Idolatry of Innovators Can Lead You to Foolish Places

Here's an insane thing I read on social media today:

Post by @inspiringselfcompassion
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The fellow who blocked the account above, Michael Darius, includes Apple pioneer, skeuomorph, and protégé of Steve Jobs in his Twitter bio. His actual opinion regarding taking notes during meetings is literally this:

The Wire GIFfrom The GIFs

Suffice it to say, design meetings are not a criminal conspiracy. His subsequent comment about the copious note taking that occurred after those meetings exposes the absurdity of the practice he's touting.

I can't recommend the practice of taking notes during meetings highly enough. Whether you're an pen-and-paper note taker (my preference), or someone who types notes on a laptop on-the-fly, you'll be far more likely that you'll know not just what you need to do, but how your work connects to the work of others if you capture the right information. Depending on your role (and I've found this to be more and more true as I've gone further in management), if you distribute your notes you can become the person that doesn't just keep track of agendas, but the person who sets and drives them as well. Depending only on your memory in a professional context is effectively trying to work with both hands tied behind your back. And that's before you even get into meeting length, subject, or any other attributes of meetings at work.

Taking notes isn't merely about recall, but reuse. One of the original reasons I started blogging 20 years ago was to have a public place to capture things for future use for myself. Writing blog posts about how I solved particular programming challenges over time gave me a resource that I could and did search to accelerate solving similar problems in new contexts as I moved around during the course of my career. While the earliest blog posts weren't about meetings per se, they did ultimately lead to my taking more notes in meetings.

Being a working professional is challenging enough without having to deal with cult-like hangups regarding note taking from the Dariuses of the work world. Do what you need to do in order to put your best foot forward at work. No employer who would impose such an arbitrary, stupid, and ultimately discriminatory requirement on how you process information at work is worthy of your time.

What We Left Behind in 2023: Mint

Intuit decided and announced last year that Mint (an excellent personal finance app that I've used since 2009) would go away. They've pushed CreditKarma (another Intuit acquisition) as its replacement along with putting a migration option right into Mint. You're also given the option to download all of your transactions as a CSV file, which should come in handy for exploring prospective replacement apps. Logging into Mint again after the migration is complete gives you a link to your Net Worth page (which at least as of this writing does not appear anywhere in CreditKarma's regular menu navigation options). This lack of menu option becomes pretty annoying pretty quickly, because the Net Worth page is also the only place you can access the Link more links that enable you to connect more accounts to CreditKarma. Unfortunately, Intuit also decided to leave Mint's budgeting capabilities behind in 2023 as well.

I began the process of exploring Mint alternatives for managing my personal finances within the past month or so. Copilot (the personal finance app, not the generative AI chatbot developed by Microsoft) is the one I'm looking into the most closely right now. Another one of my cousins is using PocketGuard. Another is trying out Monarch. One of the co-founders of Monarch is the former project manager for Mint, so that's probably what I will try next if Copilot doesn't work as well as I want.

Brief impressions of Copilot so far (in no particular order):

  • I hate the product name. Too much stuff already has Copilot as a name or in the name somewhere.
  • I like that they have a desktop app and a mobile app. In my limited usage so far, they've managed to make the experience across the desktop and mobile as close to the same as possible while still taking advantage of what iOS does well with touch.
  • By default, Copilot does not categorize an Uber Eats transaction as a Restaurant or Food transaction, so you have to add a name-based rule to make sure the app handles that correctly.
  • The initial set of categories Copilot supports does not include gifts or charitable deductions.
  • I really like the Year in Review and Month in Review features
  • The transaction list views also display whatever notes you've added to the transaction after a colon
  • I'm not sure if limiting their addressable market to iOS and macOS users is the best idea, but I think I understand why they're doing it (Apple users = money)

I'll continue to try the Copilot personal finance app for this month before I try Monarch and decide which to keep after that.

Great Customer Service Smoothes Out Bad Self-Service

Success at switching to a truly bundled Disney+ and Hulu experience (both with no ads) from the janky status quo where both services were billed separately and Hulu had ads but Disney+ didn't required the great customer service experience I had earlier today. In prior months, I'd made the mistake of following the instructions provided as the self-service approach to accomplishing this, and failed miserably. I switched from annual billing to monthly on Disney+ and tried to switch to the Premium Duo multiple times over multiple months, only to be redirected to Hulu and be blocked from signing up for what I wanted.

Today I tried the chat option (with a live human being) and finally got the bundle I wanted--and a refund for the price differential between the new bundle and what I'd been paying. It ultimately took being manually unsubscribed from both Disney+ and Hulu, which the customer service rep accomplished by reaching out to whatever department and systems she needed to, in the span of about 20 minutes. Definitely a 5-star customer service experience--unfortunately made necessary by terrible self-service options.

Plenty of companies almost certainly believe that they will be able to use ChatGPT (or something like it) to replace the people that do this work. But at least initially (and probably for quite awhile after that) the fully-automated customer service experience is likely to be worse (if not much worse) than the experience of customer service from people. I'm very skeptical of the idea that an AI chatbot would have driven the same outcome from a customer service interaction as a person did in this case. And this is in a low-stakes situation like streaming services (some number of which will very likely end up on my budget chopping block in 2024). High-stakes customer service situations will not have the same tolerance for mistakes, as shown in the FTC's 5-year ban on Rite-Aid using facial recognition for surveillance. These are the sorts of mistakes warned about in the documentary Coded Bias years ago, but I have no doubt that other companies will make the same mistakes Rite-Aid did.

In an episode of Hanselminutes I listened to recently, the host (Scott Hanselman) used a comparison of how AI could be used between the Iron Man suit and Ultron. I hope using AI to augment human capabilities (like the Iron Man suit) is the destination we get back to, after the current pursuit of replacing humans entirely (like Ultron) fails. Customer service experiences that led by people but augmented by technology will be better for people on both sides of the customer service equation and better for brands.

From "Quiet Quitting" to Loud Layoffs

One of the more loathsome inventions of the business press in this pandemic-impacted era of work is the term "quiet quitting". Ed Zitron is far more eloquent than I in expressing his fury regarding the term. But here is my own response to an article about a CEO complaining about the backlash he received to a LinkedIn post about firing 2 engineers who were working multiple full-time jobs:

"The Business Insider piece is kinda trash because they let the CEO posture and moralize. There's an obvious double standard for what CEOs are allowed to do versus regular workers and they didn't interrogate that at all. Perhaps some people work parallel jobs to make ends meet, but there are definitely folks taking advantage as well. The collusion of the press with business to invent this concept of "quiet quitting" still makes me angry. Having seen and been subject to layoffs [myself], stingy benefits, and being underpaid relative to my experience and skillset for a good chunk of my career, it's laughable to me that these companies expect loyalty for how little they offer in return. Even though I wouldn't do the parallel jobs thing myself, I can see how people rationalize it. They're just being as transactional with employers as employers have been with workers for decades now.

me in an online chat with friends from October 2022

Fast-forward to today and the news is filled with layoff announcements. PagerDuty literally quoted Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr as part of a blog post laying off some 7% of their workforce. Friends of mine at 2 other companies regularly in the news are now out of work. My own employer laid off a little over 2% of the workforce. While I am still employed, a number of people I've done great work with over the past 5 years are now out of jobs. As far as I can see, these layoffs do not have a thing to do with performance. And given the profit numbers some of the most prominent companies in layoff news have posted over the past couple of years, these are not cuts needed to ensure the survival of these companies.

Ed Zitron's take on what should happen to the CEOs laying off all these people seems extreme at first, but is it really? Microsoft posted record results for fiscal 2022, but they're still laying off thousands. Is it really the fault of all those workers Google, Facebook, and others hired during the depths of the pandemic (as if consumer habits were going to remain that way forever) that the pandemic loosened its grip and consumer behavior moved back toward pre-pandemic norms? Perhaps we aren't being skeptical enough, or critical enough of cuts of this size and scale. As often as we've heard about and/or read about "the business cycle", CEOs who make the kind of money they do ought to know better than to assume that

I survived more than a few layoffs back when the internet bubble burst (leaving an internet consulting firm for a new role just months before it declared Chapter 7 bankruptcy). The company I joined, a telecom equipment manufacturer, turned out to be at the height of its headcount. Over the 4 years I was there, they shed well over half their workforce (even as they acquired failing competitors). The friends of mine at those companies that lost jobs never seemed to lose them because of performance. The RIFs I would be on the wrong side of in later years never seemed to be either. In a world of work that long ago replaced pensions with 401(k)s, we are just numbers when push comes to shove.

Not every company is as honest as Netflix in modeling themselves after a professional sports team, and all that entails about the short shelf life of the average player. I've been working more than long enough to know that any company that refers to itself as a "family" is a company not to be trusted. This season of layoffs is just the latest reminder that what matters most in life are the people who matter to you and the people who treat you like you matter in return--regardless of the work you do for a living, be they family or friends. When it comes to work, we should enjoy it and do it well, but not at the expense of what matters most. If we're going to give loyalty, let it be to people who have earned it and reciprocate it, not to institutions.

Security Breaches and Two-Factor Authentication

It seems the news has been rife with stories of security breaches lately.  As a past and present federal contractor, the OPM breach impacted me directly.  That and one other breach impacted my current client.  The lessons I took from these and earlier breaches were:

  1. Use a password manager
  2. Enable 2-factor authentication wherever it's offered
To implement lesson 1, I use 1Password.  It runs on every platform I use (Mac OS X, iOS and Windows), and has browser plug-ins for the browsers I use most (Chrome, Safari, IE).  Using the passwords 1Password generates means I no longer commit the cardinal security sin of reusing passwords across multiple sites.  Another nice feature specific to 1Password is Watchtower.  If a site where you have a username and password is compromised, the software will indicate that site is vulnerable so you know to change your password.  1Password even has a feature to flag sites with the Heartbleed vulnerability.

The availability of two-factor authentication has been growing (somewhat unevenly, but any growth is good), but it wasn’t until I responded to a tweet from @felixsalmon asking about two-factor authentication that I discovered how loosely some people define two-factor authentication.  According to this New York Times interactive piece, most U.S. banks offer two-factor authentication.  That statement can only be true if “two-factor” is defined as “any item in addition to a password”.  By that loose standard, most banks do offer two-factor authentication because the majority of them will prompt you for an additional piece of “out of wallet” information if you attempt to log in from a device with an IP address they don’t recognize.  Such out-of-wallet information could be a parent’s middle name, your favorite food, the name of your first pet, or some other piece of information that only you know.  While it’s better than nothing, I don’t consider it true two-factor authentication because:

  1. Out-of-wallet information has to be stored
  2. The out-of-wallet information might be stored in plain-text
  3. Even if out-of-wallet information is stored hashed, hashed & salted, or encrypted with one bank, there's no guarantee that's true everywhere the information is stored (credit bureaus, health insurers, other financial institutions you have relationships with, etc)
One of the things that seems clear after the Get Transcript breach at IRS is that the thieves had access to the out-of-wallet information of their victims, either because they purchased the information, stole it, or found it on social media sites they used.

True two-factor authentication requires a time-limited, randomly-generated piece of additional information that must be provided along with a username and password to gain access to a system.  Authentication applications like the ones provided by Google or Authy provide a token (a 6-digit number) that is valid for 30-60 seconds.  Some systems provide this token via SMS so a specific application isn’t required.  By this measure, the number of banks and financial institutions that support is quite a bit smaller.  One of the other responses to the @felixsalmon tweet was this helpful URL: https://twofactorauth.org/.  The list covers a lot of ground, including domain registrars and cryptocurrencies, but might not cover the specific companies and financial institutions you work with.  In my case, the only financial institution I currently work with that offers true two-factor authentication is my credit union–Tower Federal Credit Union.  Hopefully every financial institution and company that holds our personal information will follow suit soon.

The App Store Economy Ain't Broken (So Don't Fix It)

I came across this article via Daring Fireball, and figured I’d post my two cents about it.  I disagree with the both the premise of the article and some of the specifics.

To the question of “why are so many of us so surprisingly cheap when browsing the virtual shelves of the App Store?” I’d say because quite a few vendors have conditioned us to expect high-quality apps for a fairly low price. It’s the same reason that the vast majority of people expect news to be free on the Internet.  Those news sources that went online with paywalls at the beginning (The Wall Street Journal and The Economist are two publications I read for example) are still doing just fine financially.  Those that didn’t are struggling financially (or going out of business altogether).

The idea that “we as cheap customers are having a negative impact on a lot of both real and potential businesses” is one I disagree with.  One, because the author doesn’t quantify the negative impact.  Two, because a potential business is a valueless unknown (and as such, can’t have any real weight in a discussion of what to pay for products from real companies).  I’ll certainly buy an app if I use it a lot (and/or get tired of seeing ads in the case of most games).  The benefit of the low pricing both to us as consumers and to app developers is that we can buy multiple apps that do similar things without having to think much about the cost (it’s why I own more than one photography app, for example).

I’m not a big fan of in-app purchases (especially after finding out how much my wife spent on a single game), but I don’t see much of a difference between that model and the licensing/subscription model that more and more software companies (Adobe, Microsoft) and others (Netflix, Hulu, Spotify, Pandora) are moving (or have already moved) to.  The author’s focus on social media apps and games leaves out more serious “service-backed” apps like Evernote, GitHub, Flickr, DropBox, Box, LinkedIn and Google Drive that let you use a limited set of functionality for free and pay more for additional features or storage space.

Companies who sell apps aren’t doing it for charity.  So if they’re any good at business at all, they’ll sell their products at a price that will keep them in business–or they’ll go out of business.  It isn’t our job as consumers to keep poorly run companies in business by buying their software.  And despite the author’s suggestion, paying for great apps now certainly doesn’t mean great apps later.

Recommended Listening: Derivative Dangers

If you want to know how long ago the seeds of the current financial crisis were sown, definitely listen to this episode of Fresh Air.  Terry Gross' interview of Frank Partnoy reveals not just how derivatives came to be unregulated, but who some of the players were in making it possible.  What may disturb you is how many of the people who made the current situation possible are playing key roles in trying to fix it.  Partnoy also authored F.I.A.S.C.O.: Blood in the Water on Wall Street.  He first wrote this book 12 years ago–before the collapse of the internet and telecom bubbles, before Enron, and the subprime mortgage meltdown that triggered our latest financial calamity.

Mark Cuban, Keeping an Eye on the Bailout

If you’ve been listening to NPR’s Planet Money, you already know about BailoutSleuth.com.  But in case you don’t, it’s a creation of Mark Cuban (owner of the Dallas Mavericks) to report on how the money allocated by the bailout bill is being used.

They’ve already discovered that we taxpayers won’t know how much the companies working on behalf of the Treasury Department are being paid because that information is redacted.

More Financial Crisis Info

I heard about this site on the financial crisis during an episode of the Planet Money Podcast.  They interviewed Simon Johnson (one of the co-founders) during “A Very Scary Cut–In The Interest Rate”.  The Financial Crisis for Beginners may be the best place to start.  Right near the top of that page, you’ll see links to both shows from This American Life I blogged about October 8 and May 28.

Understanding collateralized debt obligations

The best explanation of collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) I’ve heard so far comes from the latest episode of the Planet Money podcast.  I was driving to work at the time, so I don’t have the exact time index of it, but I think it starts at the 16 minute mark.  The whole episode is worth hearing too.

Wikipedia has something to say about CDOs too, but I prefer the Planet Money explanation because it does a great job of showing how just one CDO can connect widely disparate parts of the economy.

Bailout Price Tag Continues Rising

According to this story in the Wall Street Journal (it’s subscriber-only, sorry), AIG just got another $37.8 billion from the Federal Reserve.  That puts the price tag for just bailing them out at $123 billion.  This may be a sign that the $700 billion $850 billion may not be enough.

In other news, the national debt is now so high that the US debt clock has run out of digits.  I don’t know if the figure includes the spending on wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

More Financial Crisis Education

The reporters who did the Giant Pool of Money story have followed up with Another Frightening Show About the Economy.  Like the first show, this one is well worth setting aside an hour to listen to–much more worthwhile than the same amount of time spent watching network or cable news on the same subject.  The explanations of precisely what frightened the U.S. Treasury and the Federal Reserve into begging for new legislation are especially worthwhile.

Other worthwhile stories on this topic include:

Having listened to a number of episodes of Planet Money, it's proving to be a good podcast.  Each one is a lot shorter than the stories I mentioned earlier, so they're especially convenient if you haven't got a lot of time.

Planet Money Podcast

The “Giant Pool of Money” episode of This American Life I blogged about in May has apparently spun off an entirely new podcast called Planet Money.  If that first story is any indication, the new podcast will definitely be worth listening to.

The Giant Pool of Money

For a great explanation of the current meltdown in mortgages, definitely check out this podcast.  The two reporters put together a narrative that covers everything from a homeowner with a sketchy loan, up to a Wall Street exec who creates collateralized debt obligations (CDOs).

$1.67

That’s how much one (1) euro cost me yesterday when I was converting currency with Chevy Chase Bank for an upcoming trip. You know things are bad when even the branch manager is surprised by the rate of exchange. The exchange rate is probably even worse today. Even if I took out the fees they charged, the exchange rate is probably 20-30 cents worse than it was when I first went to Europe in 2005.

It reminded me of economics classes in business school, and what we learned about what countries do to defend their currency.  The Fed is doing the opposite of those things right now, so between that and deficits our government runs, I expect the dollar to be worth less and less in the near term.

Universal vs. Apple on DRM-free Music

A very interesting take on Universal offering DRM-free music directly instead of through iTunes. I think the writer is on target in describing the motives of Universal in cutting Apple out as a distribution channel.

If memory serves, the big record companies tried to push Apple into variable pricing not long ago. That move didn’t seem to work, as the 99-cent single is alive and well on iTunes.

The idea of Apple signing artists directly is an interesting one, but I don’t see Apple signing artists anytime soon.  Artist management is quite far afield from what they do best. It might violate their recent deal with Apple Corps too. That said, if Apple could make it easier and cheaper for indie bands to put their music out without violating that deal, they’d probably make some money they aren’t currently getting.  It might even help them sell more iPods (which is really the whole point of iTunes anyway).

Daimler-Chrysler: Another Failed Merger?

Today’s news brings word that Daimler may be looking to break up with Chrysler.  I find this particular merger interesting because it came up more than once in my MBA studies.  While the problems we studied had more to do with integrating two different engineering cultures and technology platforms, the financial wisdom of such a merger was always what I questioned.

I have a strong anti-merger bias, having been on both sides of such mergers at each of my last three employers.  I’ve written about them in this blog before.  Thanks to this transcript of a PBS NewsHour segment, it’s possible to look back at the time when this merger was fresh and new.

I found it interesting to read how positively all the guests viewed the merger at the time.  Not until almost the end of the segment do you find much skepticism about whether or not the merger will be successful.

Aston-Martin & Jaguar Changing Hands

There’s been quite bit of buzz in the press about the possibility of Aston-Martin (and possible Jaguar and Land Rover) being sold lately. It interests me not because an Aston-Martin has usually been what James Bond drives in the movies, but because of a negotiation assignment in business school. My final assignment was to lead a team of my classmates (we represented Ford) in negotiating the purchase Jaguar (another team of classmates). As it turned out, our negotiations failed (Ford and Jaguar stayed separate).

The negotiations failed because we I didn’t account for the interests of a few of the Jaguar execs who would be “redundant” in the new organizational structure (they wanted their golden parachutes). But a few of us, myself included, thought the numbers in the case study alone were a sufficient argument against Ford buying Jaguar. It’s been a couple of years since that class, but the recent sales talk feels a bit like vindication.

Bosses 'are deluded' over success of deals

An interesting title for this story I read in the Times this morning. The acquisition of my current employer (Aspen Systems) by Lockheed-Martin falls right in the area the story discusses (acquisitions of $100 million or more). The buyout is scheduled to close shortly, so I expect to find out soon enough what Lockheed’s plans are for us.

The idea of M & A activity not always creating additional value has been around for awhile. I remember reading stories like this in magazines like The Economist five or six years ago in the middle of the Internet bubble. I’ve only been working full-time for nine years or so, but I’m sure questioning the value of mergers stretches back far before my time.

Since news of the buyout came to us, I’ve been wondering what Lockheed sees in Aspen that they want. Our annual revenue is a tiny fraction of Lockheed’s. As far as I can tell, the thing about Aspen that Lockheed most wanted was the subject-matter expertise. A lot of the civilian agencies we do work for have essentially outsourced certain government offices to Aspen so we can act on their behalf. So while we aren’t an outsourcing power like IBM or EDS, we do occupy a similar niche.

I think Aspen gets plenty out of being bought Lockheed. The first thing is deep pockets. Even more important than the deep pockets is superior processes. We just achieved CMMI level 2 last month, while parts of Lockheed have been at levels 3 through 5 for years. Only time will tell if we help push the LMT stock symbol up.

Acquired

Last Friday, just before the end of the day, I found out that my current employer had been acquired. The buyer: Lockheed-Martin, the multi-billion dollar defense contractor and member of the Fortune 50. It’s the second time I’ve been part of a company that was acquired.

When I first heard the news, I thought back to previous employers. At Ciena, we were the buyer. I was there when they bought Catena Networks, Internet Photonics, WaveSmith, ONI Systems, and Akara. I worried less when we were the buyer because it usually meant that any “redundancies” would favor Ciena employees over the acquired company. Our managers and execs would always have meet with us to put the most positive spin on these moves. The acquisitions were revenue plays of course. When I left marchFIRST to join Ciena, it turned out that I had merely traded the Internet bubble implosion for the telecom bubble implosion. We merely delayed the inevitable layoffs a bit longer.

MarchFIRST (the former USWeb/CKS) was a different story. We got to be on both sides of the equation. While I was there, we acquired a strategy firm, and sold out Whittman-Hart. While it was spun as a “merger of equals” by the old CEO and the new one, it was as much a merger of equals as the DaimlerChrysler hookup (and even more of a failure, since not a shred of the combined firm exists anymore).

Since Aspen is so small (1700 employees to Lockheed’s 130,000+), I feel plenty of uncertainty as to what will happen next. Do they value Aspen as a single entity or will we be broken up? Is this acquisition simply a purchase of people and contract vehicles or something more? In the e-mail we got from our CEO, he said everyone would keep their jobs. But I have my doubts that we’ll keep two HR and accounting departments for any length of time. What happens after those duplicated positions go away is what I wonder about. I think it’s likely that after 3-6 months, the best technology people will be cherry-picked for other spots in Lockheed-Martin IT. I’m not sure what that means for me, but I feel better about sticking around to find out than I might have otherwise.