Post #3616 J

I Won An Award At Work Last Week

Our contractor company has a monthly meeting with a segment of recognition (individual and team honors). To be honest, it had been a long time since I've worked for a company that did anything like that. And, of course, when you're a relatively recent hire, it takes a while for people to get to know you and judge your work effort.

For me, I maintain my own impossibly high standards, a bit of a perfectionist. For example, Twitter notoriously doesn't provide functionality for editing tweets. Like a chess player, I'll often be thinking 2 or 3 moves ahead of what I'm typing on the keyboard and won't notice a typo. But at some point later (say, I'm republishing the tweet for a blog post), I'll notice the defect, drop the tweet, and publish a replacement tweet. It makes no difference if others liked or retweeted the original.

When I published academic articles, it was an analogous thing, in the sense I would endlessly rework my article, not unlike the meticulous detail of a sculptor on a block of marble. I worked hard on organization and flow. Occasionally, you'll get complimentary feedback; you don't really expect it. I once wrote a critical (still unpublished) note on technical defects in MIS measures, e.g., on computer user satisfaction, which quickly came back rejected with personal attacks, not one salient comment on the content of the article. It was quite clear that the editor had chosen reviewers who had a vested interest in the status quo. It was stuff like, "instead of criticizing other people's scholarship, why don't you grow some funk of your own?"; "what are this guy's credentials on psychometrics? He hasn't cited a recent article in the field." Defensive bullcrap: it wasn't my intent to write a conspectus on psychometrics. There were measures being used that didn't meet the standards of reference literature, and I had read literally thousands of relevant academic articles in psychology and education. It would have been much easier to do my doctoral research if I simply cited the sources as authoritative. The example measures I cited probably got a free ride on methodology, no reviews by measure developers in other disciplines. All I wanted to do was open a frank discussion, so researchers choosing measures were aware of their limitations

I still like the comment on one of my articles to the effect: "I feel like I now know everything there is to know on this topic". I was anal-retentive on crediting other sources: literally hundreds of sources in my bibliographies. I still remember getting a note from an editor who wrote, "We would love to publish your article, but you have to cut your references in half."  I still regret that; how do you decide which ones go? You imagine one of those authors reading your article and thinking, "Why isn't he crediting my work?" But as a career academic (at that point), you find a way to make it work because you want the journal hit.

But sometimes it isn't formal awards that provide the most gratifying recognition. I'll repeat a couple of stories I may have mentioned in past posts, regarding my technical communication articles. Keep in mind I never had taken or teaching  a single course in the discipline, had no contacts with relevant faculty, had never been to a conference or related event:

• While on UWM faculty, I was contacted by a faculty recruiter at the University of Washington about a yet unpublished opening on their technical communication faculty, suggesting the position was mine if I wanted it (solely based on the quality of my scholarship). Getting an appointment to a land-grant university or other top university had been a professional aspiration. But I wanted more of a joint position with their MIS program, so I could continue to teach MIS courses. There was no response from the recruiter. To this day I wonder about the road not taken.
• I had a friend from Wisconsin-Madison who I had met at an ICIS doctoral consortium. He got recruited by the Illinois Institute of Technology. He told me he had met a tech communication professor there and mentioned my name, "Have you ever heard of this guy?" "Yeah, he's written some of the classic articles in the field."

But sometimes when you do get recognition, you wonder why you feel some of your best achievements went unrecognized. I had involuntarily moved to Santa Clara, CA (I have mentioned this in past posts as "job offer by extortion" (as I was preparing to fly home Friday, my boss told me not to bother coming back Monday unless I agreed to a job offer; if and when they upgraded EBS, they would agree to a follow-up engagement). I had been working as a temp Apps DBA for a contractor with a typical "no compete" clause--meaning I couldn't work for the client directly for at least 6 months after the end of the engagement. There are ways, of course, e.g., the contractor could request something like a finder's fee. Of course, they would terminate me in a heartbeat if the client wasn't willing to sign off on my hours. My new boss was hired 2-3 weeks after I started; in fact, the vacancy I was filling was for a DBA who was pissed off he had not gotten the promotion.)

When I got there, I discovered their EBS/ERP was wildly out of Oracle Support compliance (meaning that Oracle could refuse to service production issues until we were patch-compliance). I immediately filibustered management to do necessary patching. (I was furious with my predecessor: how could he have done nothing to mitigate the risk of non-compliance? He later told me he had tried to patch but was rebuffed by management. The funny thing is, management didn't push back; we just negotiated a weekend for me to do patching.

This is not to say there wasn't resistance-particularly from the squeaky-wheel risk-averse accountants. So for example, patching had replaced a customized check printing template (something I literally fixed in less than 10 minutes). Now personally I thought getting the clients' applications on track--something literally not part of the contract and something potentially risky to operations, given a largely undocumented system--was worthy of recognition.

A second unacknowledged effort was even more impressive. Sixth months early, Oracle had desupported the "green screen" (non-GUI) accounting interface in favor of GUI. This basically meant if we ran into a production issue running green screen (character-mode), we risked losing support for non-compliance. The accountants hated Oracle's GUI interface because they saw it as a much slower way to get things done. I remember this one receivables clerk argued to her boss she could do X things if she did things the old way, but only X-4 things doing in "Ron's way".  (Ironically, my boss suggested some time later the six-foot clerk liked me and i should ask her out.  .It had nothing to do with her appearance, but I don't find making my job harder is a turn-on.)

And then I ran into an unexpected problem. An accounting supervisor, a close colleague to my predecessor who had resigned and resented my replacing him (there's a soap opera behind that beyond the scope of the post) discovered under GUI, none of our fixed assets showed up, although they did under green screen. She immediately informed management of my "screw-up", i.e., "I told you he would screw everything up with all his patching". Not to mention she stepped into it big time by going to Oracle Support directly, without my knowledge or consent; they quickly maneuvered her into unwittingly doing a "row-who" for them, and she reported the result: "anonymous".  In essence, Oracle had evidence the client had changed things in an unauthorized way, which violated the terms of the Support contract.

I later uncovered what had happened, which is something Sherlock Holmes would have admired. Some 3.5 years earlier, developers working to install the Fixed Asset module decided to take a shortcut instead of setting up some 24 subcategories: they identified the target table and wrote records directly to that table. That materially violated Oracle's support contract. It turns out that Oracle's functionality did more than just stick rows in that table. Among other things, Oracle converted sub-category names to upper-case. The developers and accountants never realized that because application logic was not case-sensitive, i.e., subcategory "None" was processed equally with subcategory "NONE". Oracle tightened up security in GUI and basically filtered on "NONE", finding no related assets. 

Oracle Consulting told my boss it would cost about $10,000 and 2 weeks without our EBS database to resolve (basically to export out assets, redefine categories, and import back the assets). This simply wasn't viable. It was extremely complicated to devise a corrective script involving over a dozen database objects; it was like delicate surgery knowing a single missed object or code defect could worsen things, and of course Oracle would never support my fix. I, of course, tested out my fix first in our test/dev environment, then successfully implemented it into production.

So I fixed a problem that easily easily paid for months of my salary on its own. But no; although I won a record 3 CEO Awards over 13 months, those didn't include the above initiatives. It's not that I expected such recognition; I have very high personal expectations, plus I'm being paid to do a job. It's more like, "I'm gratified for your honoring me for X, but really Y is much more of an impressive professional accomplishment".

A postscript on this employer. we used two sets of prices for domestic customers, one which was all-inclusive, including delivery to their shops (we manufactured and serviced computer chip testing equipment); then there was an option for clients to arrange their own shipping off our loading docks. Oracle Inventory basically supported one line of prices. Each month switchovers in pricing involved time-consuming efforts between the marketing team and one of our system analysts that occurred over days. (Never mind issues of the system analyst being available, etc.) There were a number of pieces there, including scrubbing data inputs from our Japanese headquarters (e.g., a stray yen character.) So I devised a multi-phase concurrent program that was largely driven by the marketing analyst, provided email notifications at each stage (e.g., data scrubbing iterations, promotion to internal custom tables, posting custom table changes to Oracle Inventory, etc.)  It was largely a design I threw together on the fly (technically there were no developers or Unix administrators on staff, so I wore multiple hats). I had a close Indian friend analyst/PM who was working on his green card at the time. His contractor employer (which had served as my pre-employment agency) moved him to another client; I resigned some time afterwards (it had to do with my boss reneging on some key promises, certain stressed-induced symptoms, etc). My friend eventually got his green card after I left, and my boss immediately hired him. There was a soap opera at the company, and my friend eventually became the acting, then permanent IT manager.

One day well after I had moved out of the People's Republic of California, my friend wrote to say they had finally gone through an EBS upgrade (I had pushed my boss to do an upgrade but had been unsuccessful, one of the reasons I resigned; Oracle had already announced version 11i, 2 levels beyond). I guess I hadn't mentioned my concurrent inventory program to him, and he started gushing about how cool it was, that only cosmetic changes were necessary through the upgrade process. (My friend on the side is also a software entrepreneur, including EDI and expense reporting applications.)

There are also forms of delayed feedback. I've given examples above but other ones include:

• getting requests from international professors asking for copies of my publications
• a former student came up to me after a research presentation at UH to tell me that he had joined Accenture Consulting, largely based on career advice I had given during the DSS course he had been in
• I met one of my very first UH students while shopping in a men's suit section of a department store. I basically cringed thinking all of the things I could have done better in my first course. (I had been a calculus teaching assistant at UT, but I only led calculus lab sections, not lectures.) He shrugged it off, saying, "You know, I hated your guts while I was taking your class. [Okay, I think, this isn't going very well.] You gave the first real college tests I took at UH. I learned more in your class than any other class I took there."

Then there's the unwitting compliment:

• "I learned more in Dr. Guillemette's class than any other class. But he deserved none of the credit. I had to do it all on my own." [Yes! That's the Holy Grail of college teaching. The student is able to function outside of the classroom, on his own initiative.]

From my 8 years of college teaching, there have been no Hallmark moments, no "This is Your Life" retrospectives. Of course, they probably wouldn't know where I am, even if they wanted to get in touch. There are a few things I remember:

• A Wisconsin Bell executive and new UWM doctoral student: "I'm sorry to hear you're leaving. I had heard good things about your graduate systems analysis course and was hoping to take it."
• A UTEP Mexican student invited me to join his family's celebration of his graduation. Unfortunately, I couldn't attend because my baby sister was graduating from UTSA that same weekend.
• Another UTEP graduating senior (headed for the UVa MBA program) insisted on taking my picture, saying he wanted to keep a record of the professors who had made an impact in his college experience. (I think I republished the photo in a past blog post.)
• There was the student who was looking at my grading of his project assignment and responded in a very emotional, unexpected manner: "You graded this; you didn't have a grader do it." I cautiously confirmed; I had never used graders. Where was this going? "I can tell you put a lot of thought into this evaluation; everything you wrote is relevant; you took my work seriously. I put a lot of work and effort into this project; you made it all worthwhile." 
• There was a female graduate Asian student in my ISU human factors course. I LOVED teaching this class; it was a dream some true. She wrote me an unsolicited one single-spaced letter where she paid tribute for all the hard work she had seen me put in the course. She gently suggested that I was teaching over the heads of most of the students in the course. One of the things she did in paying tribute to my leadership as a visiting professor was to attach a copy of an old Cadillac ad I had never seen before and profoundly moving: the penalty of leadership.

Here is the text, in case you can’t read the image:

“In every field of human endeavour, he that is first must perpetually live in the white light of publicity. Whether the leadership be vested in a man or in a manufactured product, emulation and envy are ever at work. In art, in literature, in music, in industry, the reward and the punishment are always the same. The reward is widespread recognition; the punishment, fierce denial and detraction. When a man’s work becomes a standard for the whole world, it also becomes a target for the shafts of the envious few. If his work be mediocre, he will be left severely alone – if he achieves a masterpiece, it will set a million tongues a-wagging. Jealousy does not protrude its forked tongue at the artist who produces a commonplace painting. Whatsoever you write, or paint, or play, or sing, or build, no one will strive to surpass or to slander you unless your work be stamped with the seal of genius. Long, long after a great work or a good work has been done, those who are disappointed or envious, continue to cry out that it cannot be done. Spiteful little voices in the domain of art were raised against our own Whistler as a mountback, long after the big world had acclaimed him its greatest artistic genius. Multitudes flocked to Bayreuth to worship at the musical shrine of Wagner, while the little group of those whom he had dethroned and displaced argued angrily that he was no musician at all. The little world continued to protest that Fulton could never build a steamboat, while the big world flocked to the river banks to see his boat steam by. The leader is assailed because he is a leader, and the effort to equal him is merely added proof of that leadership. Failing to equal or to excel, the follower seeks to depreciate and to destroy – but only confirms once more the superiority of that which he strives to supplant. There is nothing new in this. It is as old as the world and as old as human passions – envy, fear, greed, ambition, and the desire to surpass. And it all avails nothing. If the leader truly leads, he remains – the leader. Master-poet, master-painter, master-workman, each in his turn is assailed, and each holds his laurels through the ages. That which is good or great makes itself known, no matter how loud the clamor of denial. That which deserves to live – lives. “

There have been a lot of outright lies and slander that have undermined my academic and professional career. Oracle Technical Support has gone after me a number of times, largely because I had a no-nonsense attitude in escalating issues bearing on production to more experienced analysts: I wasn't rude or unprofessional, but I forcefully insisted on behalf of my client or employer. 

• In one case, a duty manager alleged that I had cursed out a female junior analyst, reducing her to tears to the point they had to send her home. Now I don't know if it was a case of mistaken identity or complete fabrication, but that never happened, period.  
• In a second case, I was working for a credit card company as a contractor; because of bureaucratic foul-ups, I had to work at a workstation away from my cubicle, and I didn't have access to voicemail (this was over 3 weeks). On one occasion, I was told to call Oracle Support (this was not under the current iTar/My Oracle Support system, but under the old 800 voicemail system) and get a response, nothing less, on a specific technical issue. When I finally reached an analyst, the analyst did not deem the issue as meriting Gold (same day) Support. I got nowhere in debating what my employer clients had instructed, but basically was threatened that my attempts to "abuse" Gold Support privileges could put the client's support contract at risk. I was later informed that Oracle escalated the issue with the client's Support contact, and client management wasn't happy with me, a new contractor. And when Support finally got back to me, they of course got sent to my workstation voicemail which I couldn't access. Once again, they complained to the client's point of contact that I wasn't returning their calls and wanted permission to dismiss the TAR. 
• In a third case, my Oracle Consulting practice manager called me and told me a duty manager from Oracle Support pleaded for him to fire me, telling him that he would be willing to help him find my replacement.
• In a fourth case (this involved my Santa Clara manager described above), my boss was out of town, and the switchboard forwarded the duty manager's call to my phone. Evidently the duty manager was confused, thinking he had been connected to my boss, and I heard a totally slanderous, personal rant directed at me personally. (Imagine the calls I never personally heard.)

I'm sure that other tech support organizations can be just as reprehensible, unprofessional and unethical, and I can say more recent experiences through MOS are improved. But the earlier experiences were bad. I knew West Coast DBAs who would wait for Colorado Oracle Support to go off shift, because Australian Tech Support was more competent. I remember when I attended an Advanced Replication "Oracle University" course, and the back row was comprised of Oracle Support analysts cracking "dumb client DBA" jokes. It was just awful and did not reflect well on Oracle at all.  I was the guy pushing Oracle's agenda behind the scenes, pursuing compliance, pushing best practices.

If you think academia is better, you would be sadly mistaken. For example, I allowed ISU students in a data structures course to program their assignments in the programming language of their choice, and the senior professors attacked me for not mandating the use of PL/1. I also got falsely accused of teaching COBOL (troubleshooting students didn't understand the difference with pseudocode) At UWM, I got attacked by the administration for using a textbook using COBOL-85 compliant compiler (the 85 standard included support for structured programming constructs); the business school had licensed Microsoft COBOL which had not, at the time, released an ANSI 85 compliant version.

I still found moments of amusement as a professor. I heard my UH students rate my exams based on how many beers it took to forget them. Then there was the student who compared taking my exams to having a lobotomy.

I remember during my doctoral residency period I got called into the department chair's office over some petty thing I can't remember. What I do remember was how he ended the conversation: "By the way, don't think that you're fooling anyone by sending in students on your behalf. I'm onto you." Let me be clear: I've never asked a student in my life to do or say anything in my behalf. What I can tell you is my student white knights operated without my knowledge or consent, probably countering what other students were doing or say they knew to be unfair. It was a complete surprise to me. I was like--I have a white knight? I wonder who it is.

There are moments that stand out. I was tech lead on a City of Oakland project for Oracle Consulting back in 1998. I was being transitioned off the project after 6 months, probably a cost-cutting move commuting from Chicago. I had a good relationship with the IT manager and city DBA. The manager called his staff and me into a meeting on my last day, where he said a lot of nice things about what I had done for the City. He added, "You know, of all the Oracle Consultants we've had on the project, you're the only one we've felt we've gotten our money's worth."  I'm not sure whether it was a fair thing to say about my team members, but it was gratifying to hear the City respected my efforts on their behalf.

My last assignment was with the State of Oklahoma, and it wasn't promising. The clients had 3 senior consultant predecessors walked off on the first 2-3 weeks of the engagement. So not only didn't I know what I was walking into, but I knew we were behind schedule. Oracle was close to losing the project. Long story short: I turned the project around, and I was nominated for and won an Oracle Nifty Fifty Award. It was just $50, but from an organizational perspective it was a big deal.

So what led to my more recent award? I was simply doing due diligence for an affiliated contractor developer's request, and he told my boss how I had responded super-fast, accurately to his requests, I was a great asset to my company, etc. Great guy, a white knight. I never asked him to do that, but I appreciate it. My boss forwarded a copy to me; it made my day. Being a great DBA is something a lot of people don't notice; they are only aware when things go wrong. So I didn't know I would get an achievement award last week, but I thought there was a good possibility.

A developer colleague who serves as my backup sniffed at me after the meeting. "You know, I got an award 2 months ago." It's not like I was bragging about it or even raising the topic in conversation. Come on, Dude, don't rain on my parade. Let me savor the moment. 

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