Older blog entries for apenwarr (starting at number 80)

Weasel Words

Adrian had some interesting comments about how if someone doesn't say something in the simplest possible way, there's probably a reason.

Someone asked me today about a comment I made in one of my papers, and I thought about it in those terms.

Windows, although of course nothing is perfect, makes a great desktop system.

I'm trying to appease two opposite types of people with this sentence: people who like Windows, and people who don't. There are lots of IT people in both categories. I need to bring both of them around to agree that our system is better, at least in this particular case. See all the things I'm doing with only a few words:

- Nothing is perfect. Of course. I've got nothing against Windows, you know, but...

- Windows makes a great desktop system.

- Windows, by implication, doesn't make such a great server system, or I would have said it "Makes a great system" or something.

- Windows' imperfections are less important than its greatness; that's why it's a subordinate clause instead of the main clause or an ending.

- The end of a sentence sticks with people more than the middle (this is what subordinates subordinate clauses in the first place). We end on a positive note.

- The next sentence is about server vs. desktop, not imperfections, so the end of the sentence leads into the next one.

Okay, so maybe I massively overanalyzed this one. But massive overanalysis is what I do, really. The real question is: was I really thinking all that while I was writing, or did I just make it up afterwards and make it sound good? That answer is the key to my personality, I think, so don't expect me to just give it away. :)

Obligatory Correlation to Coding

For the advogato audience, here's how it all ties into programming. I wrote earlier about restructuring to simplify a design not really working, because you lose all those hidden details that deal with the many special cases.

Well, there you go. When you're looking at a program, ask yourself why it's so complicated. Give people the benefit of the doubt. Sure, maybe you can find a better way to do it. But make sure you first know what "it" is.

Religion and Non-compromise

Today, while wandering down the street, I accidentally learned about Falun Dafa (aka Falun Gong), a Buddhism-influenced religious movement from China.

I won't try to explain their whole story in as much detail as it was explained to me. But the part that stuck with me (probably due to selection bias, of course) was their explanation of persecution by the Chinese government. Some religions would explain it away as "There's a reason for everything", or "God is punishing us", or whatever. That view never really worked out too well for me. But my local Falun Dafa representative explains it this way: "Suffering is always wrong; there is no good reason for it. But when there must be suffering, the right thing to do is to endure it, not try to avoid it." And then, of course, you launch an international campaign involving millions of people to try to get rid of the cause of the suffering.

Why is this interesting? Because it parallels my earlier comments on stupidity: when stupidity is forced on you, as an individual you have to take the "less stupid" of your available options. But it's the core stupidity itself that is wrong; that's what forcing you to do something stupid yourself. You have to make the root cause of the stupidity go away.

What does all this have to do with programming? Uh, er, use your imagination. But it all fits together in the end.

On Naming Things

If I had a battleship, I would name it the HMCS Impediment.

Slogan: "It's mostly the name that gets in the way."

Design Requires Persistence

People were teasing me a bit over the last few days because of my insistence that the room where we were relocating my desk was "evil." This wasn't me being a pest and refusing to move - this was the simple fact that the room's layout so violated my sense of aesthetics that I had to, in good conscience, refuse to work there.

Since I finally understood things back in August, one underlying, general rule has become extremely clear to me: good "design" consists of finding a way to satisfy all the constraints at once. I've always known that choosing a side in an argument and violently adhering to it, in opposition to other goals or other points of view, just felt wrong; but I had thought the alternative was compromise. It's not. In a compromise, your solution has each side giving in, so that nobody loses too badly. But the right solution to a problem, in fact, is a solution in which both sides get exactly what they want, despite how the two might seem initially to be opposites.

It is not about sacrificing the good of the one for the good of the many, or vice versa; it's the sacrifice itself that is wrong. You have to find a way that the good of the one is served perfectly at the same time as the good of the many.

In the end, after many hours, with advice from many people around the office (who tried to be helpful, despite visibly tolerating my obsessiveness) we finally found a "right" solution: no desk had to sacrifice itself to an inconvenient orientation, and yet the room at last found its coherency.

Was this worth it, to fuss for hours just for the trivial details of the layout of a single room? No, probably not in itself. But the larger purpose was to test myself, and to prove a point. The most important lesson of my life so far is that you don't have to settle for contradictions. This is not a lesson that has stood unchallenged. Better than that: it has been challenged, and it won.

Implementation Details

Special thanks to mich, whose tolerance was not visible, and, moreover, who actually did the work of "implementing the final design," so to speak.

4 Nov 2005 (updated 4 Nov 2005 at 04:32 UTC) »
Restructuring

It often seems like a good idea to throw out all your code and start again; especially when you just took over someone else's code and it's now your job to maintain it. The reason it seems like such a good idea is that the problem space sounds so simple... but the code looks so complicated. So you throw it away, and write it from scratch. That's when you realize why the old code was so complicated: there were lots of special cases for all the weird bits that you didn't realize were part of the problem space in the first place. So your rewrite gets big and complex too. If you're very smart, at least it eventually gets to be better than the original; but even then, it takes a long time to do. And if you're unlucky, your rewrite is merely bigger and slower, not better.

Companies are the same. Company processes are designed and encoded (eg. through forms or software systems) over a long period of time, and they cover lots of weird special cases. When you look at the problem space, it sounds so simple, and you wonder why the solution has to be so complicated. So you throw it away and start from scratch, redesigning a bunch of things to better align with your way of seeing the world. But it means you've lost the benefit of all the tweaking you've been through over the last few years; perhaps your overall model is better, but the surface details are lumpy, inefficient, and downright wrong at first. If you're very smart, hopefully it eventually gets to be better than the original; but even then, it takes a long time. And if you're unlucky, your redesigned company is merely bigger and slower, not better.

With any great redesign, you have to be constantly on the lookout for mistakes. No new design or implementation is perfect right from the start. The biggest danger is to assume that it is, and find out only very late that you're wrong. (That way is called the "waterfall method," and it's very inefficient.)

Looking for a job in Toronto?

Speaking of restructuring...

NITI has a job posting for a QA Manager in Markham, Ontario. If the corporate version of the job description looks uninspiring, see instead my version: Evil Death Ray. Actually, Evil Death Ray is a "QA Person", while the new job is "QA Manager." But the idea is the same, only more so.

You'd be working on testing our award-winning Nitix distribution of Linux, the only one that has ever been successful in servers for small business. Yes, we are open source friendly. And you'd get to play with our super fun, room-filling Project Death Ray test cluster. As well as annoying me, one of the shoddy developers whose code you'd be breaking.

Roadblock Analysis and the 80/20 Rule

I've written down this theory a few times in a few different places, but I still don't think I've explained it clearly. Here's another try.

For years people have been talking about the magical 80/20 rule of business: that 80% of your revenue comes from 20% of your customers, so you should find out who that 20% is and focus your attention on them. When you do, you magically make more money.

Nobody, of course, has ever offered me any evidence of this; only, "Wherever you look, it always turns out to be true. It did for us." This is suspicious, because it implies a selection bias, in which people have a natural tendency to only look for evidence that supports the specific thing they're trying to prove. For example, in the 80/20 rule, the 80 and the 20 measure different things; they don't have to add up to 100%. The 80/30 rule or the 90/40 rule are just as plausible as the 80/20 rule, lacking any additional evidence.

But I'm willing to accept a weaker formulation: the majority/minority rule. The majority of your revenue comes from a minority of customers. There are all sorts of reasons this might be true, most obviously the fact that most customers are small and therefore a few larger customers add up to more money than a few smaller customers.

Roadblock Analysis

I recently learned a rule, obvious in retrospect, that is critical to understanding business. Let's define a "roadblock" as a convincing reason not to buy. In that case the following must be true: no customer will buy your product until you eliminate all of his roadblocks. How do I know? If you invert the statement, it's obvious: if there remains a convincing reason not to buy, the customer will be convinced not to buy, by definition, and so will not buy your product.

This is important: if you solve 90% of the roadblocks for 100% of people, you don't have 90% of people buying your product; you have 0% buying your product. "Roadblock analysis" is my name for a process that I certainly didn't invent: the process of identifying a group of people (a "market segment") and the complete list of their roadblocks.

Now, in reality, people's needs are distributed randomly, and your features are distributed randomly, so some people will have their roadblocks solved just by random luck. But not most of them.

Note that roadblock analysis, unlike the 80/20 rule, is not magic: it's just a simple, logical statement. If you do eliminate all the reasons not to buy your product (remember, many of these reasons are non-technical, such as "I've never heard of your product"), then they will buy your product.

Why 80/20 Works

Once you understand roadblock analysis, you can understand why following the 80/20 rule (whether it's precisely 80% and 20% or not) actually helps. It's like this: the current customers who actually make you the most money are the ones who currently have zero roadblocks for many of their situations. The others are the ones who currently have more than zero roadblocks, at least for most of what they do.

People known to have more than zero roadblocks might in fact have lots of roadblocks; maybe hundreds of them. Who knows? But people who already have zero roadblocks in many cases probably have near-zero roadblocks for a bunch of other related things. It just makes sense; they probably do a lot of similar things, so if there are many situations where your product fits, and some situations where it doesn't, you can probably improve just a few things and solve those problems too. Not so with the other 80% of customers; for those, by default, you should assume you're nowhere close.

80/20 is a Random Process with Convergence

Repeatedly following the 80/20 rule causes you to converge on the closest market segment to the randomly-selected customers you originally chose.

That is, you start off by spamming the market with a technology-driven product that does something cool; you find out who buys it; you optimize it for those people; you find out which of those people buy it; you optimize it for those people; and so on. This is a feedback control system which will eventually converge on the local maximum market segment. Notice how the 80/20 rule, by focussing on a smaller and smaller subset of customers each time through the loop, decreases the "hop size" each time. This is a well-known technique for guaranteeing convergence. As we know from calculus, this kind of method works pretty well: but the local maximum is often very different from the absolute maximum.

Characteristics of 80/20 Solutions

The 80/20 rule is a major management fad at the moment, presumably because it works much better than completely random guessing about which customers are important, which is what most companies would resort to otherwise. After all, a simple mathematical method that gives a very high probability of making an existing product even more profitable is nothing to sneeze at.

But 80/20 solutions will show some very specific tendencies, which you can see all around you by looking at your favourite companies.

- The tendency to annoy about 80% of customers by ignoring or mistreating them. (In this case, the 80% is real, because companies define their strategy by literally choosing the 20% of customers they will care about.)

- The lack of new customers. By focussing on very specific existing customers and never implementing features someone else might want, you limit your ability to attract new ones and slowly get further and further away from other market segments.

- The irresistable tendency to move "upmarket." The one thing this algorithm guarantees is that when you have one big company and one small company as a customer, the big company will always win. There's no way any one small customer can land in the top 20% of your revenues. So you get more successful only as you serve fewer and fewer bigger and bigger customers.

This leaves a badly underserviced 80% vacuum at the low end, which in the software industry is basically the "small business" market.

The Missing Markets

Roadblock analysis is a more general method than 80/20 for finding and servicing a market, based on one important insight: there might be a huge market that you completely cannot serve right now because you left all of the customers in that market with a few, actually rather simple, roadblocks. These customers aren't in your top 20%, because all of them have problems.

The roadblock analysis method is much more risky than 80/20, in fact, because it's hard to know the list of all roadblocks you have to solve. It might look like there are only a couple of them, but after solving those, you might discover a dozen more. 80/20 gives you a virtually guaranteed path to expansion, albeit at an unknown pace; roadblock analysis guarantees nothing, but offers higher potential gain.

The Best of Both Worlds

Finally, the good news: if you explicitly choose a market segment using roadblock analysis, you can then use a variant of 80/20 to improve your performance inside that market segment.

In math, this is like choosing a better initial value for your convergence algorithm; if you give your algorithm a clue where to start from, it's more likely to converge on the "right" local maximum.

So there you go - no more magic.

Veiled Historical Reference

There's a lot of crazy, crazy people in this world. Trust me. I know.

Sigh.
20 Oct 2005 (updated 30 Oct 2005 at 19:31 UTC) »
Disturbing News

I got back to Montreal tonight and flipped on the TV. The local CTV news was just starting. One of their only two headline stories:

"Parents are demanding that the city place a crossing guard outside an elementary school... (dramatic pause) and it seems the government is listening."

Yikes! We need crossing guards now? Outside of our elementary schools? And the government is listening? What is this country coming to?

English Grammar is Almost As Dense as Perl

There, no kitchen is an island.

There is no kitchen island.

There is Kitchen! No! Island!

There is no island, Kitchen.

There is Kitchen Island, no?

No! There is Island Kitchen!

Kitchen is there. Island, no.

Is there Island Kitchen? No? Is Island Kitchen -- no, there! Island Kitchen is there, no?

...

So please don't ask me why compilers never auto-correct your punctuation.

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