growth....
growth.
Livingston: I know it was your sixth company, but was there anything that you
found you were better at?
Greenspun: I think I was probably mostly worse at things than I thought. The
VCs had a point when they said people remember how you made them feel
more than what you said.
Managing programmers is tough. That’s one reason I don’t miss IT, because
programmers are very unlikable people. They’re not pleasant to manage. In aviation,
for example, people who greatly overestimate their level of skill are all
dead. You don’t see them as employees. J.F.K., Jr., is not working at a Part 135
Philip Greenspun 341
charter operation because he’s dead. It’s not that he was a bad pilot; it’s just that
his level of confidence to level of skill ratio was out of whack, and he made a
bunch of bad decisions that led to him dying, which is unfortunate.
In aviation, by the time someone might be your employee, probably their
perceived skill and their actual skill are reasonably in line. In IT, you have
people who think, “I’m a really great driver, I’m a great lover, I’m a great programmer.”
But where are the metrics that are going to prove them wrong?
Traffic accidents are very infrequent, so they don’t get the feedback that they
are a terrible driver because it’s so unlikely that they’ll get into an accident. A
girlfriend leaves them—well, it was certainly her deep-seated psychological
problems from childhood. Their code fails to ship to customers. It was marketing’s
fault!
If a software company dies, you can blame the marketing people.
Programmers almost all walk around with a huge overestimate of their capabilities
and their value in an organization. That’s why a lot of them are very bitter.
They sit stewing at their desks because the management isn’t doing things their
way. They don’t understand why they get paid so little. It is tough to manage
these folks. But on the other hand, there are better and worse ways to do it. If
you want to ensure that the customer gets high-quality code and that the product
is high-quality, you have to step on these younger folks’ egos and say, “No,
that’s not the way to do it.” The question is, how harsh can you be? I could have
been kinder and gentler for sure.
I think I was good with the customers. That’s one thing: I realized that businesspeople
didn’t have any ethics in a fundamental way. Forget how they dealt
with me and other stuff, but here’s one example where I realized that having
basic ethics was an operational advantage. There was one customer that didn’t
| ← agreeable personality. They | want to pay → |