[HCoop-Discuss] Financial situation

Mon Apr 30 06:36:54 EDT 2007

I've been a software developer for 6 or 7 years professionally. As a
software developer, I have learned that I am not a number of other
things. I am not a database administrator. I am not a release control
manager. I am not a project manager.

Adam is a very brilliant person. He earned a 4.0 in Computer Science
at Carnegie-Mellon and is studying for his Ph.D in Computer Science at
Berkeley.

I think something we need to realize is that we all have our strengths
and weaknesses. Just because someone is a good programmer does not
mean that they are good at the satellite tasks that I listed above.

Adam and Nathan are really bearing a huge brunt of the
responsibilities of this cooperative. I would say they are being
overworked in fact. With overwork comes oversight. Not only that, but
like anyone else, they have areas that they are both well-versed in,
but others where it would be best to find some different support
people, but unfortunately there are none.

As FGB said, we are a cooperative. This is not my first cooperative. I
have seen many lovey-dubby touchy-feely we-are-all-one organizations
go under. I have seen others that refused to go under and kept
operating at a negative, while most members jumped ship. Everyone was
a nice and dedicated person, but they got slaughtered by the corporate
forces in the same sector.

When I look at the discussion of our problem from my perspective as a
software developer, I hate to be brutally direct,. but I see issues in
project management and release control, each of which I will go into.

Having issues in these areas is serious. How many corporations do you
think go in the red when they have to scale out? How many people have
their jobs at the end of the day if they keep sucking funds out the
company on a project that does not materialize?

Project Management - is the ability to specify a project, corral the
needed resources, and execute the spec within a specified time frame.
We can look at the Perl 6 project (or the GNU HURD) as a prime example
of a bunch of well-intentioned people that were great at software
development, but had no clue of how to keep the show running smoothly
in the meantime. Owing someone 4000.00 and then asking us about it
with no clear ETA on project completion would get  a _project manager_
booted out of any company anywhere in any country as fast as the CEO
could get up and line up his shoe on the person's ass :)

But again, we need to see this situation for what it is. We have a
tremendously talented and tremendously compassionate and tremendously
dedicated leader in Adam. We have the best software system for
unix-based virtual hosting out there. But asking him to do all this
and have clear vision as a project manager is too much. Many companies
our size hire 2 or 3 full-time project managers.

Again, this is not an exercise in finger-pointing, but if we provided
an objective recount of what has happened so far to any IT
professional, their curt assessment of the situation would be: "so you
failed to handle the project management aspects of your project"...
end of story.

Release Control
============
Release control is the process of incrementally evolving a piece of
software in response to business demands. I am not completely clear on
why this migration is taking so long. I have heard some things about
AFS issues. I am also not clear on why it is happening the way it is -
migration to a different (improved) setup as opposed to raw-mirror and
then improve.

Again, taking the corporate metaphor to heart, it is rare that a
company will shut down or incur huge operating expenses just because
they want to roll out a bigger better product. Wal-mart is an
exception. When their online website s00ked, they shut the whole damn
thing down, contacted Sapient, and had it done right, and then
re-started things. Sure they lost some revenue and some face, but they
are past that now on the right track.

>From what I can tell, it looks like we are trying to do 2 things at
once. We are trying to migrate and improve. Either task is bug-prone
and trying to do both simultaneously increases problems exponentially,
not linearly. Migration is just that - moving our shit from where it
is to a new machine :) Improvement is things like AFS, domtool2, etc.
While I understand the Wal-mart/Perl6 mentality of "everything is
fresh, shiny, clean and new now!" It is clear that a few voices have
spoken up in displeasure at the increase in operating expenses. Not
only that, but fyodor is not wal-mart: fyodor works well for everyone
using it on a daily basis. We dont have something broken like
wal-mart.

Was the strategy for migration put before us as a coop? Were the
project management and release control issues placed before us as a
coop? What can we do as a coop to have better project management and
release control? Who can we recruit that _is_ focused on money. It is
nice to be a Justin Leitgeb - all heart and passion. Or an Adam
Chlipala, all intellect and technical skill. Or a Nathan Kennedy, all
legal and overworked. But it is clear we need a few more people with
their dedication level but in the two domains in which this project
has failed - project management and release control.

I hate to draw analogies to the Iraq war, but what are we doing over
there? Do we really expect the violence to stop? It is obvious that
situation can only get worse and and can only suck more and more
funds. I think we all need to stop and reflect on what skills we can
offer to the cooperative to prevent situations like this from
happening again. Let's network with other similar organizations. Let's
get some communication going on what we plan to do before we do it.
Let the members have some say-so in how these things go.

We need a skilled project manager and release control expert to step
up to the plate and harness our raw technical prowess. Technical
prowess has only led to business success in the case of google. More
often, it is business prowess and technical amateurs that net the big
bux. We need some tight-fisted people with business sense now.

We need project management charts and regular updates on progress.
We need incremental release control after a mirror of fyodor on Peer1
resources. I dont like this Perl6 approach to creating a new tribe on
a different island. Alternatively, what stops us from "bucket-hashing"
coop members? Instead of one big new hosting setup, why not have
fyodor-power-user.hcoop.net and fyodor-trivial-user.hcoop and
bucket-hash people onto servers? Why grow out horizontally to
accomodate the JC Hallgrens with the Terrence Brannons in one bucket
when our needs are clearly different?

I know this letter is going to aggravate some people. But I have
something to say and I'm not going to let some hate by others stop me.
Also, I have to congratulate myself. You should have seen the
hate-laced finger-pointing email I wrote up all yesterday on this. It
is amazing what a good night's sleep will do to one's perspective.

On 4/28/07, Adam Chlipala <adamc at hcoop.net> wrote:
> To recap: Peer 1 has been charging us for colocation services for a few
> months now, as we've been setting up our new servers there.  We're not
> yet ready to switch over to the new systems, though.  I have been
> working under the assumption that a reasonable slice of the membership
> would be unwilling to pay shares of the Peer 1 costs before they are yet
> receiving direct benefit from the new servers.  As a result, I haven't
> been incorporating the Peer 1 costs into the financial records on the
> portal, the idea being that, at the point when we are ready to move any
> member over, we consider all the Peer 1 costs to that point as a
> one-time cost to be split in a special way to be determined.
>
> Now, a few months into that, we have about $4000 worth of those
> charges.  I sent a request to hcoop-announce recently asking for people
> to throw in more money to help cover these costs in the mean time.  With
> the volume of people who seemed to respond to that, it's clear that only
> payments of several hundred dollars per person could make a difference,
> and that didn't happen.  I've ended up essentially paying all Peer 1
> costs from my personal funds each month.
>
> So, what should we do?  I don't have any idea how soon we'll be ready to
> switch to the new servers.  Essentially no one responded to my call to
> "lend" HCoop money in the interim.
>
> Should we call this the point where we bundle the charges so far into
> one sum that we split among willing members ASAP, and from here on bill
> monthly charges to everyone as they arrive?
>
> Or, can more of you add several hundred dollars each to your HCoop balances?
>
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