The Long Goodbyes

Quite a long time since I posted, apologies no excuses, I could certainly do with the practice.

Today some of my favourite colleagues are leaving, they are part of quite a sizeable group of people that have been trickling off since the start of the economic recession - well about 3 years ago for us. I work in the aerospace industry and most of my colleagues have worked in it over 15 years, to explain the general length of service here, three of our accounts ladies retired this week they had clocked up over 90 years between them!.

Restlessness in the UK

However things change and work habits in all industries are changing. But I wonder when we look back if we will notice the effect of this recession in the general movement or restlessness of people in the UK. At the beginning of the recession and when people realised the loss their savings, I notice several parents in my children's school were notifying each other in the playground that this would be their child's last term, they were moving if not abroad, then into the countryside. There was at least 4 or 5 from both the children's classes that left which is usually over a the 12 years we have known the school, a rare event.

I suppose it's not really surprising that a global economic crisis changed some peoples plans. Sometimes it takes a push to make a change to your life and it may only take a small event in the workplace or a public event to set you planning a different plan for the future from the one you woke up with in the morning. 

Smarten up or ship out

Although it has not been overnight, I have noticed a change in the way people are expected to behave in the workforce. I started working in software when you could wear your pyjamas to work and no-one would care. Now many software companies expect you to wear "office-wear". In fact through lack of work and fear of redundancy everyone has felt the pressure to "smarten-up", though for some of our best techies this is not possible and they have become vulnerable to redundancy rounds as a result. The crisis has meant a greater adherence to conformity by senior management not willing to take risk with more "exotic" people and of course their ideas.

One sad and emerging trend however impractical is the expectation that the young will work for free to get experience.  People will be staying on in the workplace in the future, long after todays current retirement age even though the young and fit are already finding it hard to keep on top of todays diverse workloads. A great generalisation I know, but in particular the young and the old for varying reasons can also find strict conformance and regulation over extended periods more stressful. 

Diverse Attractions

In order to deal with the new levels of age in the workplace it would seem there should be a change to working practices, but part-time work a common method of employment for older workers is being used by employers to cut costs to employ people who would rather work longer hours. My experience of working part-time tells me that there is no such thing a part-time workload, just a more intense shorter working day. If after years of lip-service to gender diversity we were doing better, the outlook would look better for age diversity, but without little evidence of the success of policies to attract women to senior positions in a company which should be reasonably simple, it is difficult to see how one ensures that companies would create successful policies to attract the elderly. 

Not Playing Ball

Witnessing the restlessness of people one thinks of the idea of mobility, some of us can move job, home or country. It may help to move, to improve a persons life chances, but when getting there to the new job or country,there is no guarantee that they will find working experiences up to their expectations. Nowadays with higher general education few people envisage a life working at a fast-food restaurant for ever, this was just a step to doing something better. The problem appears to be that there are not enough steps to go round and the competition is so fierce that some of the really clever  people just stop competing.

Back to the root

At the end it is the feeling of loss, these people that are leaving of course, cannot be replaced. They bring their experience and their network of relationships their personalities and and they are unique. It is unsettling, so many goodbyes over such a long period of time, and with it the impact on the  change of my work and social environment I understand that people move on, the feeling that people are up-rooting, specifically people with big roots, has been slightly disturbing. The mainstays of our PTAs, local societies and children of elderly parents are moving and for those left behind the worry of how we will cope without them. I hope when the dust settles and the jostling for position post-recession is over, that there will be some focus on the value and contribution for those that could not move, a sense of belonging and a power of autonomy that today's ever more educated and healthier people appear to so desperately desire. I am hopeful that we may see a society that encourages and provides means for people to participate, one that truly demonstrates that it values its diverse peoples, and their health and well-being, and to stop the restlessness, a society where people will want to put down roots.

An Evening at Horse Guards Parade. European Space Solutions Conference

Just a quick post on my thoughts after visiting the European Space Solutions Conference in London -@ Westminster Hall. I went as a space fan - i wasn't there to represent my company. I saw the tweets about the conference, that it was free, and that there was food - So I took a day off and visited.

The last Glass.
I went to the evening function on the first day Monday and met the great character Paralympian Tennis Player Peter Norfolk also known as "The Quadfather". I was really interested in the space and disability theme that was being discussed on this first evening. Unfortunately it was a short and packed meeting in a small dome-like tent on Horse Guards parade. Peter got stuck in a corner, and managed somehow to miss getting a glass of wine, which had run out by the time he had finished his speech. He was very upbeat and was happy to talk to me, as a software engineer, about the sorts of technologies he thought was of interest to himself, and some of his disabled colleagues.
The Cost of Autonomy 
The word autonomy came up quite a few times in the conversation. Peter said he thought that tools giving better autonomy to the disabled individual were probably the most desirable to obtain a better quality of life. During the conversation I asked he thought the main problems were with the current tools/technology provided for the disabled at the current time. "The cost" he replied. Most of the technologies proposed to assist the disable were very expensive and out of reach for most individuals.
On further discussion it appears that Germany have a large amount of the current development in this area. some SME  firms that have been looking into technologies such as autonomous wheelchairs.
Caring about the Carers.
I kept thinking to myself about this "cost" of developing technologies. Surely if the technology already existed wouldnt it be relatively cheap put things together "maker" style. Perhaps if it was agreed to donate licences to use a technology for non-profit or charitable purpose?.
The other subject I briefly discussed was if not a technology to help the disabled what if there were technologies for the helpers and carers. Some disabled people of course, due to their disablity, would never be autonomous. Peter is part of an elite sporting fraternity in spite of his disability, the differences inside the disability community may have differences of opinion regarding the sort of help that would be useful from the technological (space) community.
Re-cycled Cardboard.
After I spoke to him I thought about the cost of some of the top class formula 1 style wheelchairs that had been created for the atheletes. I then thought about the article I had read in the economist about the cardboard bicycle -economist. I wonder if we would be able to build cardboard resin dipped wheelchairs for £5 in the way the bicycle designer was hoping to do for his budget bicycle market. Perhaps we could print custom individual wheelchair seats on a 3D printer with cardboard chassis parts. With a few like minded individuals we could resolve some problems that have, up till now seemed insurmountable - isnt that what space engineers are trained to do? After my glass of champagne hobnobbing amongst the great and good of space and sport I feel I certainly have a lot to think about, I hope my colleagues will feel the same way..

Going Backward to Go Forward-Your Tech Community Needs You

Sometimes to go forward you have to go back they say, this is of course true with regards to trying to pull all your experience together to make better judgements. Sometimes no matter how long you have been looking at a type of problem there is a new one that just doesnt fit into all the old categories.
Now I am not doing so much coding I am dealing with people and feelings and the delicate issue of how people work best within a tech community. This is all quite a new experience so I am trying to find a formula to follow where my judgment seems to limited. To be honest I liked being a techie without too much human interaction, but we have run out of people to represent us so I have found myself shuffling to the front of queue to defend our behaviour and culture and just why we can do great things without too much intervention or at least why we are not and never will be the service industry.


It is difficult when you turn round and you are the oldest, when only you can remember this or that breaking technology. When all the senior managers even the directors start to be younger than you. This is where I guess, you have to step up. This transition is difficult.  Some of start trying to dress a bit better. Scruffy is ok when your a techie - who cares, when you're young its even a bit glamourous - over forty its not the same thing. What to wear can be problematic and to be honest if you don't really like/care about clothes or the way your look its like a complete surrender to the enemy or at least a slow torture.

Anyway get past the trying to tart yourself up enough to pass unnoticed in the business community is a good thing. Then you can start making small impacts and influences, by attending the meetings that many of us techies are not invited to ( usually for fear of making a scene- or divulging some terrible techical faux pas a customer or subco/director may have made) anyway usually we're persona non grata - translated that's software engineers. I just wanted to say really, that all due respect to people that go for this option, its not a betrayal we do need you. At this point we are desperate for people that can explain

 the complexity of a task, to senior management and the protection and needs required for the teams that must carry out its implementation. We are looking for philosophers to explain the values of certain approaches and psychologists to demonstrate how people need to be supported to be able perform to the levels we need them to perform. Above all we need people that respect the mental health, wellbeing and stability of the technical community however eccentric and demanding it may seem to business management. This kind of representation can only come from within. As a techie be prepared to represent your software community, your community certainly needs you.

The Sound of Mathematics

Keeping it simple

We were talking today at work about holding some lunchtime learning sessions. My colleague offered to give a lecture, this will of course be really interesting, but as an experimentalist physicist his slides usually have lots of equations. I asked if he could keep the equations to a minimum  just to keep most of the audience with him. He agreed this would be possible but he said perhaps to retain interest for the average engineer he could try to animate the equations. I looked this up seems its an old idea equation animation -I guess good mathematicians can read the equations like musicians read the score of complex orchestral piece, they can interpret the notation directly in their head as they read. 

A picture speaks Wordles 

This sparked a thought in which a general audience could benefit from the visualisation of his equations in perhaps a "wordle" type visualistion where the main actors appeared in clouds of different sized text. Dealing even more with abstraction I wonder if it is possible to visualise a set of equations purely by colour. Where repeated numeric constants or functions could be represented by muted or bright tones. If it is possible to view groups of types of equations would they have a distinct patterns of colours. Would the patterns describe anything/mean anything to us.To research these results would we need new disciplines artists/digital retouchers with pantone charts to tell us more about the results from discerning different hues and intensities.

The Sound of Mathematics

Following that train of thought, if we substituted sounds for different, repetitive functions and constants would we be able to hear the difference between a groups of equations from different disciplines, would they sound different - would there be a coherent or recognisable sound. Would we need teams of people with perfect pitch to analyse the differences between the "musical" pieces these groups would
 produce. I am not sure we could say immediately if this would be of any benefit to anyone. I hope we can try this out, I am looking forward to the new lunchtime learning sessions, looking at these equations from my colleague if we are translating these ones to colour maps I may need to bring my sunglasses!.

The Show must go on...

A little bit of Panic  

Panic - The Smiths
I can't put my finger on it but, there seems to be a little panic in the engineering community at the moment. The need to do more for less is not new, in fact there's not much new in most of the current developments. However it is getting difficult to get new people in  For some reason the highly experienced community are pulling back and instead of reassuring and leading, they are retiring or changing career. 

Options and Possibilities. 

For new recruits the reality is that the work pace is so fast due to cutbacks and understaffing that only the swiftest can keep up. Retention is proving difficult even in the current climate. First to leave were women who couldn't find an acceptable work life balance or sufficient flexibility after having had children to be able to continue their career. In software we have been more accepting of team members with versions often not classified as autism and aspergers but it is getting more difficult for them to be selected for the new teams due to the pressure,lack of support or just understanding. As the intellectual community talks of ethics and diversity, the man on the street as a result of economic crisis, is becoming more demanding and less accepting. This attitude reflects a retreat from risks, real or perceived means a very real shutting down of options and possibilities. A cult of individualism believes that it is possible to exist and heroically achieve great things alone, that it is not necessary or inadvisable to get involved with the community, and in some cases this is believed to be detrimental to the individual. When an individual has good health, and a good source of income, and little dependencies, this system of belief may prevail.

If all the world is a stage..

A cult of individualism looks for a hero or a star. I have worked with heroic and brilliant engineers and also some excellent stage actors that had incredibly powerful star charisma. Although both can make a good project excellent, neither could replace the structure required to ensure a productions success. A good project like a theatrical production is a complicated organic and willful beast.  To explain the need for cross discipline teams and high engagement, I keep looking for answers in the arts, in particular the theatrical spectacular. Having been involved in amateur dramatic productions in the past in different roles actor, stage manager, director, set-painter. I am still in awe of how many hours of effort is put in by so many, to bring a performance to the stage for sometimes just one one evening.

Prepare to Recover 

One play - (which i have mentioned in a previous blog) had so many setbacks including the loss of venue, players,illness and romantic liaisons it seemed  a good outcome was impossible. Even now I am not sure how it succeeded but I do know it was not myself that "pulled the rabbit out of the hat". It was the most disparate group of people I had ever worked with, - well almost ;) - from opinionated pensioners to sulking six year olds, who at the start were not particularly easy to get on with. At the end, we had a full house on all three nights with the highest praise from the author himself. What was interesting of course is that no-one was paid anything to do this. In fact people mostly covered their own expenses and gave their time for free.

Big Community

So what relevance does this have to space. Space is not the "big community" referred to by politicians looking for free support services, although some do volunteer their time for free, people also have to be paid in order to make a living. Space has a community in the real sense with diverse groups of stakeholders and part of it is the space industry, it must be able to pay its way, there must be the ability for people to get paid work in space. Having said that for most people I know that work in space, they are not there for the money.

Lessons Learned The Hard Way

So if there are lessons to learn it would be for me the following, the space industry is a creative industry, therefore all the planning in the world cannot always predict the kind of problems that will arise in new technology projects. Developing the ability to recognise and recover from errors or mistakes of judgement as quickly as possible is essential. I have also found the following advice very useful.

• Limit the expectation from the individual. 
• Make it possible for people to contribute in the way that they want in the amount they can.  
• Have a plan and be prepare to change it when its wrong. 
• Keep saying thank you, you should never underestimate the effort that people are making, most people have other responsibilities than your activity.
• Don't make assumptions about anything, in particular technical or creative meanings- "get it from the horses mouth" as they say.   
• Make sure everyone gets something out of it. Even if you don't get a moment in the limelight your contribution should be recognised by the community.
• Talk about and advertise what you are doing. Never pass up the chance to tell people about what you are doing and how you would like them to get involved. It is important to share your enthusiasm.
• Be careful about the non-negotiable - if you find yourself in central role, don't bet everything on one project this includes your family/your health. Space industry complexity relies on you having more than one project to refine your skills.
• Some teams you work with, have different tools, deadlines and languages, the skill is to ask them to translate the important things they want you to know well, and for you to translate your stuff in a suitable accessible format for them.

Finally..

• Always remember why you are still working in this industry, people such as musicians, writers & actors amateur and professional alike, believe their work is highly important, work in the space industry has significant importance to understanding how to protect humanity, as space workers we need to put in the best performance that we can in whatever circumstances that are thrown at us, humanity requires it -  the show must go on.

The Show Must Go On..

When a Project Fails.

I guess if you work in any industry long enough eventually you will work on project that fails. I have worked on two which failed in different ways. Both were painful to leave, but it was only by leaving  that some remnants of sanity was retained.
The first project was first the one that I worked in related to the space industry. I was around 33 and had had quite a few varied jobs (at least 10) before starting work there. It was a huge culture shift from being the oldest in a dept to becoming the 2nd youngest. In my last job my colleagues had gone on holiday to the usual overseas destinations, in my new team Wales and Devon were the most common destinations, and office romance was not an option here.

Up until then I was used to coding a good few pages of modules every day.when I arrived in the office my PC had no compiler on it and I had to sit for three weeks with documents to read - pages of abbreviations and document trees to learn. I started  to look for another job immediately but home life was difficult at this time so I stuck it out.

Over time I got to interact with the teams, there were two other women in the dept and approx 18 men. Everyone seemed to want to code but most were doing documentation. I didn't want to do code at this time but ended up getting the job leading a small cross-site team designing and coding simulations. The project was a precursor to a bigger project so politically it needed to succeed in case we lost the follow-on.  The project was large and complicated by legacy systems and they recruited a contractor to create a large UML model of the system, UML was a new methodology at this time and due to a colleague going on holiday - I got to go on the training session (with his nametag -he was a Dr.!). I was the only one to get the training which caused some problems reading the model.

The model grew and was managed by the contractor located at the other site. The network link to the other site was slow and the model grew harder to open. Eventually the model was so large no-one could open it. It was at this point they decided they should start the coding up in c++,we discovered that there was no-one at the other site that could code in this language, they decided to send some of the team on training. The project did not want us to code these functional modules at our site even though there was expertise there.

As it turned out that there was no money ring-fenced for the simulations work, and we had no equipment to put them on, luckily the other part of the site had upgraded their pcs and we took these pcs out of the skip, I was coding in visual basic using a free cover version from pc world we couldnt get the project to pay for a licence at our site.

We had a meeting at the other site and discuss the critical design review. The engineering manager was not present, he had starting to disappear on a regular basis and made excuses to not turn up to meetings. The contractor that had created and managed the UML model had a serious breakdown and left the project. I hadn't noticed, but the disintegration that was becoming contagious. I told our dept head i thought our team leader was having difficulties. The dept head told my team leader what I had told him. My lead wouldn't speak to me he was having family problems, he became increasingly off-sick and eventually went into extended therapy.
My dear friend and colleague who was a c coder was asked to do some c++ started to not talk to anyone about anything and became increasingly agitated. After a family bereavement he couldn't get it together was off sick for a long time, as he was a contractor he had to leave the company. The oldest chap in the dept. was starting to drink at lunchtime and slept all afternoon, he was one of the most experienced in the equipments but difficult to work with. In spite of the setbacks we managed to create a simulator product that simulated 100s of equipments with the help of three excellent sw engineers. Then the project was canned.

We had a meeting, the engineering manager had caved in and somehow the information got to the customer there was an "uncertainty" about our deadlines. This was most unfortunate because we all believed that we could have pulled this off, these were some of the most experienced and brightest engineers I had ever met. My sleepy colleague would start the morning with the times crossword and the telegraph one would be finished by 10 O clock. Then the brain teaser puzzles would be sent round by email. I was always playing catch-up.
The young debutant project manager gathered us together and gave us the bad news. The subcontractors would be let go and there would be a review for possible deployment of the permanent staff.
So what did I learn from this project?. Even now I don't know what I could do to make things go better, I think the recognition of the disintegration the small things that hold people together when things get stressful are important. This turned out to be the morning tea break where everyone squashed into the kitchen. Also the start of working in pairs. We implemented this on the next project to stop managers being able to put the blame for the delay of a complex item on one engineer - insinuating a capability problem. I also would say my trust in the wisdom/integrity of elders or senior members of staff is not as easily given.


Ultimately there is a limit to everything, no-one pushed the team harder than they pushed themselves -good management should have managed this culture before it imploded. There were people in the team that hadn't taken a holiday for years, this should never happen in a well managed company. In recent years I speak about breakdown and stress where I can, at work, in team meetings/general conversation. I know some people find this irritating, but 12 years on we are still no more sophisticated about mental health and stress working in this industry than we were then, we still don't consult psychologists/doctors in the workplace. I still hope things will improve, I believe talking about it in the workplace community, in particular putting it on the agenda at the company decision-making levels will be a start.

A 100 years Plan for Space.

Today I printed off the brilliant diagram from Rockwell International (discovered thanks to sc-ifi/sw tweep @StevePoling)100 year space plan  that shows the time line stretching from 1983 forward a hundred years. Its a vision of interdependent events leading finally to interstellar travel.
I put the diagram (after sellotaping it together in A4 pieces) on the corridor wall at work . Each time I looked over, someone new was studying it. Some projects that people had actually worked on were identified, and highlighted, and of course the rovers, were of great interest. Most importantly for me was that someone however madly optimistic they might have been, had tried to articulate something, that even now we are struggling to describe - a global space future.

You Are Here.

The problem for many of us working in the space industry is that the "You are here" relationship mapped to the rest of the project or industry in general is not immediately obvious. It is possible to work at one desk for many years with out really getting a grasp of what the people working in the bay next door are up to, or the where the project is currently heading. Although we have much better communication tools and technology it is not clear that gaining understanding of inter-dependencies and production complexities are any better addressed than they were 20 years ago. In fact there's a strong possibility that due to a number of factors, it could be much worse.This is an opinion of course ;) but in the space community there appears to be a "clicky" culture in that you will belong to one group or the other either by nationality,discipline, gender, culture or all of them. If you're not in a group you're on your own and in general this is not a good place to be in space even if you're quite self sufficient. As a female software engineer I am used to being a bit of an outsider, but its also possible to identify many other outsiders not defined by gender.

Nice To Have, Difficult to handle

I tried to do a bit of investigating on why this happens, and there is a lot of research on-line on building effective communities based around -bit of a jump here - "diversity in schools". It appears that by bringing in different more balanced quotas of genders,race,class, culture or nationality does not necessarily bring an integrated community, in fact it can increase gang membership and bad relations in the community. mcgraw-hill article To counter this behaviour it was found that it was effective to build infrastructures where individuals could collaborate cross-community, this consisted of projects specifically set up to increase the possibility of socialising and working across the different community groups. Great care was taken to ensure that these collaboration projects were supported and given a high priority in the day-to-day planning. None of this information is rocket science of course but for some reason in the industry there still a belief that community interaction is a "nice to have" and not a necessity.

Heros and Villains

For the community in space there is an added element to the understanding cross-cultural behaviours, there is often the need to explain something complex a concept, details or other difficult elements to the other group. Language, behaviour and attitude in the cross group relationships becomes an essential part of the outcome. One aspect that is difficult to ignore is the stress. The space industry like many other industries is often underfunded for the almost impossible requirements,that now need to be satisfied, to achieve our new space project objectives. Some people behave well perhaps even heroically in a stressful situation and other do not.  If looking for a good project outcome it is advisable to prepare with some kind of "health check" for both behaviours!. 

How many lifetimes?

Anyway back to the 100 year plan - when i look across and see the effort made by one small group of people to explain a vision of the next 100 years and its complexities it helps to put things into perspective. Each of us has such a short time to contribute to this vision that requires many lifetimes to fulfill. Following in the footsteps of engineers that started this task, it is humbling to see how much was achieved with so little. I believe that much past achievement was realised by teams of engineers working closely together. I hope working against the current cult of the individual, we too can achieve this high level of collaboration required to face the challenges ahead in space.

Tough Without a Team

A few weeks ago, I was having my hair cut in "Ayshes" in the Stevenage indoor market when there was a power cut, not all the market, just the shop units on one side, which included the hairdressers. Its an old-style hairdressers womens side on one half of the shop, men on the other -around 6 chairs on each side. In the dark without hardly any discussion, (apparently this had happened before) they picked up the chairs and I found myself seated in a "bus like" arrangement in the middle of the market place with my grey nylon cape and wet hair.
Sitting surrounded by the quiet industrious hairdressers in the market place made me think how much I missed working in a team.
A team of individuals
In the sort of environments I work in, usually the "team" really is a group of individuals with different and sometimes conflicting objectives. Improving the team spirit is difficult as the individuals on the team are highly competent, and educated, and often do not see the need to collaborate, and some feel that they will be be slowed down by working in a collaborative way. For some this of course may be true.
It is interesting that there is often a focus on a modern advance or tool which appears to be a desire to leapfrog a community or discipline to avoid interacting or consulting whether this is a secretarial or administrative group or technical group usually proposed as a cost saving exercise. Under the pressure  to make quicker decisions the decision-making groups  round the table are smaller and less diverse and more increasingly compliant to senior management sentiments.
Skeleton team
Increasingly due to costs, the skeleton team is now a mainstream approach which means you may be in highly skilled team but there will be only one member from each discipline. In the current crisis there is a resistance to take on trainees or lesser-skilled people as there is no time designated for people to train them. The lack of a technical community to discuss your problems can be stressful, also,when arguing cross-discipline it helps to not be the only one in disagreement. If no-one else understands your point of view you can be seen as obstructive or difficult. Having your work peer-reviewed by your own community helps build your confidence and promotes discussion. Processes are difficult to enforce on the wider community ie. adhering to naming conventions/configuration control if you are the only one in support of this sort of basic quality, improvement initiatives, you may just be seen as being  "picky".
Pushing the Limits.
With a tough isolating work environment that is currently evolving it is also important to have good emotional support at home, family pets etc. (easier said than done!). Its now common to build technical community networks that transcends a place of work. Techies usually belong to interest groups on the internet, although this is a great source of support for an individual, it is not always possible or desirable to use this a replacement for the workplace social environment. As technical work becomes more complex, the levels of finance low and the expectations increasingly high, it maybe that a return to working in teams becomes once again becomes more desirable due to the limits of the human individual and not least because of the deep human need for people (scientists,engineers & hairdressers ;)) to work with each other.  

Escape from Colditz

• A Room at the Bottom

There was a great program on tv the other night about a engineering team recreating an WW2 escape from Colditz. Most interesting (apart from the glider building) was the interview footage with the escapees. This was shot in 2001. I was immediately taken back to the time when I worked at the Imperial war museum 24 years ago when I worked in Sound Records dept. I worked in a very small room at the bottom of the directors carpeted stairs in a sound-proofed room. My job was to re-record and archive tapes made by our resident interviewers sent to interview wars veterans from up and down the country. When I started I used to listen to the interviews usually 8 reels worth a day, by the end of the first few weeks until the end when I worked there 4.5 years later I rarely listened, i used to turn them down to a low hum. War is a difficult subject especially close-up.

• The Queen

There were two of us, me and my ancient (I thought) boss of 34, working in the department we were also audio-visual dept. a new arm of the newly re-developed war museum. I spent the first few weeks walking around the building site with a hard hat. The war museum is housed in "Bedlam" -Bethlehem hospital a Victorian mental institution it was quite spooky at night- some of the renovators wouldn't work on the night-shifts they didn't like the sounds of "the chains"- their words. Shortly after my starting work, the Queen (Elizabeth II) came to re-open the museum, this was my first museum function, I was working the PA.system for the Queen. I had stickers with queen on fader 2 and so on - yes really!.

• Jobcentre plus cynicism

 I was still in shock at getting a real job as a few weeks earlier at 20 I had been officially unemployed or "resting" as a photographic retoucher artist/musician. I had to open my first bank account, borrow some money from my boss to buy some clothes for the event, it was the first time I had been paid monthly since Id left school at 16. The man at the Deptford jobcentre wouldn't believe I had 6 O'levels, I had to argue with him to get the application form.

• My Marvellous Boss

Luckily my new boss at the museum- although he looked like an accountant with an oversized suit- was an ex-record producer that had built a recording studio in his house (may cover this in more detail at some point) I have to point out this was folk rock genre ("didnt we have a lovely time etc.".). He didn't mind my lack of formal education if i could splice tapes and work a soldering iron, which I could (I had been playing/recording with bands since I was 13).

• The interview

When I had my interview there was a panel of three people sitting along a trestle table and I sat opposite  them. (Luckily I believe I thought that this was standard interview practice- havent had an interview like that since!). I was asked the dates of the second world war and what sort of music I wrote. I failed the first question ashamed to say and replied "love songs" to the second. We were a post punk band but I didnt think that would go down well. Not sure even now, why i got the job, although the museum superintendent was also a ex-musician from quite a famous 70s band so there were a lot of musicians and artists around at the time. I am eternally grateful to these open-minded people for taking me on.

• Evening functions

I learned electronic engineering (day release) and started software programming on Amiga machines,created animations and wrote music for some of the museum AV displays. I was asked to compose something to accompany the Belsen exhibition as this was being put together at the time, I composed a piece for this, but I am eternally grateful that the then director Dr Alan Borg said there should be no soundtrack as the film is too visually powerful to show with any music or voiceover.
We were incredibly lucky as the new corporate function industry took off around this time and many organisations hired the museum in the evening. Even the Rolling stones came by one evening (my night off) - if only twitter was around then!! We did have the medical students from the Royal College one evening and I remember someone had been sick in one of the tanks, this stopped any future Uni dos.

• The Unruly & Independent

Anyway back to the original reason for the post. We had an evening function, it was a re-union for the Colditz prisoners, I couldnt do this evening for some reason (what was I thinking?). The following day I asked how it had gone."It was terrible!", my boss had complained, "we had a presentation but when it started no-one would sit down. We tried to get them to be quiet for the speeches but no-one listened. When they did sit down some of them would get up again". Well, what did they expect?...I'm glad the ex-prisoners  and serial escapees still were unruly and independent, even in their 70&80s..

• In Relentless Pursuit.

Looking at the current difficulties for young people to get into work, I hope we can always find a place for people who don't fit somehow. Looking back over 20yrs ago it would seem we were more open to risk, in the future if we keep putting hurdles in the way (financially,academically or otherwise) of some groups of people from being able to contribute to society its own potential & capability will be weaker and the outcome would be that everyone's quality of life will be diminished. The Colditz escapees were relentless in their escapes, unwilling to bow down against an oppressive regime.Watching the program I hope that ordinary people may be inspired to be as relentless in their pursuit of a possibility of bringing improvement,diversity,fairness & transparency to future societies that may suffer the threat of oppression.

The Business of Creativity. 

There has always been an uneasy relationship between the artistic creative industries and large corporate companies and finance. There is a deep suspicion amongst the artists that the corporation will not only sell their products but try to influence and control the creative process.creative control  This was always the (quite legitimate ) worry for musicians signing to one of the large record companies.In engineering there has been in recent years the scaling back of engineering management layers in order to better control the engineering product or engineering schedule at source. Historically engineering management has been essential, to protect or defend the engineers dilemmas,explaining in management speak the problems and difficulties regarding the design and production of complex products.In large corporations the need to save money has meant cutting out the middle management but in reality it means the creatives must also take up the role of administration and explanation.

Complexity and Explanation.

The products are now so complex that the creatives need more time than ever to analyse and problem solve. The schizophrenic behaviour required by fulfilling all roles is mentally debilitating & ultimately self defeating. Why ask the techies or creatives to do cost, budget, schedule and contract management as part of their daily routines when business specialists could be targeted to manage the complexity these tasks. Where is the respect and understanding between the business and creative disciplines?.
Its getting difficult to attract highly skilled engineers into certain specialist areas of industry, by adding tasks (such as costings scheduling administration) it can only dilute the quality of contribution of the engineers employed in specialised roles. The old methods such as  no.of lines of code and power point slides cannot now with explanations of complex interdependencies. Increasingly we need some kind of visualisations or graphics to show project timelines and the evolution of development to keep the dialogues going (some time for years)between teams on a project.

Institutions and Added Value 

In recent times some corporate record companies have failed, due to musicians & artists selling their music directly on the internet EMI. The record companies have not been able to let the musicians identify any "added value" from the management of their creative talent.It is not such a large step to think that some time in the future engineering/science creatives may be able to sell their talent directly to projects funded by private or microfunded Microfinance intiatives and travel between projects without the need to be employed by the current major industry players. If large corporate organisations want to remain relevant to these industries they must demonstrate added value to the engineers & scientists that they employ. They can do this by providing infrastructure and stability for multiple & transient teams and disciplines to work together.

Joy in Numbers

One of the main benefits the larger employer can exploit is the sheer number of employees they employ. The melting pot of talented staff is one of the main reasons stay working in these large companies in spite of lower wages,poor quality working environments and substandard management techniques and expertise. Allowing networking and collaboration possibilities and a better environment to support collaboration and development activities will ensure better engagement and belonging. A larger employer may have available funds to provide a good facility to enable innovation and collaboration, this environment when provided thoughtfully, this can affect the quality of products,innovation and production creative environments Creative communities do not always appear where they are wanted - they sometimes just appear.  For instance it would be hard to get a group of any painters or musicians to live/work anywhere they didn't want to or that was detrimental to their work. What most creative people want in science art or otherwise is a chance talk to other creative people about their work and the opportunity to create stuff.

On the shoulders of Pragmatists.

On the shoulders of Pragmatists.

I sat through a very long presentation today on how we were going to save money on future projects. Its always interesting to see that the team which will be cut back is the team that was not in the room when the budgets were being discussed. The reasons the saving will be achieved were a bit woolly needless to say that software should be trimmed back and other more prominent depts should get a bit more.  The savings are thought to be made around the rather tricky subject of autocoding.  I would have been happier if the autocoding case was put forward by software peeps but it was not. In my experience autocoding is best used by the people at the coalface who know which functions it will help and where not to take any risks, this takes quite a bit of experience. Autocoding like automated phone operators can replicate aspects of non-changeable functions but like the automated telephone answering system,but if the question doesn't fit you can get passed round an endless loop of A B or C when you really want to "speak to an advisor".

Modularise and shut your eyes.

Later in the day there was another interesting comment when trying to set up a common working area with some of our sub-cos there was strong resistance to the working together philosophy, very experienced engineers (not software ones) were explaining to me it is better to modularise software and let the teams deliver a stand alone package and reduce any collaborative activities. I appreciate the thought but if a product we are working with is not created in  a multiple contributor and protected core design, and is a product designed to be coded and configured in-house there will be problems. Some product in the industry are conceived and written well before the "thin-prime" spectre haunted the  corridors. Modularisation is an important design consideration but is of course not an excuse for not collaborating communicating with the project stakeholders.

See no evil hear no evil ( "simplicity" = "complexity")

It is strange that with the increasing software complexity and the bafflement of our own experienced engineers in our the ever challenging environment, increasingly personnel from other areas of discipline are taking it on themselves to explain to us that things are now simpler in the software world (and therefore cheaper) than we thought. The worrying thing is that the only resistance I can see to this is a sharp raising of the eyebrows by my colleagues in meetings, but these people are so knocked by the current economic climate the emperor will be parading around in his blissfully ignorant nudity for some time to come. Software engineers need to become excellent in explaining complex issues to another discipline in particular to Project Management.

No Respect for a new discipline

I have frequently heard software referred to as the "dark arts". This is not good for a variety of reasons but being referred to as voldemore or HP himself is not helping the collaboration & respect issues between disciplines. 
It is official there is no respect for software in the more elevated parts of the engineering industry, perhaps it is because it is still a relatively new discipline. Software though over the last 15-20 years has learned to be a bit more humble than some engineering disciplines. It has taken on the nightmare of incremental deliveries and being extremely pleasant to the customer without "people-skills" being a key software engineer quality, software folk have had to respond to complexity,financial accountability and the possibility of having got things slightly or very wrong much earlier in the development phase- when other people are still eating the bid-win celebration canapes. We now know by bitter experience if the misinterpretation of  key requirements can be addressed early on by demonstration, simulation, or modelling it can save huge amounts of recoding and misunderstanding later on in the project, when everything is interdependent and difficult to update and modify.

Raising The Game

One resistant problem is system folk and other disciplines continue in the waterfall V development not understanding the shifting sands of the software and data development, therefore the tools and environments provided by project will not be supportive for this flexibility. It is not possible to use a document configuration system to cope with configuration control in a software and data development environment they will need special (probably expensive to maintain) tools. It is the job of the SW dept manager to make sure the costs for these and risk offsets are well understood by the rest of the company. If we can maintain a humble approach in software it will serve us better to be able to question the large" fix-it-all" tool. It is important to be able to question the sanity of signing up to any tool/ model that is proposed as replacement for the need to talk to other disciplines about their worries over timing and data format issues. As we pass our data from the central database to the sw datasmiths its true we can change formats many times just to cope with the various environments. It is not possible to get all the disciplines to align on one environment but the excellence required to tidy up the interfaces between environments should be a key focus for the community.


In short experienced (read aging ,tired & worn out) software people its been a tough decade. Brush yourself down, put a bow in your hair (metaphorically or otherwise) and stand tall. All the lessons that have been learned in the last decade (and before) are highly valuable to engineering and technology industries, even if we dont "feel the love".  if software teams can bring with good humility, our mastering,understanding and management of complexity,then include the excellence of good interfaces between disciplines, we will set the bar higher. We will be able to play our part in leading the technological and scientific communities forward to help with the explanations of increasingly complicated tasks for both the current and the next generation of engineers and scientists.

When things go wrong.

 

The SpaceX rocket didn't launch yesterday.  extract from wired "Once the limit was hit, launch software took over and aborted the liftoff." In a post abort press conference, SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell said "the problem looked like an actual issue with the engine and was not one of the sensor or software issues that had led to delays in the schedule earlier this year during simulations."

"We can not blame the software guys for this one," Shotwell noted.

From a software perspective this statement was a bit disappointing for some reason there was a feeling amongst the software community that perhaps new companies with more modern approaches to business might have managed also to have a more honest view  about the software & data community in the space industry.

The spacecraft in its physical form must be reflected in a data shape that absolutely resembles every feature and status that is available on the spacecraft. During and after launch the only way to communicate with the spacecraft is by a limited number of datapackets which must helpfully contain, or the possibility to contain every possible combination of commands and statuses available to the spacecraft. 

This spacecraft dataset is produced by many different discipline teams working on the project. In fact almost every team will produce some kind of data in spreadsheets,file or document format. This dataset is then combined with processes to manipulate store and perform calculations, there are many software components and applications to manipulate this data and many data format changes to pass information between teams. 

For the final operation and integration of the processes and datasets to work teams must be highly communicative and interactive. If there is any discord among teams it will be reflected in the data and software integration and operation. Where there is a team that is not trusted there will more checking of values. Where there is a team that tries to do the least possible there will be add-ons made to other unfortunate teams that have had to pick up this "dropped off" functionality. Where one team is quiet or timid they may have found it difficult to  give feedback to another more arrogant teams design approach. Any imbalance and disrespect between disciplines will generally be to the detriment to the overall design or become a risk to mission success.

If there is a problem with a spacecraft launch or delivery today, you can guarantee it will probably be software or data related problem. This is not because software and data teams are a few small guys in a room with some pizzas that have lost track of time, its because every team on a project is generating data,information and processes which complete the   spacecrafts final data image. It is this error prone data imprint of the spacecraft that closely reflects our imperfect selves.

My Personal Genghis Khan 

Just a quick rant about the lack of processes, or the removal of processes in the cause of cost saving activities. Over the years and in different companies, I have had experience of several figures who have arrived on a project and made life hell for people one way or another.

Each time this happens I wonder if I could do something to avoid us being" damned to repeat history". 

Know yourself.

In the Space Industry projects tend to last a long time and senior management staff turnover is usually the fastest. Middle management tend to stay longer usually at least 25 years. From an engineering perspective sometimes it seems senior management make decisions about things they don't really understand, as they dont like consulting the technical teams who can seem unhelpful,arrogant or eccentric. They see their role to take decisions and consultation as adding unnecessary delays and complications.

Technical teams often do not appear to see their role to advise senior management they sometimes prefer to be told what to do or to avoid confrontation. On both sides this can be a severe abdication of responsibility. When teams have a weak team leader it can leave a team with increasingly impossible tasks,cancelled holidays and no possibility of success. Quite often if a bad culture is recognised, unless you have reasonable authority or decision making powers it probably is better, where possible, to leave the project.

Mental Health - a touch of madness
I have noticed over the years that there have been some managers (sometimes senior engineers) that really have a touch of madness, this seems only to be obvious to all parties only once they have left, by which time most of the dept have left or gone off sick with stress and all employee diversity is removed ie At this point the only people left may be a small set of hardened contractors that have weathered somewhere extreme like Afghanistan - well you get the picture. Quite often your personal Genghis is very charming and highly intelligent and you will not win if you take them on head to head. As I said before if you recognise a bad culture and you havent been able to get reasonable seniority it is time to start to update your CV.

The Last bus home
So what can one do to avoid this happening again to confront ones own personal Genghis Khan?,.
My feeling firstly is probably there should be a mental health check. Maybe easier for HR PR to call it health check but Im guessing, asking a few questions on a regular basis to all project team members could get a project mental health temperature reading.
The second one is that cost saving should not mean leaving one person to make all the decisions without any support. Roles and responsibilities collapse to save cost but the distribution of the work is not fairly distributed and it appears some people are kept permanently too busy to keep them from becoming effective decision makers. Strategies that we are happy to talk about in the abstract, like game theory or Fault Investigation Diagnosis and Recovery are completely forgotten when the space industry comes to people management strategies. It may be necessary to really start the conversation going where we demonstrate the desired patterns of behaviour for project teams. If we can manage to recognise good patterns of behaviour we may have a chance to replicate desirable artificial intelligence algorithms. Ignoring the crazy behaviour that happens in human stressful situations only stores up problems for us when really working in space, where when we find ourself abandoned by our project team, or cornered by our personal Genghis Khan, we cant just get the last bus home.

Go climb those trees.

We were talking about the Thames boat race today, in particular about the guy from London School of Economics that jumped in front of one the boats. If you read his blog boatmans blog its reasonable articulate expressing his anger against a government he clearly saw as a ruling elite.A different type of protest perhaps  from the summer riot, however both events appear to be expressing a similar theme. If we are looking to the opposite of elitism would it be diversity. The topic of gender diversity has been in the news and in popular press quite a bit recently.  British society with its perhaps overly deep reverence for the past and its traditions can be disabling for certain sectors and if you need change in particular in the workplace "traditionally", engineering has been a male domain". 

Traditions for Girls

In the late seventies I remember it being made quite clear that if a girl did "boys things" noone would want to marry her. We used to sing a song at school in music, about a hen that "crowed"girls that whistle and a girl that whistled (both came to a bad end.)  In this same era I liked to climb trees-as high as i could go and then sit up for ages watching feeling powerful on top of the world. Around the age of 9 I remember being  scolded by the doctor for falling out of a tree, saying to my mother that I should act more like a girl, "girls dont climb trees"  he said and this was clearly why i had fallen out. "yes said my mother I don't know how shes ever going to find a husband" There were quite a few incident in the same vein. Even now I find it hard to understand how the generation that lived through and born so close to WW2 when women were jumping out of planes, being shot at behind enemy line and generally laying down their lives for a a peaceful, democratic way of life, could have such a bizarre restricted view of what a women/girls should then be doing in peace time.

A Schoolgirls view

My mother was a housewife - there were four children to look after, my father worked as a commercial assistant. She used to do the paper round with me and then later when i stopped she carried on, some of my friends mothers were working in a variety of roles doctors,PAs,teachers,hairdressers. I was convinced that when I was grown up things would be different. I remember less pink in the toy aisles,that dressing like a princess and associated princess fantasies were strictly restricted to the school pantomimes and fancy dress parties.  I thought that when I was grown up I would live in London with my schoolgirl friends, we would be scientists,artists and rock stars and we would run the country. We thought gymnastics, the Olga Korbett, kind would be watched along with netball and other womens sports would take their place along side football on the television.There would be a ladies boat race on the Thames,women presidents and astronauts. We all discussed how it would be of course whilst sunbathing at lunchtime,& eating freezepops on the hockey pitch at school .

Absent Women

I left school at 16 and have worked first for a commercial artists in poland street as a retoucher,then when it really took off in the digital world in software. My university educated peers from school also gravitated to software and technical industries then somewhere around the second child it seemed that it was impossible to mix the ever increasing load of the workplace with good family life. Some of my friends had become divorcees after having given up work/careers to look after children then to become vulnerable single-parent mothers and some of us discovered domestic violence.   We wondered what had happened the future that we envisaged, how did the choice to be a working mother become a necessity, how could women still be so vulnerable and what was driving the misogyny of the newspapers,sports and media (often in women journalistic articles) an everyday instrument to lower womens general standing in society.Madeleine Albright says in her TEd interview there is a special place in hell for women who dont help other women madeleine albright. So I ask myself -why do my formerly confident and capable peers, now middle aged women, feel invisible? Why have my most highly educated and intelligent friends left the technology/science and political industries/arenas to retire in their forties to work on their home crafts and allotments. What can we do to assist them as they care for elderly parents and children, How can we their advice,leadership and intellect so desperately needed at the decision making tables.

Advice to our Sons & Daughters

So then, looking forward, what shall we advise our daughters to do?- will there still be an option to leave work to look after their children, or will she need to keep her job at all costs in case her partner leaves her -and she becomes the single parent mother this government/society abhors. How we can we advise our sons to behave with honour and integrity walking the narrow path through the cut-throat misogynistic mentality in society and business. For those that are still up for it, and want to see further, theres a role for the absented. invisible.middle-aged women. If recent events are anything to go by there's a change in the air, recent/not so recent traditions cannot offer us all the answers we need to improve our situation. perhaps its about time to create the new ones and for women to step up to the leadership tasks -so ladies lets go and climb some trees!.

Looking for Development Shangri La.

Blogging for the first time reminds me of the" tell me what you did over the holidays" task at primary school - lots of pencil chewing going on and looking out of the window.

I am a software engineer although i have had many title changes due to corporate restructuring but in old money i am still a kind of software engineer i believe. After a good few years (ok about 20) in the software industry, a few things are becoming clearer and some are becoming even more difficult to understand. While my colleagues are excited to to look at the new languages and platforms  I am more interested to notice even on the bigger projects i am trying to resolve the same problems as i was twenty years ago just with different tools. 

Wizzy things.

Actually the tools are part of the problem. I am working on a complex project but the will to create a new tool that does something a bit wizzy things still rules supreme. In our industry everyone is a secret wannabe softie so usually the creators of the tools don't come from one of the formal software depts. (mathematicians take note) the creator then disappears leaving the production team to either discard or support what is usually substandard code (pique) in a tool that has embedded itself deep in the data production process. The antithesis of this is the big tool approach uml added value. This is usually some sort of model that everyone will comply to, but that no one can explain. The big model approach can be one discipline teams own world view of how everyone else should be working.

Deep suspicions

 Lurking deep behind the dream of standardisations and freedoms come other overriding problems. In the science and engineering world software is still a newcomer and under deep suspicion of being "money for old rope" or paying for something that appears to have no tangible evidence of production. This jaundiced view is partly our own fault as the demonstration or visualisation of software functionality to a project management team takes time to work into the schedule alongside all the other activities although increasingly essential and software people don't like to do presentations (apologies for big generalisation). 

Pushing and shoving

The relationships between disciplines seems to be key now, the increased understanding of the others environment and behaviours essential. The acceptance of the need for different views/formats and tools to exist and evolve supported by a common development community (after much pushing and shoving) appears to be the most effective (however messy that may look to management). One reason   why the maker community is of such interest. Showing respect for the people that have made stuff made with respect for others that may re-use it works.This may seem a development shangri-la but we can't move forward without it.

Cheaper Thrills

If development Shangri la was housed in a building then the technical/science community should demand corporate bodies take the complexity of large tech/science projects seriously, there are algorithms and models designed to build buildings that enable collaboration and interactions(see Christopher_Alexander.) wouldn't where you sit/work 8 hrs a day or more)impact on development output. Business keeps looking for a cheaper thrill, even asking for voluntary contributions that it can exploit but what added value will the corporations finally bring, will engineers/scientists of the future really need them? Its a good time to bring mutual respect and as they say in the  (Makerspace)  maker community "be excellent to each other!".