Sunday July 30, 2006

The Sun Global Technology Conference in Bangalore last week included a session on Global Engineering during which we discussed the challenges around building and running an effective, widely distributed engineering organization. I'd like to share a suggestion I made during this session. It addresses only a specific aspect of the global engineering challenge, but I believe it could deliver real value for Sun, Sun's employees, and ultimately Sun's customers.

In a nutshell: Ban the use of conference rooms at Sun for meetings with multi-site attendees.

It would cost a modest amount to ensure employees have headsets for quality, full-duplex audio, but if we are serious about being a global company, this suggestion should be studied carefully.

For our senior executives, it's probably been awhile since you've been stuck on a phone, dialed into a conference room full of people who you can't hear, who haven't remembered to email the conference materials, and who use whiteboards you can't see. If you can get past all that, now try to actually participate in the conversation instead of just trying to listen. It doesn't work. And better conference room audio systems are not the answer.

As a senior technical person, I find such meetings annoying, but I make it work as best I can. I'm not shy about insisting that the meeting materials be sent out or about being aggressive in inserting myself into the conversation, despite the difficulties of being heard on the phone. But what about our less senior engineers? Or engineers in countries where such aggressiveness isn't part of their culture? Sure, they need to step up and participate in Sun's engineering culture, but why not remove a significant barrier to their full participation? One that we can easily address with a small technology investment.

In terms of how meetings should work, I've been involved for several years in several standing meetings where everyone is required to use a headset even though these meetings involve groups of people on each of the Burlington, Menlo Park, and San Diego campuses. We could use three conference rooms, but we don't. And what a difference it makes:

Conference materials must be sent out to everyone. And the audio playing field is completely leveled, allowing everyone to participate equally. It's true that tools must be used to share online demos and do whiteboarding, but such tools allow everyone to participate, regardless of location.

Some may argue reasonably that this is a lowest common denominator approach which removes the benefits co-located attendees derive from sitting in conference rooms together. While that may be so, there are other ways for co-located employees to replace that in-person meeting interaction, for example through hallway conversations, after-work socializing, cafeteria lunches, etc. That problem is a lot easier to fix than the remote ("remote" is headquarters-speak--there are no remote employees) distributed collaboration problem.

It doesn't take a corporate ban to start levelling the playing field. I don't like big policies like this anyway. If you run a meeting with distributed attendees and are serious about allowing all your team members to contribute equally, make the change. Just do it!

British Airways is zero for three with me now. Every one of the three flights I've taken has arrived at least two hours late. The stilton hit the fan yesterday when we arrived over two hours late to Heathrow from Mumbai and I missed my connection to Boston.

After having been told by the onboard attendants that everything would be sorted out for me in advance of landing, and that the gate agent would help me, imagine my surprise when they instead directed me to a line at the BA desk for rerouting. It took over an hour and a half to have my flight rebooked and be given hotel and meal vouchers. Numerous appeals to the BA staff to find some additional staff for the desk were not sympathetically received. At one point, the line stalled for over 30 minutes while the few agents assisted customers with apparently difficult situations.

After that, it was then another hour to find my way from Terminal 4 to Terminal 1 to the hotel bus to the Renaissance Heathrow. Thumbs up on the Renaissance, by the way.

I'm now back at the airport with three hours to wait before my flight home. It's been smooth so far. But the day is young yet.

British Airways. Bloody Awful.

UPDATE: The day was indeed young and I was optimistic. My last BA leg arrived in Boston over two hours late as well. And that ends my short and unhappy relationship with British Airways. Four strikes and you're out, guys.

The traffic in Bangalore was something to behold. It's a flowing river of motorcycles, auto rickshaws, buses, trucks, and automobiles. It's noisy, chaotic, and dirty. Noisy because horns are used continually; chaotic because the lane lines seem at best advisory; and dirty I think primarily because of the large number of auto rickshaws on the roads. I saw some of these little three-wheelers spewing steady streams of black or white exhaust from their little tailpipes. In spite of all that, it is quite fun to watch and I never felt unsafe.

After I'd watched the traffic for a few days, I came to think of it as "polite chaos." While the horns are used continually as a matter of course, they are not blared in irritation as we do in the US. Rather, they are tooted informationally in advance of overtaking another vehicle. And to warn pedestrians, who are definitely at the bottom of the food chain in this ecosystem.

A simple, static snapshot couldn't capture the sense of the traffic very well. I was much happier with a series of eight-second exposures I took from our cab one evening. I've included a few below.

Every year, Sun holds an internal technology conference for its senior technical staff. The Technology Leadership Conference is an event for Fellows, Distinguished Engineers (DEs), and a selected group of senior engineers from all of Sun's divisions. The conference is usually two days and focuses on technology issues important to Sun and its future.

This year, in recognition of the importance of Sun's global engineering community, the conference was for the first time held outside the US. Actually, this is the first time it has ever been held outside of California as well. The conference was held in Bangalore, location of Sun's largest engineering office in India. About a dozen Distinguished Engineers and Technical Directors (TDs) travelled from other Sun sites to attend along with about 150 of the Indian senior technical staff.

The conference was divided into two parts. The first day was organized around talks from a variety of Sun customers in India. Talks were chosen to align with Sun's targeted growth areas and each talk was followed by a panel discussion with the speaker and several of the visiting DEs and TDs.

The second day was for employees and it gave us a chance to get into some excellent discussions on some of the major internal technical vectors that Sun believes are going to be critical for the future of the industry and Sun's success. The 2nd day opened with a video presentation from our CTO, Greg Papadopoulos, that outlined Sun's view of the technology landscape and the challenges and opportunities ahead for us as an engineering organization. I teamed with David Greenhill, Niagara Chief Engineer, to do a presentation on horizontal scaling. The presentation was followed by a very active panel and discussion session.

After the technology presentations, attendees split into breakout sessions to discuss each of the technology areas and then each team reported out its conclusions, which will be summarized and shared with Sun's senior technical staff.

The conference was a great success. I was very impressed by the local staff's enthusiasm and eagerness to engage actively in the event. It was clear from the numerous interactions I had that the senior technical staff in India are a motivated and very clueful team.

I've been on past TLC program and organizing committees and know how much work is involved. Congratulations to Srinivas and his team for holding a stimulating and valuable technology conference!