How things were done in San Diego
Getting Fat
Photo by Joe Fikar
Bob and Alice - Anti-Design Patterns in Life, Love and Tech will soon be a book. Join other smart people who absolutely love Bob and Alice today.
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Introduction
Bob talks to Mark about falling in love with Alice.
Giganet is strapped for cash. We introduce the Getting Fat anti-design pattern.
Bob guesses what Alice does outside the gym.
Mark
Bob was the one who began.
“Mark, I need your help”, he said to the tall, lanky bald man.
“Let’s talk about Alice. Let’s talk about falling in love“.
Mark remained silent as they sat on the park bench.
In front of them there was the green calm of the park.
A man hungry for an answer, must stock up on patience.
A man in possession of analytical skills needs to listen. That is why Mark remained silent.
Mark was 20 years older than Bob. He was born and grew up in Mission Beach, San Diego. He had a photo of his mother and dad, Serena and Edward, taken in California sunshine, his dad in a marine uniform, but he said he had no memory of them. Edward was killed in Laos in 1970 when Mark was 3. Serena gave up her boys to a foster family, and moved to San Francisco to become a hippie where she died from a drug overdose.
It was how Mark, fifty-six and fired from Google a few months before, came to be sitting with Bob on a park bench in Venice beach.
Mark grew up on a surf-board.
His brother Ron, was a serious student, excelling in math and science, finishing high school valedictorian and going straight to a PhD in mathematics at UCLA. Ron married and moved North, where he became a professor of Mathematics and a researcher in cryptography at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey.
After high school, Mark enlisted in the Navy.
Mark spent 7 years seeing the world with the 6th Fleet and was discharged as an E-6 petty officer with full military separation pay and a tattoo on his left arm with the word Edna over a heart.
He returned to San Diego and he started taking computer science and networking classes at UCSD.
He took a liking to computers and a disliking to Edna and they divorced with no children.
An incurable romantic, Mark married Susan and divorced after 2 children.
His third marriage to Chiara, ended in another divorce and a daughter.
To get away from the bad vibes of 3 divorces and 3 children he didn’t want to raise, Mark moved to Seattle. He started freelance programming and rebuilding his life. A guy who knew a guy brought him into Microsoft to be part of the team developing the Netbios networking system for Windows.
After 10 years at Microsoft and vested in his stock options, Mark knew a guy who knew a guy and he joined Google to lead the kernel drivers team in the systems infrastructure group.
Without a college degree in a company, where a PhD in computer science was an entry level position, Mark became the go to man for complex programming projects.
His success rate was as perfect as he was quiet.
Mark speaks little and speaks politely.
This frightens people so much that they never question him.
Mark was called into his boss’s office on a Thursday morning. It was short and brutal. He was fired and out the same day. Sundar Pichai announced later that afternoon that Google was firing 12,000 people in order to focus on AI.
Mark didn’t care. He was vested in Google stock options and he didn’t need the money.
At Google, Mark and Bob became close friends. They would eat lunch together once/month at a hole-in-the-wall Mexican restaurant.
Mark was a childhood friend of the owner who had also grown up in Mission Beach.
Great food and sassy waitresses made up for the cheap cutlery.
How sassy?
There was a fine acrylic painting of one of the waitresses on the wall of the restaurant. One of the customers said thank you for the service, did her portrait and donated the painting to the restaurant.
One-on-one with close friends, Mark was a wonderful conversationalist who knew how to listen.
Over the years, their monthly lunches became a platform to talk about software, jazz and politics. Family was off-limits. Every so often, Mark would talk with pride about his daughter the doctor in Chicago, his daughter the software engineer in Austin and his oldest son, who was an indy rock musician of considerable success.
Bob called Mark and said, “I need to talk to you. I met a woman in the gym in Venice”.
Mark asked, “Where are you?”
Bob said, “We moved back to LA. I’m working with a small startup in Venice.”
Mark said, “I’ll fly down next week and we’ll do a system analysis”.
They met in a park and sat on a park bench in a quiet corner.
Finally, Bob began his story.
“I work out once/week at a gym in Venice. I met a woman there, Alice. It was random, but something clicked and I fell in love with her. Just like that”.
“Mark, I need your help”, he said to the tall, lanky bald man.
“Let’s talk about Alice. Let’s talk about falling in love. What do I do?“.
Giganet
The entire team; Barry, Iris, Bob, Lena and Yasmin are at the studio apartment facing the beach, working on the next release of the software for gig workers hour reporting.
The engineers are in the living room. The servers are in the cloud.
Barry, Bob and Iris in the kitchen.
Iris is bent over a stack of papers, reading glasses perched on her nose. Iris is wearing a sweater, designer ripped jeans and black stilettos. Barry and Bob in company-logo t-shirts, jeans and running shoes.
Bob, “We need someone to take care of DevOps”.
Iris, “How much would it cost? I don’t see how we can afford another head at our current monthly recurring revenue rate”. Bob throws out a number.
Iris, “We can’t afford that”.
Barry, “If we get that contract with Los Angeles County, we’ll have the money ”.
Bob, “What’s the probability of closing?”
Barry, “About 60%”.
Iris, “Until we get the cash, we’re not going to hire. Bob can handle DevOps for us”.
Bob, “I just gave you a $60k convertible note. I don’t see how I can do DevOps without compensation”.
Iris, “What do you propose?”.
“See, Iris, the situation is not that unusual, " Bob said with an innocent expression.
“I don’t know how to put it delicately, find more revenue or figure out how to put a big peg in a small hole”.
Barry thought that Iris was going to take a swing at Bob and punch his lights out.
Barry said, “That’s enough” standing up.
Iris was saying, “Barry, I need to know if he is on our side or not?”
Barry handed Iris his phone. “Here, you want to shoot him, go ahead”.
The Getting fat Anti-Design pattern
A design pattern is a template for creating solutions in different situations. For example, an IKEA cabinet with its little tools and instructions is a design pattern.
An anti-design-pattern is a template that guarantees failure in different situations. For example, not reading the IKEA papers and losing the little tools.
Introduction
Getting fat
Adding more resources to a technology project delays delivery
The Denver Airport Baggage System project in the 1990’s is an extreme example of how adding more resources to a complex project is doomed to failure.
A 16 month delay added $560M USD to the cost of the airport. By Aug 2005 the system was scrapped completely. A manual system was cheaper.
Adding more people in the middle of a technology project is a bad idea for 2 reasons:
More things can go wrong
Mis-estimation of effort required
More things can go wrong
The more parts in a system, the more interactions you have.
Mathematically - the number of potential interactions is N(N - 1) / 2 where N is the number of pieces in a system. For example, in a system with 100 pieces, there are (100 * 99) / 2 = 4950 connections.
That’s 4950 places for a system to fail and go wrong. Some of these will be single points of failure. That means that if a team is responsible for a particular piece of technology that is critical to the success of the entire system then if they fail, the entire project fails. If they delay, the entire system delivery delays.
This is a powerful argument for KISS - Keep Things Simple Stupid.
When you add more engineers to the project, the communications costs go up geometrically, like the number of interactions.
Collaboration and communications between the different teams becomes more complicated and slows down the work. Organizational politics can kill you.
Mis-estimation of effort required
More people make a system more complex.
What happens when you attempt to estimate the behavior of a complex system ?
You get underestimation.
Bias makes the project late.
Cognitive bias causes underestimation in 6 ways:
Confirmation Bias: People tend to seek out and interpret information in a way that confirms their preexisting beliefs or opinions, while ignoring or discounting contradictory information.
Availability Heuristic: People tend to overestimate the importance of information readily available to them, such as recent or vivid examples, when making decisions.
Anchoring Bias: People tend to rely too heavily on the first piece of information they receive (the "anchor") when making decisions, even if it's irrelevant or arbitrary.
Overconfidence Bias: People tend to overestimate their own abilities, knowledge, or the accuracy of their beliefs and predictions.
Loss Aversion: People tend to strongly prefer avoiding losses over acquiring equivalent gains, leading to risk aversion and potentially irrational decision-making.
Dummy Effect: People with low ability at a task often overestimate their ability to execute a task. Complex systems being changed makes everyone a ‘dummy’.
Conclusion
Getting Fat is a common anti-design pattern in technology development projects..
Adding more resources to a late project makes it even later.
This is due to complexity and cognitive bias.
How do you mitigate Getting Fat ?
Make simple designs
Hire as few people as possible.
Make as few changes as possible.
Have people on the ground participate in change and problem management. They know the truth and are not biased like project managers with political agendas.
Tuesdays with Alice
Bob is back in the Venice gym.
It’s Tuesdays with Alice.
Alice is working on an elliptical machine when he comes in and parks his bike by the ping pong table.
He finishes his circuit and they take a water break.
Alice is leaning against a pillar in the gym. The old USC sweatshirt and tennis shoes.
Alice smiles and says, “So Bob, have you figured out what I do for a living?”.
Finally he said, “You’re a lawyer”.
She had rehearsed this moment.
She would turn to him, saying “Good guess!. What gave it away?”
But she didn’t.
She turned towards him with her phone in hand and said, “I'm an attorney with the FBI working anti-money-laundering cases”.
Bob, “Impressive! Tell me more about your work?”
“It’s pretty boring most of the time. A lot of paperwork and dealing with FBI agents building cases. I’m waiting for a promotion to head of department for the West Coast anti-money-laundering operations. Unfortunately, it looks like my boss is not going anywhere. I could stay assistant general counsel for another 10 years”.
Bob, “Let me walk you to your car”.
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