SPUG: not quite random thoughts on the current crop of user groups

[Fred Morris]

Jobs:

Jobs and projects and all of that: my point wasn't about posting to the
list, my specific example was something that I knew about a month ago and
nobody was interested enough to hear it. That happens. But part of the
reason that it happens is that Tim Runs The Show. That's all, I wasn't
implying anything nefarious. Last time I checked, the SPUG page pretty
clearly says recruiters shouldn't show up at meetings and announce their
openings. In this case I happen to know that Beth is an internal recruiter
and I was simply trying to bring it to people's attention... if they cared.
Again, I'm not implying anything nefarious, just that Tim wasn't
interested... so it goes. I do start to have some broader social questions
about the frequent flyers, and that seems not to be (openly) addressed at
all.

Tim Maher writes:
>On Fri, Aug 22, 2003 at 09:33:11AM -0700, Fred Morris wrote:
>> How are presentations chosen? None of the three organizations
>> had written guidelines. I know it takes some work to find
>> people who are willing to make presentations. SeaLUG was a
>> democratic institution; GSLUG has started polling the
>> membership; what about SPUG?
>
>"Choosing" rarely comes into the picture; there's rarely any
>competition for time slots, so just about anybody who wants to
>talk about anything Perlish is given the time they ask for (the
>only exceptions are those with bad track records, of showing up
>unprepared or incomprehensible on two separate occasions). I also
>do a bit of arm-twisting sometimes to encourage certain
>individuals to speak. And that's all there is to the "system"!

I know there's more planning to it than that. ;-)

>> A fair number of SeaLUG presentations were fairly boring. With
>> both GSLUG and (especially) SPUG the entertainment factor seems
>> much higher. Is that good or bad? Is it symptomatic of
>> something?
>
>I'd give my usual response to this, which is that people who
>gravitate to Perl are intrinsically more creative and expressive
>in the first place, so it's no wonder they are more entertaining
>communicators.

And that's why, I think, it's fun!

>> In both GSLUG and SPUG I see occasional displays where
>> eccentricity crosses a line that I refer to as the Second
>> Shwartzian Transform... you know that one whose final
>> formulation as a Lagrange Polynomial is sometimes referred to
>> as "felony stupidity". Where does critical thinking go in
>> these cases?
>
>Alas, there's a fine line sometimes between creativity and
>eccentricity. That's the way it goes. . .

There's another fine line between brilliance and autocracy and... the
Second Shwartzian Transform. It's a certain blind spot, sort of like how
you can't divide by zero but you can make a value arbitrarily small (or
large) and pretend... I don't know if that's clearer or not.

>> I think Tim's fetish with Perl certification is going down the
>> same road.
>
>I *know* it's not a fetish, because those are supposed to be fun!
>8-} I've never spent so much time and incurred so much flack for
>anything I've ever worked on before, so I know it can't be a
>fetish. 7-{

Don't be so sure!! :-p

>> Obviously if I hear the name Shwartz anywhere near
>> "certification" I'm going to spit; but besides that... The
>> University of Washington's program costs a lot of money. The
>> cost should be made very clear to people 1) so that they know
>> how much and 2) so that they know it's an advertisement!
>
>If memory serves, the UW program is priced somewhere around
>$1,500. I would have thought that everybody knew that college
>classes cost money, but if not, sorry for not making that clear.
>And by the way, lest you think I was bribed to allow that
>"infomercial", that program actually competes with my own
>training offerings, so it's hardly in my personal interest to
>promote it, but I invited them to make their pitch to round out
>the coverage of the Certification topic.
>
>By the way, the UW offering is primarily a training program, and
>that's why it's not just $100 like a (bogus) on-line
>certification test.
>
>> While we're at it, who's it open to, and how does a 40+ year
>> old with nearly 20 years experience and no degree get it for
>> free or $100?
>
>You don't, but you don't need it either. My view of
>certification (expounded to the extreme at
>perlcert.perlocity.org)

Aggh. Ok, I'll have to go read it now.

>is that its main purpose is to show the
>business community that we've got credentials if they want them,
>and secondarily to help those who don't have other ways of doing
>so to establish their knowledge . With 20 years of experience,
>your "portfolio" would surely attest to your abilities (but a
>CPAN module or two wouldn't hurt either!).

Google for SqlHtmlRpt or PerlJacket; again, why do I need CPAN? Are JAPHs
hiring? I thought most JAPHs weren't in management... at least in managed
environments.

>[...]
>> How do we get certified for free? Most of the certs that people
>> want (or don't want, there are camps on both sides of the
>> aisle) are underwritten (that's an understatement) by companies
>> which make a lot of money selling the infrastructure the certs
>> are targeted for; they also spend a lot of money marketing said
>> infrastructure.
>
>How do you get any service that involves people doing hard work
>and incurring expenses for free? Either somebody subsidizes it
>for their own reasons, or it doesn't happen. And if certification
>helps you get a job, or helps Perl programmers look more
>professional, it should be worth a few hours' pay to you!

And if it perpetuates myths about who is qualified and who is not, then
what? I did go and read the perlocity stuff (this is a late addition) and
the blind spot in this seems to be that the debate is focused on the impact
on those not susceptible to the myth! (Think I should be posting this on
the Wiki? Probably.) Of *course* Larry should be certified.. or not
certified.. it's the only way to bust the myth: LARRY WALL IS NOT CERTIFIED
TO WORK WITH PERL -- it's true, this very minute.

There's this whole dynamic going on about people not making money -- being
recognized -- for actually writing software, but by writing books or
teaching: a "you go out there and work" mentality. No, you don't have to
tell me how hard it is to prepare to teach a class... been there, done that
(taught short courses on VAX/VMS at none other than the UW, FWIW). It's not
sustainable unless the planet stays in the "make more geeks" mode, and I
don't know if it is, or if would be healthy in any case. It goes back to
the contempt which plays into the Second Shwartzian Transform: you
shouldn't have to know Perl to make toast, and because you don't have to
know Perl to make toast doesn't make it a contemptible or lesser activity.

Come on Tim! Money is just a concept in Academia! They give away
scholarships, they pay grad students next to nothing.. all to achieve some
Higher Purpose. If that Higher Purpose was to ensure that anybody over 40
and/or with more than 10 years experience in a field was qualified, and
even encouraged, to attend their institution, it would simply be that way.
I'm not asking them to pay me: I'm saying let me come and take your classes
for nominal cost... the way things were at the UW (officially or
unofficially) before Reagan criminalized the whole 'net in the first place!

>> For me there's no escaping the fact that SPUG's agenda is Tim's
>> agenda; maybe if it was clearer what that was, I could make up
>> my mind about it.
>
>Huh? AFAIK, SPUG has no "agenda", outside of helping its members
>learn more about Perl. And my agenda is obvious - I like Perl a
>lot, and am looking for ways to help people learn more about it,
>and improve its position in the marketplace.

Well, OK. And you do an excellent job of showcasing the eccentric, eclectic
and interdisciplinary aspects of what I'll wave my hands and call "the Perl
community". But I'm not sure I can see any measurable impact on its
position in the marketplace.

>> The fundamental problem with charismatic leadership as an
>> organizational model is that whether or not the leader promotes
>> it as a cult of personality, it encourages imitation within the
>> membership (and if the leadership doesn't actively encourage
>> this, it is usually blind to it). That imitation is counter to
>> the dynamics needed by professional organizations of peers;
>> it's also counter to easy and open fraternity, which is needed
>> for fun, fellowship and playing around. It also leads to a
>> situation where the people who get involved are often seeking
>> attention... and when they don't get it they lose interest.
>
>I don't agree with any of that. Are you saying that I'm too
>likable to be a good enough leader? If so, you don't know me well
>enough 8-}. Do you see SPUGsters imitating my fashion choices, or
>hair style, or charity work for Perl? Do you really think we're
>not having fun at the OpenSauce lunches? What "model" would you
>rather see in place of the loosely defined one we have now?

Nice straw man. I'm sure myself and many others do our charity work, too...
and would with or without Perl, SPUG, etc. As for the OpenSauce lunches, am
I mistaken or haven't most of them taken place on weekdays? See, I have
this job... and I can't argue with your assertion that you're having fun, I
just wonder about what I sense is a certain desperation in it. And then
there's the dynamic of all of the copycat lunches, and that's the
charismatic model that I was speaking to: that Tim does it, and then a
whole bunch of people do it, and it's not really coordinated. A lot of that
effort is destined to fail, and is wasted... for my definition of "wasted",
of course. (PS, King Street Cafe is much better, foodwise than HoH. But
none of it holds a candle to a real Dim Sum Palace in SF.)

>> I'd like to see more critical thought about these things in the
>> broader organizational context, but maybe that's just me. I
>> also don't see people having enough of what I would consider
>> "fun"; somehow the tag in somebody's .sig that animals learn by
>> playing therefore comes across to me as a desperate plea for
>> help. Maybe this will help.
>
>Apart from the recent OpenSauce lunches, and the OpenSauce Happy
>Hour that will debut next week, "Fun" was also had at the Perl
>Quiz of the Week parties that Michael Wolf organized for a while.

What happened to those?

>So Fred, to have more fun, you might want to participate in some
>of these activities.

I guess maybe it's me. Yeah, it's me. But I think again you hit it on the
head, Tim does something, so other people do something, and without a
broader organizational structure a lot of these things don't end up having
much staying power. The failure of the charismatic model is that there is a
very limited amount of Tim to go around. Maybe people are hoping technology
will come to the rescue in the form of Wikis and whatnot, and I don't know
how well that will fare.

I was corresponding with Michael when he was setting those up.. and a bunch
of other things, too. It's too much noise and has too little focus for me,
personally, and I'm not really interested in fondling interesting baubles;
I'm more interested in the social and business aspects... or in pulling
several thousand feet of wire. (BTW, I took a road trip with Michael to the
Portland Perl UG. See, now that was fun. Unfortunately I don't think either
of us has reliable enough (4 wheel) transpo to make it a regular thing.
That may change for me soon here.)

[...]
>Thanks for your comments Fred, and all the time you took to write
>them down.
>
>If you can give specific recommendations about how we might
>change SPUG to make it better in your view, please let them be
>heard.

I'm not asking you to change, I'm not sure it would be "good" if you did.
In some ill-formed manner I'm just trying to point out some limitations of
the charismatic model. I've seen it, and the bureaucratic model, and many
in between, in real workplace environments numerous times over the last 20
years. They all have their good and their bad points.

It's just that the current crop of viable and "attractive" (for me) geek
groups seem to be strongly charismatic at this point in time. I guess more
than anything else I'm simply trying to point that out. Given that that's
the state of the world, I probably need to look elsewhere for the kind of
fellowship that I crave... doesn't mean I don't like Perl, or appreciate
the work you do, or the highly entertaining shows you manage to put
together.


Charisma works very well in a "boutique" setting, it may even be necessary.
When people start thinking about expanding it beyond the boutique, they
need to start thinking about their organizational model.

--

Fred Morris
m3047 at inwa.net