Self-Defence for Geeks  26 April 2004

keywords: blog, soapbox, psychology, negotiation, management, business, geeks, husslers, self-defence, BT, Apple, Ben Verwaayen, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Andy Hertzfeld, Insanely Great


Recently I've noticed several different psychological patterns for handling geeks:

The Journey is the Reward

This is named after a speech given by Steven Jobs at Apple fairly close to the release date of the first Macintosh sometime in 1984. The speech sought to wind up employees in the audience, to make them feel proud of their achievements and to consider the importance of their work on a large scale. The thing to consider here is that Apple was cash poor at the time having spent so much bringing the Macintosh to market. There was no room for big bonuses or other incentives. The point of the speech is to transfer the expectations of the listeners from hard cash to a warm fuzzy feeling about their place in history.

In 2002 I was invited to hear Ben Verwaayen (then CEO of BT) address an audience of recent hires. Within the first five or so minutes it became clear that this was a "Journey is the reward" speech. Having read second hand accounts of "the journey is the reward" (in Steven Levy's "Insanely Great"), it didn't wash with me. At the time, people were telling me that it cost a million pounds a day to service the company debt every day. I'm sure that a lot of the young kids in the audience thought that they were hearing a tough new business strategy. I was left wondering how much better it would have sounded coming from a truly world class cult leader like Steve Jobs.

Adversarial Development - are you tough enough?

Some managers like to pit developers against each other. The intention is to make everyone work harder. This means that any reward provided need only be tiny in proportion to the benefits gained. Unfortunately people taking this approach are demonstrating a desire to increase productivity regardless of the stress caused. Cultivating an atmosphere of "every man for himself" is unlikely to be wise when an organization needs a stable, productive team to succeed.

Also known as  "divide and rule".

Aikido Schedule Negotiation

A big part of Aikido involves using the force of an attacker against himself. Many of us geeks think highly of our skills. This leaves us open to having our estimates negotiated down: "Surely someone of your ability could do it in half the time?"

Bill Gates is said to have tried this approach on Andy Hertzfeld when he tried to get him to write a task switching program for DOS. Andy Hertzfeld said that he couldn't believe that Bill thought he was so naive.

Aikido Schedule Negotiation uses the size and force of a developer's ego against them. They're put off balance just long enough to make them commit to an unrealistic schedule.

An interesting variation came from an e-commerce start up guy who was concerned not to take up too much of my time. I could still develop the software, but because I'd be spending less time developing it, I'd have to accept less of a share. This is basically the same hussle, but he did get entertainment points for packaging up the proposition as "concern for my interest". I note that he used to work as an independent financial adviser.

Uniquely Cool

I have  a fairly academic background. Several people have tried to get me to do commercial projects because "although the money isn't great, you won't get to work on an interesting problem like this very often".

There are plenty of interesting challenges out there that don't pay particularly well. Many of them exist in research groups. I find this negotiation strategy particularly distasteful when it's used as an inducement to help businesspeople make serious coin.

This is straight out of Selling Skills 101: an attempt to present an apparently "unique selling point".

Like we say in Wales: "Diwedd y gân yw'r geiniog."  To translate: "At the end of the song comes the penny". An interesting challenge is all good and fine but most of us work for a living. A cool challenge might help us decide between two otherwise equal propositions but at the end of the day it's just business.

To conclude

Having written this, I'm giving up the Mohammed Al-Fayed strategy: make the most of your foreign accept - some English people will think that you're stupider than you really are. Writing this should save time: Rather than demonstrating that I can see through these basic negotiating positions, I can just refer people to this blog entry.

We might be geeks, but we're not stupid. We might be young but you can't be certain that we're naive.