I’m a little buried. Life has been crazy and I am out of town again. Actually traveling today, so I’m republishing Abolish Disjointed Time.
I am still not happy with DST this past spring.
Author: way0utwest
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A New Word: Exulansis
exulansis – n. the tendency to give up trying to talk about an experience because people are unable to relate to it – whether through envy or pity or mere foreignness – which allows it to drift away from the rest of your story, until it feels out of place, almost mythical, wandering restlessly in the fog, no longer even looking for a place to land.
I try to avoid exulansis in my verbal stories, but I know it doesn’t always work. I actually ran into this recently while traveling to a volleyball tournament as a coach. I wasn’t talking with a player, but rather a parent, talking a bit about my fatigue and challenges. On the 22nd of June, as I chatted about life, I realized I’d only been home for 7 days that month.
This parent was a lawyer, primarily working in Denver and rarely traveling for work. They took vacations, but those tend to be spread out, where as this trip was my 4th of June. I realized as I tried to talk about the experience of crossing time zones and the world back and forth that this person couldn’t relate and my point was being busy and needing to catch up on chores, as well as dragging a bit at the tournament. The travel experiences across time zones weren’t really something that they could relate to.
Interestingly enough, another parent heard and asked me for some tips, as they were about to embark on 3 cities in 3 weeks for work. They didn’t have exulansis from my story.
From the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows
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HIPPO vs. Data
One trend for many organizations is to be data-driven. This means using data to make decisions at all levels, or at least support those decisions. This was popularized by many companies, and there is research to back up the claims that those organizations who do this have more success, more revenue, more profitability, etc. Much like DevOps, however, it seems many organizations don’t want to actually invest in making data-driven decisions.
Instead, many opt to make decisions by HIPPO. If you’ve never seen this acronym, it stands for highest paid person’s opinion. Many managers will defer to whoever is above them in the org chart, often someone that is paid more money than them. Even when there is data to make a different decision, the HIPPO is still used.
It’s not just management. I sometimes see technical people do this. In that case, it might be the loudest or most senior person rather than the highest paid, but the sentiment is the same. Rather than using a lot of information, someone makes a decision based on what they want/see/need/desire. I’ve seen this often with tooling, where one person likes Jenkins (or hates it), and the organization changes from (or to) Octopus Deploy or Bamboo for no real reason. Lately, it seems some people are advocating moving from Azure DevOps to GitHub Actions because, well, I don’t know why. There’s not a good rational reason.
The goal of collecting and using data is to do so intelligently and with purpose. And not just for big decisions, but for everyday actions. By senior managers and frontline people, to help guide a more efficient and effective company. This involves a lot of technical work, but also cultural change. We have to position data as a strategic and tactical asset that everyone shares and uses as the basis to make the entire organization better.
Of course, these are similar to the concepts of DevOps. Let’s build software better. In practice, many attempts succeed initially but fail later as more and more groups fight individual incentives that promote one group’s goals over another’s. When silos aren’t broken down, we fall back into the same patterns.
In this case, listening to (or lobbying) the HIPPO.
Steve Jones
Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Stitcher, Spotify, or iTunes.
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Creating a Speaking Failures Support Group
Earlier this week the emails went out to speakers who submitted to the PASS Data Community Summit 2023 conference. These were acceptances and rejections, letting people know the results of the volunteer review.
I got this one:
I had only submitted one session after being buried last year, and I assumed (we know what assume means) that this one would get picked. It wasn’t, and that’s OK.
A Speaking Failures Support Group
I know I’m not alone. I’ve had many speaking submissions rejected. From big conferences and little ones. It is disappointing, but I’ve learned not to take it personally.
I know this is a hard message to get, especially for less experienced speakers. So I decided to a) publicly disclose my rejection, and b) create a place to get support.
Since I am the editor of SQL Server Central, that’s a natural place for me to do this. I set up a forum for a Speaking Support Group, which you can use to post questions, ask for feedback on your submissions or ideas, get spell/grammar/phrasing help from others, commiserate with fellow speakers, and give them support/encouragement to try again.
Feel free to join me there, and comment on my first post, hopefully telling me to not take this too personally.
