.

I should have structured the deal as a contracting agreement. Charging on a per-hour basis to develop their product using what we already had as a base. Then, give them a discount rate on the hourly rate in exchange for full-rights to further develop and sell the product as our own. This would have been a 6-figure deal which would have meant a lot at that time. What's worse is you might be thinking that I missed an opportunity to fleece a customer - but I argue you're wrong. In fact, that arrangement would have actually brought more value to the Adobe.

In the old-guy's arrangement, Adobe would have then had a hand in guiding the project and making sure all the features they wanted were in the soup. Not to mention, if I didn't build this for them, they simply would have had to hire someone else to do it - probably spending lots more.

Once in awhile, you have a fucking-duh moment - and for me, this was one. If you're thinking "well obviously" then clearly you've done this before, at that time - I hadn't.

Story 3 - a recent breakfast.

I recently had breakfast with a guy I met at an entrepreneur event. He was CTO of a pretty popular website. When he first described his site, I liked the business model a lot. His site fed him data that allowed him to refine his real product: pre-built server boxes which he sold to companies that allowed them to use his software internally.

Visions of sugar-plums and multi-million dollar deals immediately started dancing in my head. As he talked, the rolodex in my mind quickly flipped from person to person. I thought of potential customers, potential partners and even maybe people appropriate to join his team. His product was good, and not that he asked me to, but I couldn't help forming a deal network in my head.

I asked about his sales infrastructure. His answer left me wanting but I figured he was probably still fleshing it out (a very hard task). I almost rhetorically asked about the sales cycle. There wasn't one. Now I was getting confused.

As we talked more it became clear that he and his company were following what I'd call the young-man's business model.

He was basically building a (good) product, then laying it out on the web for all to see and hoping to get a million eyeballs. The viewpoint of the business is to get eyeballs, often from things like Digg or Techcrunch, and then figure out how to keep them. And then amazingly often, this really is the step where entrepreneurs have no clue what happens except they are sure the next step is "and then Profit!".

This is an extremely innocent look at business - and in some sense, its the most logical one if you simply have no other avenues.

This model isn't wrong but now to me (who has of course only recently come to rather shocking self-realization that I am... an "old-man" at how I view business) it seems like a business model without considering connections. Deciding to make connections for your business of course isn't conscious. When something happens, the first thing that pops in your head is "Boy, Fred needs to hear about this". And depending on how many Freds you know dictates how often that idea pops in your head. (and of course, the more Freds you know, the more Freds you will know).

My old-man/young-man nomenclature may not be perfect but it might be statistically correct. Its probably safe to say that on average a 30 year old has a generally more business connections than a 20 year old. From there people simply follow business plans as they occur to them.

To me, my friend at breakfast had a sure winner if he had put together a solid sales and marketing infrastructure. His product should have been selling inside 6 figure deals with several month sales cycles. Now clearly, this model doesn't apply to everything. And plenty of new Web 2.5 startups don't fit this mold - but I also think many people underestimate the idea. So far it seems the evolution of all businesses, even something so webby as Facebook eventually becomes about making deals with big partners at least as much as its about eyeballs.

It wasn't so long ago that saying your new startup was monetized by ads wasn't scary. Some companies go right from eyeballs to ads and to sell-out. Thats great work if you can get it. But the number of eyeballs is limited. Its scary to think that, but on the web, we tend to give value away and "make it up on volume". The only problem is you need a hell of a lot of volume to make up for free. And 6 billion people isn't all that many when it comes down to it.

Personally I think web businesses are growing up. The eyeball business model is getting to be like Market street in San Francisco. Everyone is pierced, shaved, screaming, or on fire. They're crying for attention and they have to keep shouting louder than everyone else to get it.

I have plenty of opinions about business models, but to me, the best business model is one that makes your customer money. I didn't say "saves" them money - big difference. Also, its better yet if that customer is a business. You need less businesses as customers to be successful than if you had individuals as customers. A common sweet-spot is BtoBtoC. Supply to businesses that supply to consumers (and of course, make them money).

(I am very sadly not affiliated with Paul Martino's company Aggregate Knowledge if you want an example of a business model that's simply beautiful.)

If you don't have a ton of business experience, try this - think about your next great web app, then imagine the slickest (or sleaziest, your call) old-man salesperson you ever met sitting in front of you. Picture the idea that this guy is really good at persuasion and networking. He can't code, you may not like him, and he wears shoes you wouldn't wear on halloween, but he's good at what he does. Then imagine handing the old-man 5% of the company (I know its hard, try - remember, its just pretend). You need him truly on your side.

If you had access to the old-man and his imaginary immense rolodex of connections. How else could you sell this? What value could you bring to some customers that currently you can't reach?

Your real business model might be hiding like that last screw holding on part of the engine. Despite you stubbornly breaking screwdrivers, you might not get to what you need. It might just be worth asking yourself, "WWTOMD" - What would the old man do?

A few ideas about Negotiation

A good friend of mine asked me for some negotiating tips. This is what I told her. Use, agree, or disagree with them at your own risk.

1) Never put numbers in email. Email lives forever. Numbers are only discussed on phone or in person. Only written down when you're signing the contract.

2) There's an old saying "Whoever puts the number on the table first - loses". In general, this is good fallback advice.

I modify this according to several factors:
a) The less you can predict the outcome, the more likely I let the adversary say the first number. (i.e. revenue-less company valuations are often voodoo - its quite possible your buyer will give a higher number than you ever imagined).
b) The more I need a deal, the quicker I am to say this first number. This sets a tone.
c) Conversely, the less I need a deal - I'm willing to let them show me just how bad they want it. The danger is if they give an extreme lowball, I need to be able to walk.

3) No matter what they offer, ask for more. How forcefully depends on how good the deal already is. If they offer you 10% when you were expecting 3, meekly ask for 12% and back down fast if needed. If they offer 1%, strongly go for 4% and settle for 2.5.

4) Don't answer the phone if they call to discuss the negotiation. You are probably thinking about the chicken mcnuggets you just ate and they have been thinking the last 20mins how the phone negotiation will go. In short - they are prepared, you aren't. Let them goto voicemail. Wait an hour.. spend 10 minutes focusing on the possibilities of the negotiation and call them back. Their mind will be elsewhere now. You'll be ready.

5) Seriously - don't ignore #4. Fifteen seconds is just not enough time to swap your mind into the right context. Besides, information they leave in the voicemail could be advantageous.

6) (Unless you're reading this and you end up negotiating with me - then we might as well set a time in the future to chat otherwise we'll never answer each other's calls.)

7) *Everytime* you sign a contract, you are giving up something. Take a step back and make sure you fully understand all that you are giving up - and all that you are receiving in return. Never sign a contract (or sleep with someone for that matter) because you feel bullied into it.

8) A common negotiating tactic is to put your adversary in an uncomfortable situation. The hope is that the adversary will compromise some just to relieve the discomfort (the more experienced the negotiator, the less likely this is). If you can, reverse the discomfort instead. (This is a class used-car-salesman tactic - think "But you told me yesterday you were going to buy this car!")

Surely negotiation is an art and there's plenty more to it. These ideas are at best a few tricks and tips. Negotiation is a dance - you can't exactly know what you'll have to do until you are forced to react to what your partner does. Thus just like dancing, practice does wonders for your skill.

Writing Java Multithreaded Servers - whats old is new (PDF Slides)

I'm giving another talk tomorrow at the SD West conference:

Here are the slides
Thousands of Threads and Blocking I/O: The Old Way to Write Java Servers Is New Again (and Way Better)


I've encountered some very strong misperceptions in the world that:

1) Java asynchronous NIO has higher throughput than Java IO (false)
It doesn't. It loses by 20-30%. Even with single thread against single thread. If multiple threads enter the equation (and multiple cores) which of course blocking I/O is intent on using - its skews even farther.

2) Thread context switching is expensive (false)
New threading libraries across the board make this negligble. I knew Linux NPTL was fast, but I was quite surprised how well Windows XP did (graphs inside notes).

3) Synchronization is expensive (false, usually)
It is possible for synchronization to be fully optimized away. In cases where it couldn't it did have a cost - however given we have multicore systems now its uncommon to write a fully singly-threaded server (synch or asynch), in other words every server design will pay this cost - but, non-blocking-data-structures ameliorate this cost significantly (again graphs inside show this).

4) Thread per connection servers cannot scale (false)
Thats incorrect at least up to an artificial limit set by JDK 1.6. 15k (or 30k depending on the JVM) threads is really no problem (note linux 2.6 with NPTL using C++ is fully happy with a few hundred-thousand threads running, Java sadly imposes an arbitrary limit). If you need more connections than this (and aren't maxing your CPU or bandwidth) - you can still use blocking IO but must depart from thread-per-connection. Or fall back to NIO.

I'll try to spruce up the benchmarks I used and try to post them. I'd like to point out that writing Java benchmarks is very hard. I spent a great deal of time making sure I warmed up the VM and insured there were no positional biases or other overzealous or skewing optimizations.

I was then *extremely* lucky to get help from Cliff Click of Azul systems (if you want to write a benchmark, a VM engineer is the right kind of person to get help from). He spent half a saturday tweaking my benchmark in ways I never thought of. Then ran them for me on his 768core Azul box (graph inside)!! thanks Cliff !

Notes for my SD-West talk tomorrow on Interviewing in Silicon Valley

I'm giving a half-day tutorial tomorrow at SD-West 2008 in Santa Clara on How to Pass a Silicon Valley Software Engineering Interview.

Its the first of 3 talks I'm giving this week (subsequent notes to come subsequently).

You can download the slides Here.

If you're not attending the talk, please note that as with all slide decks, they are in a sense only half the story - as I'll be filling in many pieces during the lecture itself.

This is the third year I've given this talk and I'm amused to mention that I got a thank you a few weeks back from a veteran SD speaker that attended last year's class and now is just starting his new job at Google. He said the class was very helpful (he also offered to buy me dinner, but given that dinner at Google is free, I countered and offered to buy him dinner instead :)

Customers are the most honest people you'll ever meet

My first startup was Preemptive Solutions, Inc., where apart from other activities, I turned the core of my Ph.D. dissertation into a Java bytecode optimizer called DashO. It was named after the javac (and gcc) command line option "-O". I thought it was a dashingly clever name at the time (The idea of "hypen-O" seemed nowhere near as cool).

In hindsight, it was a pretty dubious product idea. Developer tools are a tough business. For all the talk of application performance, people don't often pay for it except in the form of bigger hardware. However, as I came close to completion of the code, the idea morphed itself into something much more viable (as startup ideas are wont to do).

Turns out people weren't willing to pay for performance so much, but at the time, Java applets were taking off. And people were dying on applet download times - making applets smaller became a component of business success. A wonderful side effect of my code optimizer was that it also made code smaller. And with a few added features focusing on that, it made Java applications amazingly smaller than the original. Getting a 50% size reduction (mostly via bytecode manipulation, dead class/method removal, and identifier renaming) wasn't unusual. The product was a hit.

As time went on, applets gave way to Java ME - and source code protection was added later - but the idea of small code prevailed. If your Java ME application doesn't fit on the phone, then you really can't expect to get many users.

While writing that code, I had just finished writing the book Java Primer Plus. Honestly, I thought I was a pretty crackshot Java programmer. As time went on, of course I kept learning. There really is a teenager phase in your lifecycle of learning a language. It's a distinct point where you're convinced that you know it all. As Mark Twain said (summarizing), "When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years."

In your post-teenager phase, the biggest thing you often learn is how little you actually knew. Thereafter, coding in the language moves from your brain to your brain-stem and finally to your fingers. I can palpably tell the difference. When I code in a language I've done for more than a few years, I don't have to think about the language at all. My brain does things like data structures, concurrency, and algorithms whereas my fingers do the coding.

It was about the time that DashO made its first million in sales that I really sat down and realized how bad the underlying code was designed. My deficiency in Java when I had first coded the app was now obvious to me throughout the code base. The first thing that struck me was that I had made nearly every method in the damn application static. Talk about a C programmer moving to Java. I remember being convinced it would make things run faster (of course I probably never tested that given I was so sure of myself).

I remember thinking that it almost seemed wrong that such bad code could be so successful. But it was. To be fair it was quite bug free and actually did do what it advertised. Its success was that it consistently brought value to its users - and they were more than willing to pay for that. They really didn't care if every method was static or if I was bubble sorting my way until Tuesday - if it shrunk their J2ME application by 50% that was good enough for them.

Customers are honest. They vote with their credit cards and their attention. I've heard of more than a few startup launches be delayed because they "needed to rewrite some core pieces". Clearly, rewriting your code is essential at times, but at other times I've seen it be a feel-good technical decision and a downright bad business one. Quite often its like polishing your car's engine. It might make you feel better, but the car won't run any different and no one else is really going to notice when you drive down the street. Simple moral is that if you're going to delay your product launch because of a rewrite, just be sure its worth it. Delays have been known to be fatal.

These days, I don't get to visit Preemptive as often as I'd like but I'm happy to report it is a very successful 25+ person company, still growing, and is moving into some very exciting (to me anyway) new product directions. A new set of developers work on DashO and it continues to grow in both features and users (and happily, they've evolved the code-base into something far more reasonable to maintain). I'm still amazed at how well the application sells, but I guess I shouldn't be. As long as DashO keeps bringing more and more value to its customers, it will remain a successful product. And things like where-you-went-to-school or how static you decided to code your methods be damned. Value is value.

Your business model called; its leaving (and its not coming back)

Let's say you found yourself a cash cow. Something that made you tons of money; day after day. And let's say that you get better and better at making your cash cow efficient. Pretty soon, you're rolling in dough. At some point you can nearly rest on your laurels while your money machine keeps churning. Eventually, you probably don't need anymore money, but that doesn't stop most people it seems. You just keep on wanting more (and why not, if the cash cow keeps delivering).

Its probably pretty safe to say that at this point in time, the advent of some technology enabled your cash cow. Maybe it was recorded media or a new video format or some computers in need of an operating system. Whatever it was, its likely that some recent technology gave you the building blocks to create your new cash cow business.

And, as you realized that technology enabled your cash cow, you also know that it's just a matter of time before it's going to disable it too. Usually by the advent of yet newer technology obsoleting yours. What do you do then? The best option is to see if you can morph your cash cow to be in synergy with the new technology. Kodak is a good example, they moved from pure film to a strong embrace of digital photography. AT&T is another - land phones are dying - they made sure they were in the mobile business.

Other models however aren't so easy to move with. Music CDs are sort of silly now and the new technology doesn't leave a lot of room for a new business model. What do you do then? You might think that you're the kind of person that if you spent a few years making millions (or billions) producing music CDs that you might eventually have enough of it all. If you truly can't save it then - you can take your millions, smile back upon the fun ride of building something great, and move on to something new.

You might be. But it doesn't seem like this is the way it works. Instead (statistically speaking) if you had an un-save-able dying cash cow, you'd defend it anyway. You'd start to use the millions your cash cow makes to try to change laws, start lawsuits, or stifle technology to artificially keep your cash cow alive. Quite literally, you'd use its own resources to hinder future technology that will hurt it (regardless if thats good, bad, or indifferent for humanity).

Technology enables business, art, and science. And it kills them too, usually by advancing to a point that makes the existing ideas obsolete. A few people miss LP records these days, and surely some still play and collect them. But that number will continue to diminish. I'm sure plenty of folks stuck with a horse-and-buggy because they thought automobiles were a stupid idea. Those people are mostly dead now, just like LP records will be some day.

Now, it might seem like I'm picking on the record industry. I'm not really, they're just a poignant example. Whatever you think, the people in that industry are not idiots. They *know* their business model is dead. Dead, dead, deaddity, dead, dead, dead. Music is really a service, the idea of putting in on a CD was always an artificial means of trying to turn a service into a product.

Instead of teenagers idolizing manufactured rock stars, the internet gives every indie band in the world an open forum. It wasn't that long ago that rock bands begged and prayed to get signed with a big label. Now they can start their own label and reach thousands of listeners, all for the cost of a website. Add a marketing and sales manager and you have a music-making company.

You don't need to be a futurist to predict some corporate business models that will be dead (remnants always remain for awhile) in the near future. Shrink-wrapped software, music CDs, desktop computers, and purely-gasoline automobiles to name a few.

What about if we go just a little longer term - say 30 to 50 years. Now I'd venture to say things keyboards, mice, paper books, bullets, telephones, and batteries.

You might disagree, but I think you're not thinking far enough ahead. I don't think people disagree because they think this idea is wrong. I think just like (or depend) on some of those things and don't want them to go away. If you sell batteries, you'll probably vigilantly tell me that we'll ALWAYS need batteries. In fact, although "30 to 50 years" might not be accurate, my predictions above are pretty guaranteed in some time frame.

A friend of mine disagreed with me when I said libraries were destined to disappear. He argued they won't because people will always like to read from books. "Will always" is a very long time. Most people like books because they're used to them, kids today are pretty used to reading off screens a fair bit of the time. Tomorrow's kids will be even moreso. And would you really be willing to bet we won't invent something better (in all ways) than a paper book in a 100 years? 200? Heck, I'd bet reading itself will be gone by then.

Coming back to the nearer future, the title of this article talks about dying business models. Finding ones in the global corporate marketplace is easy. What I'm more thinking about is *your* business model.

Whether you're a assembly-line worker in a Ford plant in Michigan, a C++ programmer (sorry, I mean "software engineer") in silicon valley, or a McDonald's fry cook. Its pretty damn likely that technology is going to kill your job or career (i.e., your "business model") in your lifetime.

I've read around the net that its a "bad time to be a photographer". Simply put, thousand dollar digital SLR cameras and photoshop have destroyed the historical profession of a photographer. Surely, a skilled photographer can take better photos on average than an amateur. But the rules are now changed. With multi-gigabyte memory cards, I can snap photos all damn day long. And the camera has gotten far better at helping me take great photos. And Photoshop can come in the backside and fix any minor problems I might have. Maybe its a bad time to *be* a photographer - but its a great time to *become* a photographer - anyone can be one in just a few hours! (Of course, thats exactly why existing photographers might think its a bad time to already be one).

Seriously, if I snap a quick thousand photos, its getting more and more likely that I'll snap a really good shot. Then I can sell it on the internet in many instant-gratifying ways for a fraction of historical stock photography. The profession as we knew it is likely soon gone.

I've seen this even in computer programming. Coding used to be much harder than it is today. It takes much less devotion and study to make programs these days and its getting easier all the time. You might argue that good programmers write the best code, but you rarely need the best code to get a website up and running. And programming is perpetually going to get easier. (It used to take HTML expertise to make a website, now it just takes a MySpace account).

Scary enough I can boot up Adobe Illustrator (or more precisely, Gimp in my case since I use linux) and I can do things that a professional graphic designer of 20 years ago could only dream of. This is really a frightening thought - I have a really exceptional lack of artistic ability, but Gimp gives me a baseline. I might not be able to reproduce Van Gogh, but I can make all the graphics I need for websites or Christmas cards or whatever.

In a grand view, this is probably a great thing for our world. More people can do more things faster. It all sounds great unless you're personally be obsoleted in the process. Complaining photographers have somewhat of a point. They spent years perfecting their craft. They learned tricks of lighting and developing and who knows what else just to have it taken away by some fancy new camera. Technology obsoleted their craft overnite (like the song says, "Video killed the radio star").

If you're not a photographer and you're sort of not feeling sorry for them, thats ok as long as you're careful to shine that mirror on yourself too. Like I said, if you spent years learning the intricacies of C++, tax law, medicine, or anything else - you surely have job security likely for awhile. But definitely not forever.

Whatever your business model - it is indeed, at some given rate, dying. And its always possible that a technology will come to be tomorrow that will destroy it instantly. And every year we shall see more fights ensue with people looking to save their business model.

Create a cure for cancer? Watch the chemotherapy companies go into action. Build an electric car thats cleaner, faster, and more economical than any gasoline one? Watch the oil and car companies head to Washington. Invent teleportation? Airline industry sponsored laws will quickly be up for debate.

If you're complaining that your business model is dying, you might as well complain that the sun is going to come up tomorrow. Its going to happen and you have two options - keep moving or retire. Be ready to throw out what you learned if you see it becoming obsolete.

If you're lucky you'll be on the forefront of that technology and you can start a company giving you your own technology-induced cash cow. Once that happens, you can sit back counting money. Until the next wave comes and your once new cash cow starts to crumble. Then, of course, you can adapt again or you can become the technology stifler yourself. Somehow I have a feeling that thats one job that will never go out of style.