I can't get this out of my head

The opening of Badly Drawn Boy's song "Everybody's Stalking" sounds just like an Alice in Chains song... I think it might be "I stay away". "Got me wrong" maybe?

Why keep hanging around?

There's a pretty large contingent of people who read USSM and hate it. For whatever reason, good or bad, it just reaches into their brain and throttles the angry part. As a result, they spend a lot of time writing us horrible emails and bad-mouthing us.

Whatever.

What I don't understand, though, is why they insist on coming back. They clearly think it's a waste of their time, but they're unwilling to do anything else.

Some people hate and love us. You can go back through the comments and find that the guy who likes to savage us for not being on the right side (their side) of topic X have written comments about how much they agree when we've written articles about the subject. The sin, it appears, is to not be on their side all the time, or... I'm not not sure what it is.

Some of these people I've had conversations with, and they go like this:
Hater: "I hate you guys, you're all a bunch of morons and I don't know why you have any readers..."
Me: "I'm sorry you feel that way. There are many other places you might find yourself happier, like x, y, and z. In the meantime, please consider not reading our site, as it clearly makes you very angry."
Hater: "No way, I love the site!"

I don't get it. I feel like we should have some kind of CNN/MSNBC/etc-style news ticker that scrolls by the top, constantly repeating obvious things like "We condemn use of steroids -- We're not stathead zealots --" with each one linking to an article where we handled the topic at length.

I'd update the FAQ, but no one reads that anyway. Oh well.

King 5: horrible registration example

When you run a web site, you never want to ask people for more information than you have to. If you're signing them up for an email newsletter, you only really need their email address, and that's all they want to give you.

King 5 is a local Seattle TV station. To register for things like being able to see some content, and junk like that, you have to provide:

Email address
Confirm it (bleah)
Password
Confirm password

That's reasonable enough.

Then it requires:
First Name
Last Name
Gender
Year of Birth

So immediately, in that first section, that's too much information that you can be fairly sure they're going to use to go out and buy up your demographic data. THis is then followed by (still required):
Select your favorite hobbies or interests. Check as many boxes as you would like

and still more personal information.

Address
Country
City
State
Zip Code
Telephone
and
Typically, how do you get your copy of a local newspaper?

If you weren't convinced something fishy was going on before, well, this should set off all kinds of alarm bells. Telephone number? Really? What possible reason do they have for requiring my phone number?

It's crazy. I suspect King 5 must suffer a massive abandon rate. There's nothing they could possibly keep behind such a registration wall that would justify me giving up that kind of information (unless I make it up).

It's almost as bad as their newscasts.

Even people who leave represent your company

I realized that there's another hidden cost to hiring bad people that shows up when they're forced out: they give a company a bad name. I hadn't thought much about this until today, but it's true: my opinion of a set of companies is colored greatly by the people I know from work who've left that company.

Say your employer hires a couple people from Company X over a few months, and they're all competent but the most inconsiderate jerks: they insult people in meetings, spend much of their time forming little conspiracies, and in general act badly. That's absolutely going to affect your opinion of that company -- even if they were forced out of that company for not being good fits.

This makes for a particularly weird phenomena. Consider a dying company with a large, reasonably competent IT department.
Healthy: normal flow of people out of the company.
Early signs of decay: increasingly more of the best people leave. The outside perception is that employees leaving the company are unusually good.
Getting sicker: more and more of the good people take off. They join other companies and help bring other good people on. This company may not be viewed as a goldmine of potential high-quality employees
Needs hospitalization: employees of all stripes are leaving voluntarily and being laid off or forced to leave. These quality of leaving employee drops in general, and so does the opinion of those leaving it.
Deathbed: all the last rats who couldn't get a job gnawing on any other corpse swim to the job marketplace. No wonder the company went under, if that's the kind of person they had working for them.

This is another reason why it's so important to be super-selective in hiring. Even if you've got an unusually frisky HR department that's good at forcing people out when a bad hire gets in, those bad hires then carry your company's name at the top of their resume when they start pounding the pavement, and you get a reputation. Then when you want to get a new job, you may find that the market's prejudiced against you, so if only for selfish reasons you should look out for this possibility.

That's a quick turnaround time

So I wrote a short story and posted it on USSM today (tonight?) about trying to erase the stats of players on steroids. I posted it at midnight, and it took 16m before I got my first complaint email. It's almost like writing for Prospectus again.

The B employees hire C employees...

Microsoft is often held up as an example of good hiring practices. They have long, tough interview loops. They used to ask a lot of brainteaser-like questions. They're intended to be far too tough, and to reject qualified candidates if it means that it prevents bad employees from being hired. I work at a company with Microsoft DNA, and we believe a lot of the same things.

Of course, that only works for so long: there are only so many rocket scientists out there. When Microsoft grew like crazy, it was reasonable to expect that they'd hire people who weren't up to snuff of the original hires, because the company had two options:
- staff up like crazy, lowering standards but keeping them high, and take over the universe with an army of people who on average are still pretty great, or
- with only a few super-smart people, limit severely the scope of extremely high-quality things they could do, and see what happens

They chose the first, and it's worked out for them. In a company where incentives were heavily based on stock options, and the stock price was heavily powered by explosive raw growth, it makes sense.

For a long time, I refused to consider working at Microsoft on general ethical grounds, which -- and this is outside the scope of discussion -- I eventually overcame. But even as an outsider who didn't want to go there, I had a lot of respect for them. I know a lot of people who work their, and they're all smart, smart people. When I interviewed there years back at the start of my IT career and didn't get past the screen, I was okay with that. I've gone back and considered working there again.

Which brings me to today.

I worked at AT&T Wireless for five years in a number of roles on the software development side. Some of the people were great, but the company as a whole was pretty messed up, and there were some things that were just horrible:
- the leaders made inexplicable decisions
- everything was political and getting work done often involved a lot of poisoned knives
- the incompetent were promoted as fast as possible, while the competent were often punished for being right

If you could find a good team to work on, and a manager who could protect everyone, working in that bubble was okay. I wish I'd left much earlier, but that last year-and-change I really liked my team, and it was hard to go.

So to my point: one of the huge problems AWS had was hiring to fill slots. People were valued by the number of reports, so everyone hired like crazy and we got a lot of horrible people, and that made life miserable for the good people, and then they left... bad stuff.

Starting a couple years ago, every once in a while I'd hear about someone getting hired over there that would cause me to pause. A developer, say.

Now it's all over the place: the worst people I knew at AWS are now at Microsoft, and they're bringing in all the people they were comfortable working with. It's like seeing a cancer spread from the outside, but what am I going to do, write Bill Gates and say "Hey, you've got this clearly malignant growth on your company..."

I don't know how much time I give them. I don't know if Microsoft might be large enough that this kind of thing won't affect the giant engine of commerce.

But here's the thing: it's the end of Microsoft if Microsoft is voluntarily giving itself cancer. Even if someone at Microsoft today saw this post, went through the rosters and purged everyone they'd hired with last_employer=cingular, something's changed that these executives are being hired and they're able to get their equally bad minions hired on. Something's gone horribly wrong. Their immune system isn't working, and it's not one random staph cell or something with a funny fake nose-and-moustache disguise strolling around, it's a convention.

This is why hiring standards matter, and why companies must actively seek out and destroy bad hires that get through the screen and then make the screen better. And why I'm glad I don't own MSFT stock.