Ryan Angilly's Blog

You’re not one of the boys until you’re one of the boys

That was said by my college football coach at WPI, Ed Zaloom, on my first day of football camp — and it really stands up there as some of the best advice I’ve ever received.

He was speaking to the entire freshman football class in the stands overlooking the field.  Coach Zaloom — aka Zoomer — was trying to tell us that although we were members of the team from day one, we were not one of the boys. It was my first day.  I could not bust anyone’s chops.  I could not mouth off to seniors.  I should not expect to be in on any inside jokes.  As of the first minute of the first practice I was a member of the WPI football team, but I was not one of the boys.

Now, anyone from that team will probably be chuckling right now.  At the time I didn’t exactly get it.  I was the antithesis of this sentiment.  Not only was I on the football team, I had been lifting there all summer. With seniors!. I had a leg up.  I already had a nickname.  I was one of the boys.

Wrong.  The coach made us part of the team, but I was not one of the boys. Only the team could make me one of the boys. And within a couple days they let me know it — but that’s for another post.

Becoming ‘one of the boys’ takes some time.  But starting out as not one of the boys did not in any way take away from how I was expected to perform and contribute on the team, and I’ve been really amazed at how valuable this lesson has been in other areas of life — especially working in startups.

It’s easy to get cozy real fast in a startup.  Everyone is nice and cool and making jokes and fooling around. People might stroll in at 10am, take off at 4:30pm, drop F-bombs all over the place, run out for an hour at lunch to run a couple errands, and so on. It’s a culture that on the outside can appear quite lackadaisical compared to most corporate environments. So if you’re new to it, you might walk in and think “HOLY SHIT! This rocks!” But what you don’t immediately see is that those people are up at 1am Sunday nights, at the office until 9pm on random Wednesdays, pulling all-nighters to hit deadlines, getting up at 4am to make sure some automated thing is doing its job properly, pulling out the iPhone on dates to make sure the system is up and running, getting a bit anxious when they walk into a movie theater because they don’t have cell service in case something goes wrong, and on some nights even losing sleep over the stress of of the job. The list of stuff like this is so long that as I write it I realize it deserves it’s own post.

Being in a startup is hard fucking work. Don’t forget that when you’re new to the game. Don’t get enamored with being cool, fitting it, making jokes. Go to work.  Do your job.  Kick ass.  Do whatever is asked of you to the best of your ability. And slowly, over time, you’ll become one of the boys.

If you want to be my friend on LinkedIn or Facebook, write me a damn message

I have all my social network email partitioned in GMail. Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Tumblr, etc…. All the emails from those services get labeled and auto-archived. So whenever I see Social Networks (1) in my list of labels indicating there is a new email in there, I always get a little excited. Is it a friend request from someone I haven’t heard from in a while who wants to tell me what they’ve been up to? Is it a message from that girl I’ve been chasing for the past 2 months? Did someone tag me in a hilarious photo from last weekend? Maybe it’s a direct message on Twitter because someone has something super cool they want to share with me and only me? Lately, however, it’s invariably been this:

“[Some jerk you haven’t seen in years] has indicated you are [something impersonal]. I’d like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn.”

or it’s cohort:

“[Someone random from your past] added you as a friend on Facebook. We need to confirm that you know [this jerk] in order for you to be friends on Facebook.”

Fail.

Twitterers are guilty of this crap too. Even though there is no place in the Twitter-follow-workflow to send a message to people, there is no reason not to. It’s free. It’s only 140 characters. Do it. Send a damn note. Someone just did this a few days ago, and guess what? It was actually nice to hear from her. She works right near me and we’re gonna grab lunch sometime after the holidays.

So let me know what you’ve been up to. Believe it or not, I might actually care. These are, afterall social networks. Be social. Take 15 seconds and at least tell me what made you think of me after all these years. Then maybe I’ll actually respond and we can use these social networks like they were meant to be used: to reconnect humans. Not to increment your connection or friend count.

As a disclaimer, this is something that has annoyed for me a while. This post isn’t directed at any one person. So if you’re one of the people who has sent me a Facebook or LinkedIn request in the past few weeks — and didnt send a msg :) — don’t freak out.

Thoughts on… the death of agile

This post by William Caputo yesterday talks about the death of agile programming as a valid model for iteratively developing software.  I’ve skimmed plenty of books, read plenty of blog posts, and heard plenty of people talk about it.  And while I’ve always liked most of what I’ve heard, I’ve never completely drank the Kool-aid about pair programming, developer-centric two week scrums, stand ups, and their cohorts.  I’ve never been a card carrying member of the Agile Superfriends.

At first, I felt bad about not diving whole-heartedly into agile development method.  All the cool kids were doing it, and I wasn’t jumping on the bandwagon.  Why?

Was I being an arrogant jerk?  “I’m too good for this stuff.  You’re wasting your time”.  I dont think so.  Like I said, I’ve always liked most of what I’ve heard about agile programming.

Am I already an old curmudgeon who can’t learn new tricks?  “You silly kids and your Agile… just ship code!” No, first of all I’m only 26 (27 in on the 20th!).  And I love keeping up on whats going on in the space right now.  Working at Punchbowl with Blake gives me the freedom to experiment with all kinds of new software and process, and we frequently put cutting edge technologies into production.

Is it because I live in the middle of nowhere?  “Boston is 75 minutes away… I can’t go hang out at all the hackfests and Boston.RB meetings!  WAAAAA!” No way.  In this day and age, location is irrelevant.

At the end of the day, I always just had a slightly off taste in my mouth when it came to agile.  But my problem was different than Caputo’s.  Caputo’s problem, from what I gather, is that Agile has been watered down over the years so as to not hurt anyone’s feelings.  It was watered down so that everyone could play (CEOs, finance people, and in his example, janitors) when that wasnt the point.  But I never thought of it that way.

I think my big stopper with Agile is that it encourages people to run around screaming “LOOK AT ME I’M SO FUCKING AGILE!!!  YOU SHOULD BE TOO!”  Reminds me of something….

I’ve seen people turn down jobs because the company hiring wasn’t agile enough.  I’ve seen people denied jobs because they weren’t agile enough for the company.

A process is a guide, a suggestion.  When it becomes a doctrine, a religion, you’re betraying the message, and you need to snap the fuck out of it.  If Agile really is dead, then this kind of shit must have it spinning in its grave.

So as it turns out maybe I am a bit of a curmudgeon — and if you know me then you know that I am an arrogant jerk — but I’m a playfully arrogant jerk  :)  And at the end of the day I’m perfectly comfortable shipping code that’s a little bit agile, and a little bit not.