James's Weblog

Various whiteboard doodles I made at VMware with dry-erase markers.

2005. One of my coworkers was working on a project named “EIT” that got killed when some deal fell apart, and he asked me to scrawl this on his whiteboard. I’m not really sure why I bothered to sign this.

2008. This started off with a magnetic stick figure holding some duck magnets, and my office-mate Christine and I gradually drew different things that he was rescuing them from. It’s hard to tell from the photo, but Christine attached wings to the back of the stick figure and crafted him a giant broadsword.

2009. When my office-mate Christine (Wu) left to attend graduate school at CMU.

2013. When my office-mate Christian left.

2013. When my coworker David left. Christian and David left on the same day (they both left to focus on their startup). I made Christian’s first, and I was too tired afterward to spend much time on David’s (sorry, David). I made a lame attempt at jazzing it up a bit by adding a second color.

A few weeks ago, one of my coworkers complained about doing maintenance on a project that he had moved away from. I told him that authoring code is like having a child: you can’t say you’re tired of it and abandon it. If you brought it into this world, you should take some responsibility for it. If you’re not prepared to do that, don’t have that baby.

I was joking, of course, but perhaps it’s not a completely ridiculous comparison (although I suspect that my friends who are actual parents might disagree).

Today marks my eight year anniversary at VMware. For those past 8 years, I’ve spent 40 hours per week (well, probably more) developing VMware Workstation, watching it grow and trying to imbue it with whatever knowledge I have. A number of people tell me that I’ve been at VMware for too long and should move on, but I’m not ready to let go yet.

We’ve had a problem at work where people habitually reply-to-all to widely-distributed email with responses that shouldn’t involve everybody else. A common example is that someone sends out an email, “Welcome to Ben Bitdiddle who joined the Frobnication team!”, and then lots of people would reply-to-all with, “Welcome!” (And sometimes more people then would reply-to-all saying, “Please don’t reply-to-all!”)

As a little social experiment, I set up a dummy mailing list. Nobody was actually subscribed to it, but I sent out an email to it with the main engineering list (a significant portion of the company) BCC’d.

From: James Lin
To: email-test
BCC: [the main engineering mailing list]
Subject: Welcome to the “email-test” mailing list

Hello,

You have been subscribed to the email-test mailing list as one of many participants in an experiment that I will be performing. I will send out additional details later, but this test might involve a large volume of email being sent to you at various times of the day.

If you wish to participate, I first would like to know what email client you use. Please reply to me with one of “zimbra”, “outlook”, or “other” in the message body.

If you do not wish to participate, please reply to me with the word “unsubscribe” in the message body.

(I apologize for the wide distribution.)

Thanks,

– James

Everything in the email was a lie (except for the parts about performing an experiment and about apologizing for the wide distribution). Anyone who used reply-to-all received an automatic response from the email-test list:

You have failed the test.

You used reply-to-all instead of replying only to me. Had this been a real mailing list, you would have spammed a large portion of the company. Imagine if everyone else behaved that way.

Please be more conscientious in the future.

– James

About 1.6% of the respondents failed the test. (Since I sent it to an engineering list, I’m not surprised that the failure rate was so low.) Maybe it wasn’t worth it. (And I’m aware of the irony of spamming much of the company to address just a few people. Alas.)

Incidentally, about 35% of the respondents opted in, which was much, much higher than I had expected for an undisclosed experiment that supposedly would flood people’s mailboxes. That probably says something good about how helpful people are, or maybe it says something frightening about how much some people trust me (but maybe those people now will be more skeptical).

Despite the uninteresting results, almost all of the responses that I’ve received after revealing the true nature of the experiment have been very positive so far. At least one manager, however, was very unamused, complaining about my “misuse of company resources” and wanting to reprimand me for my “terribly poor judgment”.

Yesterday everyone in VMware R&D was invited to a company holiday party. The invitation read: “If you are attending the party, you will be allowed to leave work at 3:00 in order to get to the party on time.” A lot of us were slightly insulted by the wording. (The company’s privileged to have us working there, right?)

Surely to the dismay of my coworkers, I have been remarkably unproductive at work during the past few weeks. I suspect one factor (or a convenient scapegoat) is that VMware recently started a shuttle service that has a stop near my house. I’ve been taking it to save what I estimate to be about $1500/year on gas, but I think it has significantly fouled up my daily routine:

• I used to wake up at around 10 AM, do about an hour of web surfing and responding to email, head to work between 11 AM and noon, and eventually return home at around 10 PM. Now with the shuttle, I’m forced to wake up earlier, and since I end up rushing out the door, I do my morning web surfing ritual when I arrive to work at 9:30 AM. This means that I actually start working at 10:30 AM, an hour earlier than before, but I have to leave by 7 PM, three hours earlier than before, yielding a net loss of two hours from my normal workday.
• When I drove home, I used to think about problems I was in the middle of working on. Consequently, when I returned home, I was ready to (and often did) continue working remotely. My brain was active, and driving increased right-brain activity which supposedly can give different insights. Now that I spend the commute on a shuttle, I’m sleepy and end up trying to nap or vegetate, and by the time I get home, I’m totally disengaged from whatever I was working on, and I don’t feel like doing anything else.

Of course, some people will say that maybe I was working waaaay too much before, but my claim is that I have to do that to keep up with all my smart coworkers. Sigh.

Scroll to the bottom of the CHI 2006 sponsor list. How sad. Not only is VMware the only “friend of CHI”, but they don’t have our company logo and don’t even give us a hyperlink!

I got my performance evaluation a few weeks ago.

VMware’s employee rating system has the following choices:

• Exceptional
• Outstanding
• Great
• Needs Improvement
• Unsatisfactory

Supposedly I’m doing “great”, but I’m not sure if that means I’m actually doing great or if that means I don’t need improvement. The lack of a “mediocre”/“adequate”/“satisfactory” rating throws things off.

I’ve been at VMware for a month now. I like it there, and I think I’m settling in, though everything still feels a little surreal (virtual?) sometimes. I’m a bit stressed out worrying that I’m not going to live up to their expectations.

On one hand, I learned more at Sony than I thought I did. (All that free time I spent reading things like the comp.lang.c newsgroup probably helped.) On the other hand, I learned much less than I would have elsewhere, so I’m still way behind the curve.

New VMware hires get a license plate holder that says “Virtualized by VMware”. Someone asked me if I put it on my car. “No,” I said, “I don’t want to besmirch the company’s good name with my bad driving.”

I really don’t understand the practice of adorning cars with bumper stickers, custom license plate holders, or other knick-knacks. What good can come of it? The only time anyone is going to read them, care, and remember is if you screw up. No one’s going to credit you, “Wow, that guy works at VMware, and he uses a turn signal!”

Plus, If I accidentally pissed someone off, I think I’d prefer that they not be able to track me down easily.

Well, I officially have accepted the UI Engineer position at VMware. I still feel lousy about declining the Application Engineer job from the Palm OS startup Tapwave.

All of the logical arguments favored VMware—better compensation at a more stable, well-known, and proven company that would give me more marketable skills. On the other hand, I’ve wanted and waited to work at Tapwave for months; I was a very good fit for their job, it was familiar territory for me, I had much more confidence that I could do it, and it seemed like a fun company.

Last week, I focused on the logical arguments to make my decision, ultimately trading short-term happiness for long-term benefits. Now that I’ve decided and am about to start work next week, the anxiety of entering totally new territory at VMware is kicking the right-side of my brain into high gear. I’m second-guessing myself. I feel like I’m throwing away the months of waiting and what knowledge I gleaned from the past three years at Sony.

I’m also going to miss Tapwave’s dog.

Sigh. Jennifer Feng thinks I’m a hopeless romantic, longing for things that might have been.

I suppose I’ll just see how everything turns out when I actually start work.

After six months of relaxation, unemployment, and waiting for a job offer, I now have two in the pipeline.

I should be excited. Instead, the ordeal of choosing is putting me through agony.

They’re both good jobs. Had I received either offer a few weeks ago, I would have accepted it in an instant. With two simultaneous offers, though, I’m completely bewildered. I didn’t interview at both companies at the same time either; I interviewed at one in January, but it’s a startup and didn’t have the funding to hire me at the time. Even stranger, I sent both companies my résumé last year, and they both promptly ignored it. Things have a funny way of coalescing.

I feel bad because I don’t want to reject either one. I feel even worse because these days, there are plenty of people who would sell their mother to have one job offer, let alone two.

Stupid conscience.