Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

A friend of mine recently went to work for a 50-year-old 200-employee company that has bumbled along with modest success as a niche supplier in its (very large) market. She talked about how happy the employees were and how so many had worked there for decades. I said “That means they are overpaid.” She questioned me on this point. I cited a study of married people that found that each thought he or she was doing more than 50% of the chores. The explanation was that a husband is guaranteed to be watching when he himself is doing a chore, but doesn’t see all of the things that the wife is doing (and vice versa). The same phenomenon applies at work. An employee knows all of the things that he or she does personally. The employee isn’t aware of what the others in the company are doing. Consequently, the employee develops a major overestimate of his or her relative productivity and the percentage of overall work done. (Programmers, starting off with massive egos and having little contact with other human beings, are perhaps the worst overestimators of all, especially the 80% of programmers whose contributions are purely negative.)

An employee will overestimate his value to the company by at least a factor of 2. If he is not griping about his salary, it means you’re paying him at least twice as much as he is worth.

[Shortly after this conversation, the investor who had recently purchased the enterprise decided to fire the long-serving Chief Operating Officer.]

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The weather forecast calls for clearing conditions here in Boston. If you’re around and want to go for a helicopter ride, come to Briggs Field at MIT (the end closer to the BU Bridge) between 10:30 and 1 tomorrow (Monday, September 4) and you can buy a raffle ticket for $5 that will probably get you on or just wave some serious cash and the students running the show will let you ride. The whole thing is a benefit for the MIT Flying Club and their Web page explains more about the event. All proceeds go to the club; I am paying for the machine and the gas.

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Yesterday’s airliner crash in Lexington, Kentucky has resulted in a few friends asking how it might have happened.

It was dark, one hour before sunrise, and hazy (see http://www.airnav.com/airport/KLEX). Runway 26 and Runway 22 start almost right next to each other (see official FAA airport diagram). The short runway, 26 (oriented in magnetic direction 260), would be reached first by an airplane taxiing from the terminal. The 3500′ of runway is very comfortable for a slow piston-powered airplane, tight for a light business jet, and more or less impossible for a fully loaded airliner.

This is not the kind of mistake that two professional pilots would be likely to make. If it hadn’t been dark and hazy, the control tower would probably have noticed the mistake and called to suggest aborting the takeoff.

How can we pilots protect against this kind of error? In airplanes with a heading bug, always set it up for runway heading before leaving the runup area. If you are positioned on a runway, preparing for takeoff, and the HSI is not lined up with the heading bug, this gives an extra opportunity to notice that something is wrong. Of course, the airline crews usually do things this way and it didn’t help the folks in Lexington.

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The September 2006 Atlantic magazine (nothing available online), though a pale shadow of even one week’s New Yorker, has some interesting articles. One journalist visits the pilots of Predator drones as they sit in trailers near Las Vegas and fire missiles at people we don’t like in Iraq or Afghanistan. Clive Crook writes about how most of America’s productivity gains between 1966 and 2001 have ended up in the pocket of the workers with salaries in the top 1% (this is based on a paper by Dew-Becker and Gordon). This is not necessarily a bad thing, of course. An article by Sheelah Kolhatkar covers the Starkey International Institute for Household Management in Denver, Colorado where retired military officers learn how to become “household managers” (just one big house) or “estate managers” (all the houses and the jets too).

If we combine these last two articles with some business energy, the question becomes “What kinds of products can we produce for the next generation of billionaires?”

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I strongly suggest a trip to the newsstand for the August 28, 2006 New Yorker magazine. There is a short story by Richard Ford (won the Pulitzer for Independence Day (my review)). There is an article on the Russian mathematician Grigory Perelman. We knew that he worked on the Poincare conjecture. We didn’t know that, at age 40, he lives with his mom and attends the opera in the evenings. Everyone he knows has decamped for sunnier climates and better paying jobs, but he returned to and stays in St. Petersburg: “I realize that in Russia I work better”. Malcolm Gladwell, inspiration to so many business executives today, writes about looking at the ratio of workers to non-workers to predict economic success in countries and companies (bad news for GM and Ford, of course). James Surowiecki (not online) writes about how executives at public companies manage to make $billions by running their companies badly (or at least doing the accounting so it looks as though things are going badly), taking them private, fixing the accounting or operational issues, then taking them public again. This is an old story, but Surowiecki is always fun to read.

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People are always asking me for photo advice. My advice right now is not to buy a Canon Digital Rebel because a new model will be shipped in September, the Rebel XTi. This has a 10 MP sensor and a self-cleaning sensor, plus the instant start-up time that the professional digital bodies have had for awhile.

Canon also announced an image-stabilized 70-200/4L zoom lens that is probably worth owning for those whose backs can no longer handle the weight of the 70-200/2.8L. Finally, they introduced a 50/1.2L to replace the old 50/1.0 lens. A little slower, a little higher image quality, almost surely not worth it for 99% of photographers compared to the superb 50/1.4 (only one half f-stop slower).

[All of this puts Nikon even farther into the shade, of course. I met Ellis Vener at the Hyannis airport the other day. He was the last professional I could remember with Nikon digital equipment. He took some photos from the R44 helicopter with his new EOS 1Ds Mark II.]

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I’m a little out of touch with what it takes to attract good programmers these days. Please comment on the following ad…

Programmer

photo.net, established in 1993, is looking for programmers, full- or
part-time. If you like the site and the community, this is an
opportunity to help out and get paid.

What are we going to be building over the next year or two?

• much better community and photo sharing services
• a system to sell stock photo rights from our gallery and share the
  revenue with photographers
• a system to interface our gallery with high-quality printing
  services
• improved content management and editorial workflow systems
• a system for performance management of the entire site and company
  so that everyone involved with photo.net can see if they are having a
  positive impact

Our current system is based on Oracle 9i and the ArsDigita Community
System 3.2, a free open-source toolkit that was developed initially for
photo.net. We expect to upgrade to Oracle 10g soon. Most of our
programming and thinking is done in SQL or PL/SQL. We use AOLserver Tcl
scripts for the glue code that puts HTML templates and SQL queries
together. New development projects may in some cases be implemented in
Ruby on Rails.

Experience with SQL programming is required. Experience developing Web
applications in some sort of scripting environment is required. C/Unix
programming experience is desirable, but not required.

You will report to and work directly with Jin S. Choi and Philip
Greenspun, the original authors of the photo.net toolset and the
ArsDigita Community System.

This is a job that could be done full-time or by a 15-20 hour/week
part-timer who was experienced and enthusiastic and wanted to
concentrate on one or two modules.

Please email a cover letter stating salary requirements and your resume
(in plain text or HTML preferred, PDF is acceptable, Microsoft Word we
can’t read reliably) to philg@mit.edu, with a subject line of “photo.net
programmer application”

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Please comment on the following:

System Administrator

photo.net, established in 1993, is looking for a part-time Linux System
Administrator. If you like the site and the community, this is an
opportunity to help out and get paid.

We maintain a cluster of about 14 Linux machines plus a load balancer.
Most of the systems are currently running Fedora Core 4 or RedHat
Enterprise Advanced Server 2.1 (the Oracle 9i machine).

We have an agreement with a local sysadmin company to do the basic stuff
of keeping patches up to date and monitoring for health and intrusions.
If you are not local to the Boston area, these guys can also be the ones
who go to the colocation cage when something physical needs to be
adjusted. If you are on vacation, these guys can provide coverage for
any procedures that you’ve documented.

What might some tasks be for the coming months? Upgrade to AOLserver
4.5 (compile some C code). Figure out a way to patch the firewall so
that a particular IP address, e.g., a robot, can’t tie up the server
with 10 requests per second. Come up with a strategy for archiving
server logs on a new NAS box (probably from Infrant). Come up with a
disaster recovery strategy involving pushing data periodically to Amazon
S3 and rented servers. Come up with a monitoring strategy so that slow
or stuck server processes get restarted and so that denial of service
attacks are repulsed. Replace CVS with Subversion.

We anticipate that this job should require 10-20 hours per week.

Please email a cover letter stating salary requirements and your resume
(in plain text or HTML preferred, PDF is acceptable, Microsoft Word we
can’t read reliably) to philg@mit.edu, with a subject line of “photo.net
system administrator”.

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Please comment on the following ad, suggesting changes that would make it more specific/appealing.

Director of Community

photo.net, established in 1993, is looking for a part-time Director of
Community. If you like the site and the community, this is an
opportunity to help out and get paid.

The Director of Community is responsible to recruit and supervise a
network of volunteer moderators for the portions of the site that
consist of reader-contributed content. Note that we already have a
substantial group of volunteers on staff. You will report to the Editor
in Chief.

You will be responsible for maintaining a productive tone and
constructive environment at photo.net. Everything that readers post
should be a sincere attempt to help other readers. You will be drafting
policies and procedures as well as training new moderators.

Excellent written communications skills are required as well as the
ability to use Web forms for administration. No programming skills are
required, though it would be good if you were able to specify new
features so that our programmers can implement them.

We anticipate that this job should require 10-20 hours per week.

Please email a writing sample, a cover letter stating salary
requirements and your resume (in plain text or HTML preferred, PDF is
acceptable, Microsoft Word we can’t read reliably) to philg@mit.edu,
with a subject line of “photo.net director of community application”.

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I’m planning on running the following advertisement for a database administrator for photo.net. Comments on how to make the ad better would be appreciated.

Oracle Database Administrator

photo.net, established in 1993, is looking for a part-time Oracle
database administrator. If you like the site and the community, this is
an opportunity to help out and get paid.

photo.net runs a 50 GB database on a dual-CPU Linux server running
Oracle 9i. Over the next few months, we would like to upgrade to a
slightly more powerful physical server and Oracle 10g. We also face
day-to-day challenges of improving performance and adding services for
readers.

Experience maintaining the Oracle RDBMS in a production environment is
required. We would prefer to hire someone who is currently
maintaining multiple Oracle servers and would simply be adding ours to
his or her work rotation. Unix/Linux experience is required.

Given that we are a distributed organization, we like to see clear
documentation and prefer to work with folks who write a page or two
before starting to code or type at the shell.

Experience with RDBMS-backed Web sites is a plus. It would be nice if
you were able to write Web scripts to test out and/or create reports
from the database. We primarily use AOLserver Tcl scripts, which
shouldn’t take more than a few hours to learn if you have experience
with Perl, PHP, ASP, or any other Web scripting environment.

We anticipate that this job should require 4-8 hours per week for
someone experienced with Oracle on Linux.

Please email a cover letter stating salary requirements and your resume
(in plain text or HTML preferred, PDF is acceptable, Microsoft Word we
can’t read reliably) to philg@mit.edu, with a subject line of “photo.net
database administrator application”.

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