Beyond the Melon

A review system is of course only as good as the people who implement it. SOME change was definitely needed in the process; the amount of commitment engineering and review shenanigans inherent in the prior model (priming promotions with good reviews rather than just promoting people at midyear and then reviewing them against their new peers, as just one example) were legion. 

What’s been implemented is essentially all the worst “innovations” of the prior system with none of the constraints that made the system honest and investment oriented. I think it will work well for the business minded and sales minded of the company. Where it won’t work is where MS needs to be strongest: the technologist community. They will leave in droves for companies that focus on a way to reward employees who don’t play games with their reviews, and walk into their career 1-1’s, MYCI’s and annual reviews looking for actual constructive feedback on their work and their creative product, not prepared to play their part in a two-person theatrical production. They’ll leave for the dozens of startups and innovative companies that Microsoft bore in the 90’s in Seattle, and they’ll bring with them their experiences of bad reviews and good performance, and they’ll succeed elsewhere. 

And MS will slowly continue its accidental transformation into the largest competitor to IBM Global Services. 

I don’t want to be right about this. I’d rather MS take the chin music from Amazon, Google, and Oracle’s threats to the Windows, Office, and S&T product lines, get up off the mat, and get back to the mission: deliver amazing experiences that bring people together, get them talking and solving problems, and get them home to their families and loved ones to talk more and enjoy themselves more. Bill’s dream was the magic of software for everyone, free from the constraints of politics, technical trickery, and access. Unfortunately, chasing revenue rather than marketshare, chasing the big deals instead of the strategic ones (they’re not always the same, although sometimes they are), and sacrificing user experience for customer experience has taken its toll, and our competitors aren’t hampered by any love of the previous versions of their products like MS is with Windows Desktop, Office Desktop, and on-prem server offerings. 

Every year we say we’re going to make the hard choices, but we’ve punted every time, with limited localization of the cloud offerings, the hal-measure hybrid model of Windows/Azure, SQL/Azure, etc. wrapped in the stunning marketing move that was “We’re All In The Cloud” (which says we have no idea what we’re doing, not some clever poker metaphor). The review process was yet another hard choice punted to adjust marketing to what we were already doing, as if that’s leadership. It’s not. It’s extraordinarily well-compensated executives repainting lines and moving goalposts and collecting their winnings in a game they’ve been playing so long they don’t know it’s a game anymore. 

Microsoft needs to get used to the idea that every year from now on could be the year it all ends. Microsoft is not forever.

There’s a long long history and tradition of religious violence, which exists within a larger bin of human violence of any sort. These ads aren’t any of that. This isn’t “targeting”. If it is, then so is direct mail, and subscribed email newsletters that get your name right and actually come from businesses you do business with.

Muslims were slaughtered and tortured wholesale during the Inquisition, among other atrocities. Jews had their Holocaust, among other atrocities. Billboards, like any other speech, are just speech. I recognize just like any other reasonably intelligent person that there might be a line that’s crossed with some speech, and while I admit this line exists, these ads are nowhere even CLOSE to this. 

It is not a crime to offend Jews, or to offend Muslims, or Christians, or even atheists. This ad is not intended to offend, nor does it actually offend. It states that Jews and Muslims have a choice, and they do. It makes one statement of the fact that their respective gods are a myth (the fact that these two believe in one god that is the same god but isn’t the same god (put a little birdhouse in your soul) is an ironic side effect of all mythology; if the Romans and Greeks were around they’d get a kick out of all of this), and if that’s offensive, then so is any ad that makes a metaphoric claim of any kind. 

And here’s the core of it: religious beliefs are like any other beliefs. If I believe that BMW motorcycles are the best dual sport bikes in the world, that’s fine. When Yamaha produces a large-displacement dual-sport that challenges this notion and calls it a BMW beater, says it’s better than my Beemer, I don’t call my Congressman or beat my breast or rend my garments or say Yamaha doesn’t respect my beliefs. I don’t do these things because MY BELIEFS ARE NOT SPECIAL TO ANYONE BUT ME. This is the nature of belief, and it always has been. William James called belief “noetic”, meaning unable to be taught or communicated. Belief is not portable. Belief is personal. You may think that others believe as you do, but if you think this, you accept that your belief is not noetic, that it is commonplace and accessible and “just there.”

I have said many things about belief, but I’ve never thought once that someone’s religious beliefs are commonplace; it takes a religion to make belief commonplace, and I don’t have one of those.

Finally: Oliver Willis and a couple others picked this story up and threw it on Twitter earlier today and I took to the Twitterz and started speaking in response. This is important; when someone says atheists are “targeting” Jews and Muslims, one might get the impression that atheists are doing something to Jews and Muslims, something that affects Jews and Muslims in some way, perhaps even something that damages Jews and Muslims in some way. So I spoke up in defense of these ads, which were being mischaracterized by CNN (and while I haven’t looked yet, I’m sure other news outlets soon) as “targeting Jews and Muslims.” Oliver Willis called us “jerks” for putting up such ads. Blasphemy is a crime against god, i.e. when you say something and god is all pissed off. The word for calling people jerks for doing something they didn’t do is “liar” and “asshole” and “Rush Limbaugh.” Yes, Oliver, I’m talking to you.

I’ve got many responses to the recent revelations of NY SAT test-takers having other students take the SAT for them for money (higher prices yield higher grades). One is that it’s sad that there’s that there’s so much pressure to do well on the SAT (high stakes testing, Bing that shit) that it’s actually CREATING INNOVATION in student behavior — which we’d reward if we weren’t so focused on the fact that they’re breaking rules no one understands other than “the SAT is the standard for all academic achievement everywhere” even though it isn’t.

Another take: the kids taking the test are being named, since they’re not minors, but the kids who hired them aren’t being named, because they are minors. Never mind that the minors are the ones actually requesting the service and driving the market. Contrast for example with the drug market, where we punish consumers and comparatively rarely find/punish dealers.

Finally, also related to the issue around minors, I wonder if NY will punish these minors as adults (i.e. does minor = juvenile in this case)? We know that for a variety of offenses juveniles have been tried and convicted and have served time as adults; the crime isn’t really the factor generally as much as race and class, which is why I’m guessing we’ll never hear about these innovative SAT proxy-seekers again, until later when they break more rules with even more money. Getting someone to take a college-entrance exam is a pretty high-class crime…doesn’t take a rocket surgeon to note that we’re hearing from their legal representation already, and that each one of them is making the case that the crime wasn’t a crime, that it should have been handled within the school, and that these are just kids.

Bullshit. Punish them, but nnovate on their innovation (that is the American way after all): I recommend two years at a local community college, along with community service spent mentoring and teaching aspiring highschoolers how to take and do well on the SAT.

As for the test-takers themselves, take a hint from the NSA and send them off to the ETS to help revise and fix the SAT. The core issue here is their exploit of a broken security system; the SAT is essentially a high-cost blind authenticator, designed to identify candidates for colleges who neither colleges nor candidates can identify themselves. If you can choose what score you want to get on the test, two things are true:

• These kids clearly have a functionally infinite amount of whatever it is the SAT measures.
• The SAT doesn’t measure what we as a society want it to measure.

So let’s fix it. And if at the next waypoint we find that high-stakes testing like the SAT has perverse effects (like this), then perhaps we should figure out how to actually identify the kinds of people we want to get access to higher education. Because while we caught these guys, every one of the folks at Goldman Sachs, Lehman, and the rest of the high-profile master of the universe responsible for our economic debacle probably did pretty damn well on the SAT.

These seem like a good idea…