KISSmetrics got a lot of publicity around the startup and web development blogs/news sites so it was understandable to have assumed that startups were their target market. This month, KISSmetrics came out of beta and announced their pricing:

• $149 / month: 1m events tracked
• $399 / month: 5m events tracked
• $699 / month: 10m events tracked
• No free plan

W…T…F?! Frankly, I was gobsmacked and shocked when I received the pricing announcement. What the hell was all this? Were these annual prices? Nope. Who was this service being aimed at? Certainly not any sort of bootstrapped startup business. I don’t mind the lack of a free plan (in fact, I think it’s a good move) but where’s the $10-20/month startup plan for < 10,000 events? And then I got angry. I’d liked KISSmetrics. As the name implied I thought it was simple. I wrote a Rails plugin for the service to help rails developers easily send events to KISSmetrics. I spoke about the service at my local Ruby developers group. I recommended the service. Now I have to go and retract that recommendation. Even on the “small” plan, KISSmetrics would need to give you insights that save your business at least $200 every single month and all within 1m events. I wonder how many other people will retract their recommendations for KISSmetrics?

If I put my cynical hat on, I wonder if KISSmetrics’ business plan is actually about extracting large wads of cash from the bank accounts of venture-backed startups… because that pricing is far too rich for anyone else. Though I can’t help feel that for every $149/month plan they sell now, they could have sold more than 15 $10/month plans. It also means I’ll be staying well away from their KISSinsights product (and anything else that team may produce) and we should all be more wary about using pricing-unannounced-beta-products in the future.

“A sign of the times”

“In these difficult times”

“The world we live in”

“At least you still have a job”

I fucking hate these stupid platitudes which are currently being banded around in boardrooms up and down the country (including ours, this morning, when free tea & coffee was cancelled). It’s as if uttering one of these phrases makes everything ok, that we can’t argue with the choices, that we can’t dare to dream of something better. It’s that assumption that dreams must be abandoned that really irks me.

I’ve been moved from feature development, to backlog defect fixing, to customer development support, to QA on an entirely different product — all in the space of a year. I now work report to a manager in another country, work on a product which only 4 people in the building work on and I’ve been told, in no uncertain terms, not to look for development work within the QA role. I must simply accept my fate, play my part as the pawn to be moved about, and dance like a monkey performing the same repetitive manual test scripts. Oh, don’t even think about trying to automate that you naughty developer! This is screwing with my career and, whilst those decisions might make sense from a business perspective, this isn’t something I’m going to be happy with. I’m fucking pissed.

What will I do? Firstly, there are choices everywhere and anywhere, in every situation. So, I’m going to accept my lovely new QA role with open, if somewhat limp, arms. I’m going to do my job to a level which will neither get me fired nor garner me any awards or praise. I’ve abandoned any and all prospects of a long term career as an employee so I’m not trying to impress anyone here. I need to take my fate into my own hands and no longer be beholden to the decisions made in corporate boardrooms. I’m going to concentrate 100% of my life energy into starting a business and growing it to a level that will replace my full-time job. It’ll take time, possibly lots of time, but that’s even more reason to start. right. now.

I’ve also got a few new catchphrases for “these difficult times”:

• Fuck it
• Fuck that
• Fuck the Recession and
• Fuck the “Real World”

On the one hand, the influx of women into the Irish workforce was the main reason for our rapid economic growth. It was women — not EU-funding, not low corporation tax, not academia, but women — that grew this country’s GDP. That is pretty amazing. I wish I could find the Economist article from a few years back which examined these issues. It makes sense when you think about it: increase the workforce, increase the GDP. This was universally a good thing for Ireland.

On the other hand, many (most?) households were getting two incomes and we had almost 0% unemployment. This meant that there was a large amount of disposable income which, you could argue, is the primary reason behind the property boom and Dublin becoming one of the most expensive cities in the world. After all, when you had two professional salaries coming into the household, why wouldn’t you buy a €500,000 house? Or €750,000?

We got rich and our prices rose to match… but now we’re poor it doesn’t work so well. The problem is that now there are an increasing number of household with only one income, and it’s hard to live off one income when the economy is still structured towards two-income households.

The company is losing money hand over fist so I can only assume that these workers are happy to work for free — because there sure as hell isn’t going to be any money to pay them. And, lets face it, it’s not like no one could see this coming. The primary markets of Waterford Crystal’s tacky vases, bowls and decanters are American tourists and golf tournaments. Frankly, anyone who believes that there’s a viable business in manufacturing these sorts of goods in Ireland is of below average intelligence.

There was some headline in the Independent today about people who joined the company straight out of school and now have no where to go. Well, I’m sorry but did you ever consider that the company may close the factory? Did you ever seek to advance yourself through education, changing companies/jobs or location? Or were you happy to stay where you were and have the unions fight on your behalf?

I’m am completely astounded with the apparent attitude that it is the workers and unions that decide how the business conducts itself. This is not the way it works. If you don’t like having your entire life depending on the decisions of some high-up accountant then you need to work for yourself — and yes, that means putting in the efforts to get yourself up to that level. We have no rights to a job, no rights to have companies continue trading indefinitely and no rights to keep those companies within Ireland.

Personally, I’m expecting to be laid-off this year and I’m working hard to prepare for such a catacysmic scenario… I just don’t understand why no one else seems to think like that.

Sorry, I needed to get that out of my system.

This got me thinking about software development as a career choice for me:

• Other than wanting to be a fast jet pilot (eyesight too short, legs too long), I’ve never considered a career in anything other than software.
• I have no desire to leave the software development industry.
• I enjoy programming to an extent that I do it in my spare time (but it’s not all I do in my spare time).
• I don’t enjoy sitting down for 8 hours a day. I need fresh air and a walk a few times a day.
• I’m currently employed by a huge software company, at a low level position, doing not very interesting work
• I don’t see much of a career path within those types of organisations which have the potential to support a family
• I am very excited by the potential to create small businesses based on software. The costs and lead-in times have never been shorter although you still need to actually sell the product.
• I program because I want the end result to exist. I don’t particularly care whether it is me or someone else that develops it, just so long as the product exists.
• Since I’m motivated by the result, I often get very frustrated when the actual development gets in the way. If the documentation is lacking, or a piece of code isn’t working as expected, I get annoyed.
• Since I care about the result, I’ve become extremely disillusioned with convoluted architectures. My experience is that they cause more problems than they actually solve and rarely live up to the expectations.
• If I had the money to hire a designer and programmer to implement my ideas, I would. I don’t care about the code that much.
• I don’t know a great deal about low-level details of hardware or software. I generally don’t care about algorithmic complexity until I have to care about it.
• I prefer clean, obvious, well-commented code to “smart” or “clever” code. I’ve found that extremely smart people (up in the genius IQ range) tend to make terrible software engineers.
• I am surprised by the lack of outside programming interest by my colleagues. They don’t code at home, buy programming books, or learn new technologies on their own initiative.
• I despise restrictive development practices and micro-management (either by people or systems). Trust and respect me. Don’t build in systems and “process” that prevents me from doing my job.
• I don’t like being treated like a hammer (“Hammer, go hit that nail”). If there’s no creativity then the enjoyment is lost too.
• I cannot stand technology that doesn’t actually help anyone (particularly expensive, broken technology that is sold to the unsuspecting user)

Today I hear that Pownce, a Twitter competitior/clone, has been aquired by Six Apart and that it will shutdown in 2 weeks time. Again, there was no business model but there’d certainly have been plenty of opportunity to explore one before Twitter got their act together (and it seems easier for the underdog to explore their options).  Still, now Pownce is gone too just so Six Apart could get their staff and/or intellectual property.

It seems that these sites might have survived if they’d actually been charging their users which, ironically, would actualy have been good for the users.  ‘I Want Sandy’, in particular, had a very active and enthusiastic user community who are almost begging to pay money for the service.

Perhaps a replacement service will emerge but it seems that we should all be wary of placing our effort/data/friends/business in a site that has absolutely no business model — it’s just too easy for the business to close and be abandoned.  It’s much harder to abandon a profitable webapp.

Essentially: If you’re not paying for it today, don’t expect it be here tomorrow.

In the good ol’ days, you could just do a simple search for the page with the best keywords. Then people got wise and we had pages full of irrelevant keywords just to attract viewers. Google’s revolutionary PageRank algorithm uses the links made to a website to provide a metric for how interesting/authoritative that site is. It’s based on the idea that getting someone to link to your site was hard and therefore those links were valuable. However, these days it’s very easy to create fake blogs, leave comments on other blogs, post in forums or tweet about your sites which all provides the valuable links Google is looking for. To combat this loophole, Google suggested (and web developers implemented) the nofollow link so now any link marked as rel=”nofollow” is ignored by Google.

Here’s the weakness: Links have stopped becoming a good indicator of popularity/relevance because they are no longer rare or hard to obtain. They’ve lost their meaning. Also, most of our links are now being published (and followed) on social media sites (digg/reddit, comments, forums, social networks, etc) but are being ignored by Google due to the nofollow attribute. Google is only using a small part of the web to provide their rankings.

Yeah, I know. This is all random, untested, unverified, unproven thoughts coming hot off my brain. So I’m probably wrong. And Google is far from dumb/ignorant about this and is highly unlikely to rely soley on PageRank. But I still think there’s a 1990′s-Google-like revolution in search technology waiting to happen using something other than links

These are (largely unedited) notes I collected between 2003-2006 when I was working on my PhD in Computer Science. I eventually admitted to myself that I wasn’t going to finish it (due to a combination of research/financial/personal/career pressures) and that, in fact, I didn’t want to finish it. This post represents the advice I wish I could have given to myself when I was thinking about applying for a PhD. The short version of this advice is: Don’t.

The devil is in the details – and a PhD is Hell

I came to my PhD with a fairly clear idea about what I wanted to investigate. In fact, I’d been thinking about it and working on it for the previous 2 years. However, many people start their PhD with a vague interest in an area and spend the first 12 months figuring out what novel aspect they want to pursue. Initially, it can feel as if finding out what you are going to research is the main hurdle.

Alas, that is not the case. The main problem is that once you’ve narrowed your research area down, you need to keep focusing. And again. And again. In the end you’re left looking at boring equations, graphs and theories that are the complete opposite of the interesting and practical idea you started with. In many ways this is like starting a business: everyone can have a grand business idea, some people can tease out a feasible business plan, but the successful businesses are run by the people with the big vision and the attention to the smallest details.

Know your audience

It is important to understand, from the outset of the PhD, who your target audience is: it’s you. I remember hearing that, on average, 1.6 people will read your PhD thesis. I’m pretty sure that includes yourself, your spouse, your supervisor, your second supervisor and your examiner (yeah, that’s technically 5 people. If someone says they’ve read your thesis, they’re probably lying – they read page 9). You have to accept, that no one in the world will want to wade through this document. Ever.

You might start your PhD with the intention of making a discovery crucial to the future of the world and winning the Nobel prize before you’ve even graduated. You will be very disappointed. No one in the world will care about your work. Repeat after me: No one cares.

Supervisors: a curious species, rarely sighted in their expected habitat

Supervisors are strange creatures. Some are like ghosts, appearing occasionally for a fleeting moment, and you’re more likely to meet them at a conference than at the University. Others are always around but they’re too busy running around like demented hamsters on a wheel – all motion and no progress. They’re disorganised. All of them will, at some point, forget what your project is about – and some will even forget who you are.

I made an interesting discovery half way through my PhD: the number of good/useful/interesting/brilliant things that your supervisor will say to you is not proportional to the amount of contact you have with them – it’s constant. Yep, that right. You can have weekly meetings with your supervisor but you’ll only get three good suggestions a year out of them. Oh, and on the subject of meetings, there are only about five types of meeting that you’ll ever have during your PhD: The Big Picture, The Progress Update, The Paper Writing Enslaving (a.k.a. My Research Review Is Approaching So I Need To Get You To Write Something), The Thesis Word Count and The Pub (usually accompanied by beer). Do not make the mistake of going into a meeting and expecting it to be any different to last week’s. And try not to get them confused: even if you supervisor is plying you with beer, watch out for the sudden switch to Paper Writing Enslaving.

Supervisors also participate in a little-known game which can catch out the naïve student: Hunt the Supervisor. This involves the PhD student attempting to locate their supervisor during the agreed meeting slot. And, no, they are definitely not going to be in their office. You’ll be lucky if they’re in the right country.

The loneliness of the PhD student

A PhD is a completely solo effort. There is no one you can ask advice of. No one can help you. There are no books in the bookshop that will shed light on your problems. Magazine articles are even more pointless. You are alone. Think Frodo without the Fellowship.

Even PhD Students can live a normal life. Sometimes.

Being a PhD student isn’t like being an undergraduate. There a very, very few lectures you have to attend and very few regular assignments. There are no grades either. There’s also no timetable. Essentially you can work (or more often, not) whenever you please. So, it’s not like having a proper job. Even if you work regular hours (say 9am-6pm), you’ll be reading papers, writing papers, running experiments and any number of other pointless things during your free time. I tried sticking to a regular working day and it didn’t work – or, rather, I didn’t. If you’re like me, when it gets down to the nitty-gritty, boring detailed work of the PhD, you need to remove as many distractions as you can because, at this stage, just about anything is going to be preferable to your PhD. Computer games, good fiction and the Internet are all obvious distractions that can be minimised. Washing up was one of my favourite distractions, which I never found a way to avoid.

The stipends available to a PhD student are actually very good, especially if you’ve come directly from the pasta & baked bean-eating life of an undergraduate. On the other hand, if you’ve been working for a couple of years, the drop in disposable income is a fair shock. Still, it’s not that bad; I managed to get married during my PhD (something good had to come out of it!).

A PhD is great because… well, just because.

I attended this wonderful introductory course run by my department, in which they presented this slide of great points (completely unedited) about why you might want to do a PhD:

• Qualification
• Dr.
• Curious
• etc.

Yep, that’s right. These are the only reasons he could think of to do a PhD! According to this professor, you should do a PhD if: you need to to get that academic position you’ve always dreamt of since childhood; you want to show off your title on mortgage applications and get called to medical emergencies; you’re “curious” (just remember what happened to the cat); or some other, unspecified, and entirely unthinkable, reason.

I can actually think of a few more positive reasons. If you’ve just finished your degree and aren’t quite sure what to do next, then a PhD isn’t the worst thing in the world. You have plenty of time. If you want to start your own business then doing a PhD will give you access to the latest research results upon which to base your commercial enterprise. And undertaking a PhD requires many of the same skills as starting a new business: self-motivation, attention to detail, unhealthy work hours, forward thinking, pitching your vision to sceptics and laymen, etc.

On the downside, for every job that a PhD will help you get, there are a thousand which it will over-qualify you for. For some jobs (admittedly, probably not your ideal job), you might be better to pretend you were in prison for those years of your life. In any case, a PhD is unlikely to get you a higher salary.

It’s not the Result, it’s the Road that counts

I discovered at the start of my final year that it doesn’t really matter what you produce as an end result of the PhD. What matters are the experiments, trials, results, observations and evaluation you conduct. This makes sense when you consider the PhD for what it is: a qualification to conduct individual research. Producing something interesting, useful, wonderful and absolutely cool is not part of your PhD. Get over it. For me, this made my final year an absolute nightmare of doing things I wasn’t interested in and, frankly, didn’t care about.

I started the PhD as a way of shutting myself away from the world for 3 years whilst I worked on an interesting idea. I categorically and absolutely did not care about the qualification. I didn’t need it and I had no desire to work in academia. Unfortunately, after 2 years I had to accept that, unless I modified my approach, I actually wasn’t going to have anything to show for 3 years effort. And despite my initial intentions, I really couldn’t waste 3 years of my life without anything in return.

(Not) Getting Things Done

Like any large long-term project, you’re going to need to learn how to organise yourself. So you might start reading about various personal productivity methods: Getting Things Done, Gantt charts, to-do lists… but don’t bother, they don’t apply. If you do make a list, it’s basically going to come down to five types of tasks: Reading, Inventing, Comprehending, Implementing, Writing. Now, reading is an easy task to complete: just read the book/paper. Unfortunately, sometimes you don’t know what to read. Implementing (say, software) isn’t too difficulty either. Neither is writing. The problem is the two core tasks of your PhD: Inventing (an algorithm, for example) and Comprehending (how/why it works and explaining it to others, typically through graphs and experiments). “Inventing” something is an open-ended task which can’t be estimated or controlled. In management-speak, it’s highly risky. “Comprehending” is also quite difficult if you’re as mathematically-illiterate as me.

The Other Year

Myth: A PhD is 3 years long. Actually, you’ll find that the PhD funding is for 3 years but the university is quite happy for you to take 4 years to complete. After 4 years, they get difficult because the funding organisations will fine them for every PhD student that hasn’t graduated. The solution is naturally to finish during the 3 years of funding. It isn’t going to happen (and if it does, you were destined for academia and shouldn’t be reading this – your fate is sealed). 3 years sounds like a long time but it isn’t. But what happens between the end of the funding and the completion of your PhD? I don’t know (yet) but starvation, alternate employment, debt and non-completion are all on the (credit) cards.

It’s worth bearing in mind that the university may “strongly recommend” that you don’t get a job whilst trying to write up. This makes sense in some ways: those that take on jobs are less likely to actually complete – possibly because they’ve already got a job and don’t care any more. The students that don’t take job tend to get very skinny and tremble at the words “bank manager” and “credit card balance”. Of course, the university has their own motivations for wanting you to complete (namely avoiding that fine and looking after your academic interests). On the other hand, you will probably have a motivation to eat and remain part of society – which may outweigh your waning motivation for finishing the PhD. It’s also worth remembering that the university will still expect you to pay fees during this missing, unfunded year (although, reduced when you get a full draft thesis written).

The two most frequent PhD questions

There are really just two questions that you’ll be frequently required to answer:

What’s it about? Enjoy this phase as it only lasts for about 6 months. Once someone has asked the question, and listened to the largely incomprehensible drivel that you’ll reply with, they’re highly unlikely to ever ask again.
How’s it going? The true purpose of this question is revealed after about 2-2.5 years: what they really want to know is “When will you be finished?“. The subtext is that a PhD is something to finish, not something to do. Unlike the first question, this will be asked repeatedly by the same people, regardless of whatever negative, vague, dismissive, or generally cranky response you give them. I’m thinking of other responses including swearing, violent outbursts, “when I finally give up”, “when I finally admit that the algorithm (and general idea) is seriously flawed and I am not able to unflaw it”, “when I shrink to 4 foot nothing”, “when the earth’s magnetic field flips over”, and so on …

Your supervisor is here to stay

A university can be a challenging place for an undergraduate – plenty of them drop out or fail to make the grades… some don’t even get the grades to attend in the first place. For the postgrad, the university is a place of indifference: no one really cares whether you’re there or what you’re doing. It’s slightly more… stressful... as a postdoc since your employment is dependant on the whims of a funding organisation and the bullshitting presentation abilities of your manager. I think new, probationary lecturers might need to make some effort to impress but it soon fades after probation (or, frankly, before). Academics, on the other hand, lead a fairly stress-free life. Of course, they run around like headless chickens, never have time to attend your meeting, are always behind on deadlines and generally exude an air of stress, mild panic and approaching heart attack. However, this is not the whole story. You see, academics don’t get fired. Undergrads drop out, post-grads give up, post-docs leave but academics… retire.

Academia is a place where incompetence can hide from the rest of the world. There are some good academics who have mastered their art of reading, thinking, writing and teaching, but there’s also a good dose of incompetent ones too. In the commercial world, there’s always rumours, quiet whispering and cryptic emails about “Jake Smith no longer works for this company”, but it doesn’t happen in academia. I reckon that the only thing that would get an academic fired is if they slept with a student. One of their own students. Whom they gave top marks to. And everyone else failed. I don’t think many frustrated PhD students will consider sleeping with their supervisor just to get them fired. So, no matter how much you dislike them, or incompetent/abusive/annoying/offensive they are, be under no illusions that your supervisor is going to be there long after you leave.

Here’s what I wrote in response to a post (on the Business of Software forum at Joel on Software) from someone considering a part-time PhD:

I had 5 years commercial experience and then decided to start a PhD in Computer Science (full-time) because I wanted to get some ideas off my chest. I’m almost finished now (well, the funding is almost finished) and absolutely *hate* it.

First, I’ve no idea how you think a PhD is possible part-time. It’s an every-minute, in-the-shower, at-the-weekend, in-the-middle-of-the-night sort of thing. Part time, it’s at least a 6 year commitment, which makes me shudder just thinking about it.

I’ve written quite a lot of software during the course of my PhD but that doesn’t get you a PhD and no employer is going to care about this code because none of it is to commercial quality (it’s just enough to get things done). A PhD is not an extension of a Masters, or a super-super-BSc. It’s a qualification to conduct research. I’ll repeat that again because its important: it’s a qualification to conduct research. Therefore, the whole thing is not about actually solving a problem but the process you go through. It’s about equations, not code; about graphs, not screenshots; about field trials and user experiences, not unit testing; it’s about quick-and-dirty, not smart and professional. In short, it’s about things that aren’t (often) required in the commercial world. If you’re not interested in academia, you probably have no business doing a PhD. I tried to convince myself that I wasn’t interested in the qualification, just the 3 years to work on my ideas. But after 2 years and 10 months, it’s very hard to walk away from the qualification.

And you are on your own. There is no team, no one to work with. It’s particularly lonely and, in the end, no one will actually care about your research except yourself (and, by the end, you probably won’t care either).

Of course, I’ll be earning less after the PhD then I did when I started it. There aren’t many reasons to be using J2EE (or some other in-demand tech) in a PhD: think Perl, Python, LaTeX, etc. That’s if I can even find a job now: it’s well known that a PhD opens a few employment doors… and slams a hundred more.

Sorry to sound so depressing, but a lot of people here have been telling you to jump and I just thought I’d better present the negatives too.

Update: I’ve just read Seth Godin’s “The Dip” and I wish I’d read it during my PhD. It’s a short, easy-to-read book about the basic (and important) decision that you’ll eventually face during the tough times of your PhD: “Do I quit or do I stick it out?“. I can’t recommend this book enough for PhD students — it’ll focus your mind on actually making the choice. As Seth points out, winners quit all the time but they quit the right things… and they stick with others. The loser’s choice (and the one I took), is to not make that choice at all. To neither quit nor stick with it, meant I got the disadvantages of quitting (no PhD/failure) and of sticking with it (wasted time/effort/money) but the advantages of neither. Committing to that choice earlier is possibly my one regret.

The Dip

Facebook just isn’t working for me — I think it’s designed for people with friends. If you’re happy to have all your updates, photos, conversations etc on the one site, and share that info with just your “friends” then perhaps it does work. But the fact is that I don’t want to keep all my info on Facebook, and I don’t want to just share it with only the my 4 Facebook friends. Smugmug or Flickr are better places for sharing photos. Gmail is better for chatting and email. GoodReads is probably a better place for ticking off the books you read. Perhaps the problems is that I’m pretty exclusive with my Facebook “friends” because I figure they should actually be real friends/family, not vague acquaintances, colleagues, distant relative or people I’ve met online.

FriendFeed is a pretty cool site which aggregates all the information from disparate sites into a single RSS feed for anyone to subscribe to. It works with Smugmug, Flickr, GoodReads, your Amazon wishlist, Last.fm, Twitter, etc. Here’s my feed. It seems like a better alternative to Facebook for just aggregating online info together. And I can even include my FriendFeed in Facebook for my few real friends.

Is FriendFeed the next Facebook-like fad?  Yeah, probably.  But I’ll go with it for the moment cos it doesn’t lock me in like Facebook.