The Illiterati (was Re: Social Hacking [was: "Strong Scripting Skills" - a definition?])

[Roy S. Rapoport]

On Fri, Jan 30, 2004 at 11:18:06AM -0800, vraptor at employees.org wrote:
> My request was exactly as asked--I'd like to hear some "social
> hacking" stories, successful or unsuccessful, so we can all derive
> benefit from them.  I'm experienced enough to know that I can always
> learn something new, and benefit from others' successes and mistakes.

This may be more 'social' than 'hacking', but two examples that feel
relevant to me:

A) CURIOSITY 
I got my current job because a friend of mine mentioned to the CIO that I
was cool (n' stuff); the CIO visited my website and saw my media library,
and decided that anyone who was this into Pratchett had to be worth talking
to.  So, despite not having an actual open position, he invited me to spend
some time talking to him.  

Anyway, we were talking about the problems and advantages of being a
generalist and toward the end of the long discussion (it was scheduled for
an hour, it ended up being about an hour and a half), he asks "Oh, by the
way, I have an HTML form that I want to auto-submit after a certain time period
has passed.  Can I do that with Javascript?"

I have no Javascript on my resume.  I don't claim to know Javascript.

So obviously, I replied with "Oh, yeah."  Followed with "I mean, I should
let you know that I don't actually know how to do this because I've never
actually done Javascript programming, but based on what I know of the
language it should be possible.  I'll look it up and let you know the
details."  He sort of waved his hand and told me not to worry about it, to
which I countered that it'd bug me if I didn't know the answer.  

Later that evening, when I sent him my thank-you note, I included a code
fragment and a link to an HTML form I threw up that did time-expiring
auto-submission. 

B) FRUSTRATION
My job title here is 'Senior Software Engineer.'  I also manage a few
lower-level software engineers (two SE2s and one SE1).  I also am one of
the four people who manage the strategic aspects of our infrastructure,
though the actual day-to-day infrastructure stuff (we need a server, stat!)
is done by the infrastructure group.  There's been tremendous friction
occasionally between INF and DEV because, well, they're not perceived as
being all that competent.

Anyway, two things happened at the same time that were causing our top two
SSEs (me and my friend) to want to bang our heads into the wall:
1) Replacement of a dev server that's been malfunctioning for about six
weeks now has been dragging, with "next week" promises week after week
after week.  Finally, on Tuesday, we got a meeting notification request
from INF for a meeting at the end of the week to discuss the specs of what
we wanted (despite feeling that they could just send us the specs in email
for us to approve); Unfortunately, the head of INF (my counterpart) was
claiming that his boss (AKA my boss, AKA the CIO) wanted us to actually
meet for a sit-down on this topic.
2) INF wanted us to fill out a template covering lots of detail FOR EVERY
SINGLE APPLICATION IN OUR ENTERPRISE.  By next Friday.  And didn't tell us
what it's for (when we asked "is it for <X>? <Y>? <Z>?" We got "yes") or
what it's for (again, one of those 'yes' questions).  

What I *FELT* was that Infrastructure should be nailed to the walls with
rusty nails because they were A) Stopping us from doing our work by not
giving us robust hardware; and B) then requiring us to fill out a whole
bunch of information on the basis of what seemed like a whim.  

What I *DID* was talk to my CIO, the bridge between them and DEV, with a 
message that was basically "Hey, I'm frustrated because these things are
happening and I don't think I understand why they're happening.  Can you
help me figure out what I'm missing?"

Which
1. resolved the dev server issue by going back to them and saying "No, he
doesn't want a meeting, he just wants our OK -- email it to us;" and
2. helped us understand that what INF cares about for these apps is just
space requirements because they're trying to do space planning.  Well, OK,
that's a very different sort of situation (in the original concept, we'd
have had to fill out this information for apps that are meant to be used as
code, whereas here it's only for apps that actually use space -- like
databases, logs, etc).

For a while now, I've found that approaching things from a "I'm not sure I
understand this.  Could you help me, please?" rather than a "WHAT THE FUCK
ARE YOU TRYING TO DO HERE, YOU FUCKING STUPID MORON?" approach is helpful
in resolving these sorts of things.  Unfortunately, all too rarely I still
*think* "What the fuck ... " :)

-roy