We’ve all been there: you take some time off and you come back to an avalanche of email. As you may know, I recently went on my annual vacation (last time I mention it, I promise 8)) and when I came back I had 259 emails to read. This Running Diary tells gives a rundown of how I reduced it to zero in about three hours.

The Goal

Every time I do this, the goal is the same: figure out what’s important.

My biggest and constant fear in my work life is that somebody can’t get their job done because they are waiting on me for some decision or crucial piece of information. Be a roadblock too often and it’ll show on your performance evaluation in a bad, bad way. So, the key is to get down to what those things might be as quickly as possible.
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Originally, this was going to be a 2 part series on my experience writing an article for the Java developer community website The Server Side (TSS). But, enough happened in the week after the article went live that I thought it warranted a third entry. In Part 1, I went into how I got hooked up to write the article in the first place and some of the struggles I had in the first draft. Part 2 discussed the review process and how easy it is to get defensive when you get feedback on something, especially when you spent a lot of time on its initial creation.

Here, I’ll cover the aftermath. There was a lot of interaction after the article went live, some expected, some unexpected. A random list of what happened:
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This is Part 2 of a trio of posts on my experience writing an article on HP.com’s architecture for the Java online community The Server Side. Part 1 covers the genesis of the article, the restrictions I had to adhere to, and how I got over writer’s block. Here in Part 2, I discuss getting defensive over what turned out to be very good feedback, losing touch with details as you move up the corporate ladder, and I summarize this very interesting experience. Part 3 goes into the things that happened after the article went live.

The HP Review cycle

Before I could submit the article to editors at TSS, I needed some feedback from some folks inside HP. Not only was this for technical correctness, but to make sure I was protecting proprietary strategy as well. Among the hardest things for me to do is to accept feedback and I don’t think I’m alone there. Even when that feedback ends up being correct, I can’t help but initially feel defensive about it. I’d like to think that’s a natural reaction, but maybe there’s something wrong with me.
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Recently, I was fortunate enough to get a chance to write a case study on HP.com architecture for The Server Side (TSS), a community for Java developers with upwards of 600,000 members. This Running Diary is separated into three pieces and details the whole process, starting with how I got approached about doing it, moving on to the writing process and how difficult it can be to accept negative feedback (Part 2), and finally some of the surprising things that happened in the aftermath of the article going live (Part 3).

The Pitch

Over the first 6 months of this blog, among the most eye opening metrics was the amount of traffic and conversions of visitors to subscribers I received from making comments over at TSS. It wasn’t surprising, since the typical audience for a site devoted to Java development is also the target I’m trying to serve with the things I write here and based on my job, I have a decent amount of credibility on that forum so I was getting a lot of crossover. Because of this, I was getting ready to approach the editors about an article post when, based on the techniques I described in my review of The Virtual Handshake regarding transparency and branding yourself online, they approached me instead. While they were more interested in a technical slant on my HP.com activities than in the career topics I write about here, I was excited for the opportunity regardless of what they wanted me to discuss.
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I recently spent a pleasant, sunny day at the University of Wisconsin (UW) working as a volunteer for HP Recruiting at a job fair. Seeing as I originally came to HP in 1993 via HP Recruiting and attended similar events when I was a student myself, I thought it would be an interesting way to give back a little. What was it like to be on the flip side of the job fair experience? Read on.

Getting Involved

I got into contact with the folks at HP Recruiting in a weird way. The HR department, which the recruiting group is a part of, had a random gathering to discuss issues going on in IT and among the things that got mentioned was our starting up college hiring again. As we got into off-shoring in the late 1990’s with software development, entry level positions took a hit for awhile, but management is dedicated to bringing in a fresh crop of folks from colleges on a regular basis now.
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In Part 1 of this running diary, I discussed the things I like to do first when preparing for my annual performance evaluation. This important period is what management bases rewards on, so it is important to get right. The first part discusses tasks to help you get the ball rolling while simultaneously getting some positive press for yourself with others. Here in this part, I’ll go into how I prepare for my meeting with my boss and show a version of what I sent in last year.

The Annual Resume and Cover Letter

Yes, as masochistic as that sounds, I think of my performance evaluation that way. Every year when I fill out my accomplishments list for my performance evaluation, I do it as if I’m filling out an annual resume. As such, I go though the same set of exercises I do when I work on my resume or my LinkedIn profile, but restrict myself to the last 12 months. When I deliver it, I pay careful attention to action verbs leading off each bullet item on the list, try to make use of numbers where possible, and draw attention to items that go beyond the normal expectations of my normal responsibilities. There are certainly other ways to approach this, but I can’t complain about how well it has worked for me.
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I had a recent post based on an article on another site touting how best to prepare for your performance evaluation, so I thought I’d write sort of a retroactive piece on how I prepared for my last evaluation. I say “retroactive” because I’m telling it in present tense when really, I’m just remembering it as best I can since I didn’t take notes, which is my usual Running Diary habit.
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This last installment of my exotic team offsite diary covers the best part of the trip in the form of a tour of the Ben & Jerry’s factory. Part 1 introduced my loose definition of “exotic” when it comes to meeting locations and Part 2 discussed how our team chose to deal with its distributed nature.

Wednesday - Second Life, boring budgets, and Ben & Jerry
The morning session was my biggest contribution to the gathering as I presented some future
looking ideas for our online presence. The coolest part was telling everybody about Second Life. By far the most satisfying part of my job is getting to learn things all the time and be the guy people go to when they want to know about new stuff. I worked into the presentation the history of network gaming and briefly talked about my long gone two year addiction to Star Wars Galaxies in the process. When showing these kinds of things to the managers, though, it’s never clear to me if they are impressed and excited or glassy-eyed and not comprehending what I’m talking about. This, despite utilizing my own oral delivery tips.

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What makes an offsite “exotic”? That, along with the joys of travel on this particular occasion were covered in Part 1. Here in Part 2, the actual proceedings begin and we deal with massive geographic distribution before I get left out of the fun activity.

Tuesday - Hitting the ground running

Most of the times at gatherings like this, the agenda starts early and goes pretty late in the day. If you are going to spend the money to get everybody together, you might as well get as much out of it as you can. The part that was hard about that for me was that we had a 7:30 am Eastern start time for breakfast and my body was still on Pacific time and wasn’t happy about being awake at 4:30. Some sugar helped with that, but I was pretty out of it for most of the morning.
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From time to time, you and some team of people who reside in different physical locations will get together for multiple days worth of meetings. Sometimes these gatherings are called “retreats”, but in the company I work for, we call them “offsites” (an example being the one I ran and called the Engineering Summit). According to most spell checkers, “offsite” is not even a real word, but the term comes from the old days where we all actually reported to the same work site every day and we used to go away from that site for meetings in order to focus on some particular task. Somehow, the name stuck despite the fact that it’s full meaning doesn’t really apply any more.

There are two kinds of offsites and they depend entirely on the location in question. Which would you rather hear your boss suggest?

1) I was thinking we should all get together in Boise pretty soon.

2) Vegas, baby.

So basically, there are exotic locales that people actually want to go to and there is every place else. This running diary is about one such exotic locale team offsite.
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