March 2012

There were 2 posts published in March 2012 (this is page 1 of 1).

managing people like they do in the movies

Blogging about how hard you are to “manage” is possibly not top of the list of the smartest things I’m likely to do. The day will no doubt come when I’ll be contacting Google begging, pleading and grovelling to get this damn article removed from its cache. Serendipity will mean this is likely to bite me, and bite me hard.

It’s been a while since I’ve taken my place in that ageing behemoth of corporate management structure. Occasionally I’m thrown back there when either I think too hard or I’m told a story of the woes and misery bestowed upon a leaders minions as he marches forward “managing” those below his threshold. It’s like everyone heard that the do-as-I-say-or-I’ll-make-your-life-shit style of management doesn’t exactly work but someone forgot to tell those in management. It’s not a pretty sight to see.

So yes, people still manage like it’s the 1920s, ’cause that’s how they see it done in the movies, man! Just like how having sex like it’s done in a porno is probably not what you want to do when you’re tucked up in bed for a night of love with your other half. However, what these two things do share in common is that bringing up the topic doesn’t seem to result in an optimal outcome.

Have the gall to bring this up with your manager and you’re likely to be branded, then derided, and finally sent with your tail between your legs to your (now) wall facing desk. Even the thought of saying no or questioning management is likely to lead to stress and anxiety in those that live with this day in day out. So much so that I’m even banned from bring up this topic of conversation with certain people.

How hard can it be to realise that you (presumably) were employed because you could do the job? You know more about what you are doing than those managing you? Therefore you are going to be the best person to make any decisions. Sure, there are jobs where this may not make sense, there are exceptions to everything, but micro-managing an intelligent workforce is the worst management decision of all.

Joel Spolsky wrote about the very same topic and suggested that management should actually be called administration. This makes sense.

People being stressed out about their manager is so wrong on so many levels. Actively reducing the quality of someone’s life is not something to be proud of. You should be damn well fucking ashamed of yourself if you are. If there is a problem, talk about it, try to sort it out, advise them that the job might not be suitable. Leave your ego at the door, you don’t need to control everyone’s life, settle for controlling your own.

the budget VPS dilemma

My time with the free Amazon EC2 micro instance drew to a close in the last few weeks, that coupled with a few minor instance freezes in the last couple of months got me interested in moving the sites that I run elsewhere. Traffic to my sites is relatively low, maybe a few hundred hits a day max. Given this, a cheap VPS package looked to be exactly what was required.

First up, I done a rough calculation that showed that if I wanted to keep my EC2 micro instance running then if I took out a 3 year reserved instance it was likely to cost me (on average) around £50 per year for a US West instance over the next 3 years and closer to £65 per year for an EU based instance. Both of these are pretty good value for money – and since these sites are essentially a cost sink this is of at least some importance.

However, given the hassle I’d been having with my instance freezing I thought #1 is this going to keep happening and #2 if I take a reserved instance for 3 years then I’m kind of tied down.

In the past I’d been slightly ambivalent about what country the server was hosted in. With Amazon I’d thought screw it, I’ll host it in the US West as it was cheaper, thinking that my traffic tends to be spread throughout the world with maybe a slight leaning towards the US. However lately while creating some backups and trying to copy them locally, I released that this might be OK in terms of people viewing a site but it was a solid pain in the ass when taking full backups off the server to my local drive. So I started looking at VPS providers in the UK.

Surprisingly the cost of having your own VPS has nose-dived – I presume this is due to Amazon driving down prices, cheaper hardware and advances in virtualisation software. After looking around I managed to find a decent deal (~£47 a year with www.burstnet.eu) for a VPS with 512MB RAM, 20GB hard disk, and 1GHz CPU speed on a UK based server – I’ll stress again how much better it is to have servers in your own country when using SSH and copying files.

Now some might be asking why not just go for shared hosting? Well for many this is likely to be a good option. However, when you are running more than 2-3 sites I found that using a VPS is likely to come in at the same price if not cheaper. Plus, I rather enjoy installing the software, setting up the servers, admin of the server, etc. Sure, I may screw it up from time-to-time, but over the years I have learned quite a bit from doing things like this myself. This knowledge has been useful on many occasion. If you write software then you really should know at least something about the platform it runs on – maybe this is old fashioned now I dunno.

Anyway I actually started this post aiming to discuss how I set up WordPress, PHP, nginx, etc on my budget VPS but I’ve gone on way too long already. That’ll have to be a topic for another day. Instead I’ll wrap this up by summerising that:

  1. Amazon may not always be the cheapest – except in the first year where a micro instance is free, and you can’t beat free;
  2. Check www.lowendbox.com to see if there are any nice deals going;
  3. Try to find a server that is geographically close to you if possible;
  4. If you’re a developer, get a Linux VPS, even if it does costs you, call it an investment in your career – OK, you can do this stuff on a local Linux machine but it ain’t the same. It’s good to know how to set up a web server, configure it, and other general server admin tasks. If you ever plan to scale something one day these things will be important. It even gives you a chance to use vi or vim and wonder why the fuck people put themselves though that ;-);
  5. Having your own server also allows you to make mistakes without that stomach churning moment you get when you realise you’ve screwed something up at work – you can now screw up on your own time first;
  6. Running your own server also gives you a better idea on what the performance of your application is. I’m pretty sure it will surprise you. I thought 512MB was a crazy amount of RAM for a few simple sites. It’s amazing how it all adds up when you are running a DB and a web server with several websites on one VPS. However that’s the post I was trying to write when I started this. That’ll be next.