trendpreneur

As someone who can speak to computers, it can be hilarious — yet frustrating — fending off the badly-aimed approaches of ‘business guys’ who want to make the next Twitter or eBay clone, and believe it’s their $deity-given right to attract a flock of programmers to do the hard work. Now, I’ve come to realise that the tech side of a startup is clearly not the only hard work, but it’s certainly not trivial, and in many cases it’s crucial to the venture’s success; brand new businesses whose development model involves outsourcing the whole thing to Estonia scare me on a fundamental level.

Anyway, that leads me nicely on to this article on recruiting programmers by a Hacker News contributor. (HN readers are largely the technical kind. This article is “how to speak to people like us”. It’s very good.)

In summary, although you should read the whole thing if you’re a business type looking for a technical collaborator or two: be aware that you don’t really know the technical difficulties, so don’t “just” need a “quick” or “easy” implementation of…; embrace the techie’s ability to help you find the solution, rather than dictate it; try to code or prototype up some stuff yourself, not only to get a clearer idea of the specification, but to earn respect; make it clear what you bring to the table; get a techie to read your posting over and remove any buzzwords; and remember that engineers are just human beings.

The important thing to remember if you’re an idea looking for an implementation is that you are just that — an idea. Ideas change, and coalesce, and take shape differently than you originally planned. If you’ve no code, no customers and no market validation, writing a 50-page detailed product specification and throwing it at a programmer, while expecting not to pay him or her, just won’t work. Plenty of engineers have a healthy interest in the business case too, and it’s their time they’re investing, so it’s important to be clear on why that gamble will pay off.

Depending on whether you’re looking for a project implementation (the techie walks away once their code is written) or a long-term collaborator (far better IMO), you can also test drive and do some brainstorming and a MVP, prototype or similar to see if you could work together in the long run. Some of the startups I’ve seen have basically rewritten their entire codebase every time a new techie takes on the lead role, which is just plain inefficient, although unavoidable in some circumstances.

The key lesson from all this, however, is learn how to talk to engineers. Learn what they value, what gets them excited, and how to earn their respect; learn how to motivate them and what their long-term ideas may be. An engineer that’s drifted into five, ten Open Source projects probably has a fairly free-flow model of collaboration and participation, and your own expectations may not match up to the way in which they usually operate. Even if the techies you become familiar with don’t end up helping you out, it isn’t wasted time at all, as it helps you find someone who you’ll ultimately work with far more efficiently — and happily.

(A side note, none of this really touches on how to find engineers when you’re a business guy in a Soho office without any nerdy friends. Hacker News is a good place online, and check for local meetups or technical events; join the mailing lists of projects you’re interested in, and just listen for a while; drop into IRC channels, attend lectures and talks, or take part in technical workshops. Failing that, become an online gamer!)

Oh dear. Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. Not only did I commit the cardinal sin of writing a “N Things” article, I even promised a part two that never surfaced. So, here’s the long-promised followup to “5 Time Management Hacks Worth Noting” from March this year, inspired by a recent Dumb Little Man post about creating more time in your day.

As I’ve become more enmeshed in running my company and trying to maintain a healthy interest in the surrounding world, keep a grip on the big picture, stay in touch with what’s around the corner while also ensuring I have clean underwear, my mum remembers she has a daughter and (dare I say it) getting some “me time”, the keen reader may have noticed I’ve had less time to blog over recent months. Poor time management in practice! However, I’ve managed to find a little more time in the day of late.

The key things have been setting a regular time and goal to do things (“blog once a day, first thing”), and scheduling in tasks. Rather than expect I’ll “go for a run sometime this week”, I’ll actually schedule it in for Tuesday afternoon, and suddenly… it gets done.

I’ve also suffered from multitask-focus-drift of late, branching off from task to task in a Choose Your Own Adventure style escapade, then forgetting what the overarching goal was. I started writing down my goal for the morning and afternoon (I operate on a maker’s schedule) and even writing down major sub-goals or separate tasks. Glancing at this notepad when I have thirty-seven tabs open and forget what I was doing really helps. It also helps to use multiple desktops within OS X to ‘hide’ unproductive stuff that can time-sink – I have two separate Firefox windows, TweetDeck and IRC are hidden, etc.

At the very least I’ve also learned to procrastinate productively; it’s got to the stage where pretty much everything I need to be doing has some productive value, so even if I’m procrastinating by answering emails, they’re emails that needed to be answered.

Until I invent a time machine, this will have to do.

(This is in response to a discussion I had yesterday and then an amazingly similar post by Nicholas Lovell on the same theme.)

So here’s the deal. You’re a smallish startup. Everyone counts. You don’t take hiring decisions lightly; you employ someone because they’re a great fit and the best at their job. In other words, they really matter. They help you build a great business, they establish a ton of contacts with the outside world and become part of the ‘face’ of the company. Internally, they’re part of your company.

Then they turn round and say “I’d like six months off, please, for personal reasons” — and you legally have to let them take it, and take them back again afterwards.

This just doesn’t fit with how startups work at all, and to be honest, if I was that deeply enmeshed in a startup, I wouldn’t want to hurt the company by having kids. If I knew children were likely to be in my near future, why would I even take the risk of joining a startup at all? Hence a self-perpetuating glass ceiling, and on it goes.

The logical thing to do as a startup owner is to hire regardless, and if a woman decides to have a child, replace her as if it’s permanent (according to the stats in Nicholas’ post, it may as well be). Then when she returns to work, treat her as an awesome skilled employee alongside the replacement. The company will have moved on and jobs changed anyway, so you can’t just “step back in” so to speak. Of course, this leads to politics and Drama, doesn’t it?

It seems way easier to find a replacement permanently, than “oh your job only exists for six months” (in this regard, 3 years is easier). And obviously some roles are easier to fill than others, a talented engineer probably would be replaceable on a temporary basis whereas a salesperson/COO isn’t. You could also promote internally (not like startups have complex organisational structures) and replace the promotee, and figure things out when the maternity leaver comes back. The bigger problem to me is funding. You’re basically throwing money away. Ideally, you’re investing in an excellent employee, vital to your startup’s success — but it doesn’t always work like that.

The crazy thing is I hadn’t even thought about all this. I’m a female startup founder, and I’m certainly not having kids in the near future. Despite the proliferation of baby avatars among my Facebook friends, I tend to forget other people want them, and that as an employer it can cause all sorts of trouble. It certainly hadn’t occurred to me that the very existence of maternity legislation makes it hard for all women. I can’t even legally say in a job interview that I don’t intend to have children within 5 years, can I? (And who’d believe me? Everyone knows women are fickle, hormonal creatures.) Argh. Can, worms, presto.

Elephants, stealthy creatures one and all, have been cropping up a lot lately, so I’m running with the theme.

What’s the elephant in your room?

We all have big, nasty problems that are either horribly current or just around the corner. We know they need to be dealt with, tackled, met head-on with a stiff upper lip; but instead we choose to pretend they’re not there, in the hopes they’ll just go away if we wish hard enough.

Now, sometimes this does work! Usually when the problem is time-based, or contingent on a decision, and the “la la la” approach wastes enough time to make it all moot. Oh, I’ve been guilty of this, but I always feel terrible afterwards. Instead of facing up to the situation, I just let it… happen without me. Instead of taking the risk, I wait until the risk isn’t a question, and convince myself I wanted the safe route all along. (So even when the approach works, it doesn’t work satisfactorily).

I started feeling a lot better about the elephants in my life when I started confronting them, though. It turns out half the time they’re not even elephants at all, but out of the corner of my eye, when I’m looking the other way, they seem gargantuan, insurmountable and infinite. Turns out when you start looking closer, they’re really quite manageable.

A talk at TEDx Edinburgh today reminded me of how cool Freegle (formerly Freecycle, in the UK) is. Since not everyone has quite as greedy a ‘free stuff’ radar as I do, it’s possible some people haven’t heard of this concept. Basically, if you’ve ever had that guilty twinge as you threw something out — “I’m sure someone could use this, if only I could find them” — Freegle is there to help. Post an email to the list and most of the time someone will be listening, ready to take it off your hands, and usually very conveniently (they turn up and take it away, saving you effort).

I’ve given away a couple of things and received a few more through Freegle when it was Freecycle, and it’s a great system, making you feel a little bit warm and fuzzy as well as either getting free stuff or free space. Hurrah.

Of course, like any economic idyll, there are problems. One such is reflected in the shift from Freecycle to Freegle, which Wikipedia just about tells me was due to American Overlords ousting long-serving UK volunteers who refused to kowtow to rigid systems ^{[citation needed][neutrality disputed]}. (In fact, one gets the impression from the Wikipedia page that Freecycle itself is almost a nasty piece of work, getting mired in trademark disputes and corporate funds rather than focusing on its key goals. Freegle seems not to suffer from this, fortunately.)

Another is part of the unfortunate hassle in listing and giving away items; I’ve often seen comments about no-shows and the like on the Freegle lists. I’m guessing that because there’s no value associated with the transaction, people can change their minds and just not turn up — one way around this that I’ve seen is for people to hold reserve recipients in mind in case the top choice doesn’t turn up, rather than relist. A problem with listing a popular item is the ensuing flood of responses — I remember seeing a laptop of some sort going, and the lister decided to give it to the most deserving (which is fair enough), a child in hospital. Still, sorting through all those emails, even the ones that come after the item’s long gone.. I don’t envy that. If your email system is anything like mine, I’d almost recommend using a separate account just for this stuff, or it gets crazy.

Still, despite these minor bumps, Freegle is great, both from a giver’s and receiver’s perspective. So next time you wonder if you really should throw that old router away… list it, give it a few days, and get someone to come round after you’ve had your tea and take it off your hands. Hurrah!