Stephane's thoughts corner…

Stephane Bailliez's thoughts on everything

I’m now jobless. I resigned from my OSS company on August 16, so 3 months later, I’m done with it and I got my final check today, 2 days after leaving. Goodbye all..and best of luck.

As I have counted recently, I’m the 25th employee to leave in 2005. The company oscillated between 35 to 45 people. Which means that staff turn-over is, to be fair ~55%, to be harsh 70%..so the truth might be in between: 63%. It would take only massive money investment as a short term patch to avoid the company from collapsing entirely due to such negative spiral and keep it afloat.

I resigned, because I lost confidence in executives to do anything about quality of work, customer and employee relations, understanding of the software industry and opensource, and was really tired of not doing what I was good at and what was supposed to be my job: technical. I needed to learn more, and I could not get it here.

As I was the only employee with opensource experience within a community ( ie, The Apache Software Foundation, the best education you could get about collaboration, respect, trust, software and quality) and software development experience at a commercial publisher. I take that as a personal failure for not beeing able to educate people better. But, I would be more careful next time when I find that it is the first and only company for mostly everyone, including the executives who also have no experience in software but jumped in the OSS money train.

I’m leaving the company with an additional gift: A non-competition clause preventing me to work as an individual or for any company in France in any position in the field of Linux and/or free software for the next six months. Financial compensation which cannot be disclosed for legal matters is of course similar to the clause: ridiculous.

I’m guilty of having signed such non-sense which is part of every employee work contract and should have been more suspicious and less trusty in those business aspects. These non-competition clauses are usually not activated when an employee leaves because:

• it does not make any sense in most case
• it drains money out of the company unnecessarily
• there are constants lawsuits and precedents which makes it hard to write a valid clause
• it is against basic law articles related to freedom of work
• it gives bad publicity to the company: people talk !
• employees loose any trust they have with executives

Last but not least, if you are really working in the opensource industry and really understand it:

• it REALLY does NOT make ANY sense!

Anyone doing business and looking for a job with this company should be aware of this fact alone to decide whether or not this corporate way of thought match their ideas. Watch out for smoke screen and look for facts. This one is a fact.

Now, if you want to know the name of the company, it would be unfair to give it. So I suggest to simply google for it with my name and former position or look at my LinkedIn profile.

I believe in trust, and I believe that trust is essential to build good relationships and shape a cohesive, motivated and respected team. I also like my work, despite ranting a lot about it, and for some reason, even the next day, 24h after officially not being an employee, I stopped by to help a colleague to solve a problem.

Talk about being professional.

And see what you get.

Of course, this entry conforms to the following articles of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union:

• Article 10 – Freedom of thought, conscience and religion
• Article 11 – Freedom of expression and information.

and the non-competition clause breaks the following article:

• Article 15 – Freedom to choose an occupation and right to engage in work
• Article 16 – Freedom to conduct a business.

You are free to comment and show your support… I trust you guys.

I recently had to deal with lawyers to get more information about a few legal issues getting in my way. This was a first experience as an individual and was impressed by their billing process. The granularity of time spent working on issues are reported with a 15min granularity. Initial meeting is billed. Phone call is billed, etc…

I’m wondering what it would be like if software companies were billing the same way. Very often you spend an insane amount of time on actually figuring out what the customer wants, and this time is never billed. It encourages lazyness on the customer side, as he is often dealing with several companies at the same time and he’s just spending time and getting information and does not actually think about what he really wants. The first question a lawyer ask after you have exposed your point is:

what is your objective ? Is it this or that or something else ?

In my previous company, I have seen such process last for about 8 to 12 months. Meetings were done on average every 8 weeks or so, it was hard to get replies in a consistent way, meetings were so distant in time that it was actually counter productive and the scope was so huge that you could not get anything concrete done. Not mentioning the absence of adequate people to expose functional or technical issues. So needless to say that you spend a lot of money in such useless meetings.

I believe that if every company were billing like lawyers do, decisions would be made way more faster and things could actually be done ! Because the problem, especially in France, is mostly cultural. People are not encouraged by the systeme to take decisions. Due to social benefits, a culture of risk is not part of the equation. So when a decision is made, it is when there is no choice anymore and there is no more time in your hands…which is not really appropriate for software engineering,because you have then all the ingredients to a recipe for disaster.

That said, my bill is huge. Bloody lawyers.

While looking desperatly for an appartment to buy within my budget, I bumped into the following announcement :

“Asnieres, Idéal investisseur !!! 2 pièces 31 m2 près de la mairie. 7e étage sans ascenseur par escalier principal. Vue dégagée. Cave. Loué 730EUR/mois. 123.000 EUR“

Translation: “Asnieres, Perfect for investors !!! 2 rooms, 31sqm, near mayor house. 7th floor without elevator using main stairs. Clear view. Cave. Rented 730EUR/month. 123000EUR”

Now, that is incredibly insane.

In the software industry, the DIY (do-it-yourself) , NIH (not-invented-here) and ‘Reinvent the wheel’ syndromes are well known classic management pathologies.

To some extent it’s in your best interest to leverage other people’s work and look at what has been working or not in other (similar) organizations.

Imagine an IT company of about 41 people with about 25 consultants and a 55% employee-turnover looking for VCs.
To “handle the future growth and help communication flow”, and after extensive thoughts, meetings and weekend meetings, the CEO, CTO/co-CEO and CFO it have decided to have the following meetings:

• Weekly Executive meeting on monday morning from 8AM to 1PM
• Weekly Executive/Senior project managers meeting on monday at 7PM
• Monthly project manager meeting on wednesday from 7PM to 9PM. All questions to be adressed must first be sent to the preceding Executive/Senior Managemers meeting.

Now, when reading this, I feel like: “don’t people learn ?”.

Set aside the fact that the schedule is simply and completely insane from a social and efficiency point of view, this is at 180 degrees from running effective meetings. There are tons of books and articles on this topic and very large organizations with more than 100 times employees are doing their best to get away from these kind of ‘waste-of-time’ meetings by:

• Meeting only if necessary
• Having an agenda
• Keeping the meeting short: at most 45 minutes
• Starting on time and ending on time
• Issuing minutes

I will be going to ApacheCon conference, held in Stuttgart during July 19-23. That will be a nice occasion to meet great people such as Stefan Bodewig, Steve Loughran and James Strachan and a load of other Apache committers I’ve only known via email or IRC for the last 4 years. Sylvain Wallez and the Cocoon gang will be there too trying to take the conference by storm.

That will be nice to have some time away from work. These conferences are always a fertile ground for technical ideas and you’ve got some amazingly skilled and experienced people. It is especially important to me as since I’m working in an opensource company I basically consider my contributions exceptionally low.