The Apprentice started a new season on BBC Wednesday night.  Along with it will come lunch-time conversations and news updates on firings.  I’ve always been a big fan.  I really enjoyed watching it last year.

This year, with all that’s going on in the economy, I don’t want to watch it.

I don’t want to see project managers argue with each other and posture and demonstrate how their leadership skills are better than the others.  I don’t want to watch Alan Sugar on his big boat or the winning teams who get pampered because they won a task. 

Every day, there are more stories in the news about people who are losing their jobs and their homes.  There are people struggling, and the rest of us are wondering how long until it gets us.  Some people are questioning whether our society is living beyond its means.  Others are waiting for the good old days to come back.

I’m all for business, but I don’t want to go back to 5 years ago when everyone was starting their own consulting businesses.  I’ve gotten swept up in this too.

I used to go to networking events for ECademy, which turned out to be giant orgies of people trying to promote themselves.  I was there to talk to people about Overpass, and they were there to talk about their own companies.  Everyone was trying to sell to each other.  I met people who promised they could get my site to the top of Google (without knowing what keywords I wanted or what my business actually is).  I met so many people who decided one day to be a life coach without having any skills to support it (except for the fluff "people person who cares” skills”). 

It has gotten to the point that no one has any skills any more.

There have always been managers and executors.  In the Army, the enlisted men were managers and the officers were delegators.  Officers had a skill of telling people to do things they couldn’t do themselves.  Officers were pampered as strategic thinkers.  Enlisted men couldn’t stand them.  40 year-old First Sergeants would have to salute 20 year-old lieutenants.  It never seemed right.

If you visit a garage, it is easy to see the division between skill and management.  Managers are customer-facing and tell the others what to do, but they may not be able to do it themselves.  They may have been very good at fixing cars one day a long time ago, but have fallen out of practice.  If there are lay-offs, the manager will probably stay.  The skilled labour will go.

I see this a lot in my current profession.  At various jobs, I meet project managers or business analysts who don’t understand what I do.  They consider me their resource.  I can’t tell you how many times a project manager has said, “I started out as a programmer, so . . . “ and tell me about how they coded VB4 back in 95 but couldn’t do it today.  I had one PM tell me, “I could write that sql, but I’m a project manager now, so that would be taking a step back for me.”  How could you not be insulted by that?  Since when did Project Manager become the next promotion step for developer?  I’ve turned down Business Analyst opportunities before. 

Everyone wants to be a manager.  Everyone wants to be a consultant.  Everyone wants to call themselves a leader.  We are running out of people who can”do”.  We are losing those who can execute.

Tom Peters, one of my favourite management gurus, has a great quotes “You don’t promote your most talented violinist to conductor”.  The Peter Principle (different Peter here) states that, “You are promoted to your level of incompetency.” 

From where I sit, however cynical it may be, I see the massive layoffs as a big hit to our ability to execute.  While the mass skilled staff who don’t sit at board room tables or in meetings are being layed off, the managers are trying to make the case for why they should stay.  We don’t need more managers, we need more do-ers.

This is why I can’t stomach the Apprentice this year.  I’m not up for it.  Too many people are losing everything, and I don’t want to see a bunch of un-skilled managers (I don’t think management is a skill) argue with each other so they can get their dream job. 

I guess this is MY populist rant.

Thursday, I went to lunch with a bunch of friends where conversation turned to the Apprentice.  I sat quietly.  Apparently, so-and-so deserved it and so-and-so was very rude.  I can’t be bothered.

Maybe next year.

It’s been a few weeks since I’ve posted anything here.  Over the past few weeks, I’ve spent a lot of time running and playing with Twitter.

Twitter has grown so fast it’s incredible.  It seems like every day more and more celebrities and politicos are joining.  Of course, the celebrities immediately have loads and loads of followers almost immediately.  Other people follow loads of other people in hopes that they will reciprocate and give them a high number.

The avalanche of Twitter use really hit me when Kevin Pollack posted a few days ago “After 19 days of Twittering . . . “ but it seemed like he was one of the early adopters and was one of the top 10 Twitterers (with the most followers) when I subscribed to his feed.  I’ve been following Newt Gingrich, Jonathan Ross, and Scott Hanselman among other people.  They post several times throughout the day.  But having only done it for a few weeks, I think it’s something that will lose it’s novelty soon enough.  A year from now, we’ll be saying “Remember when we were all into Twitter?” and laugh and laugh at how silly we were to latch on to that fad. 

I’ve been Tweeting once or twice a day. Usually to say how far I’ve run or what I had for lunch.  Nothing major.  If I have an idea about something, I can keep it to myself or write it.  It makes no difference, really—it’s easy enough to do both.  If anyone is interested in what I’m doing, they can follow it—but if it evaporates into the ether without anyone noticing but me, I see no problem with that.

I still don’t talk about Tweeting when with my friends or colleagues—they are too cynical and it exposes more of my nerd-dom.  They may latch on in a few months or a year (like they did with Facebook).  There are still people I don’t tell about the blog, because they see it as superfluous anyway.

The other activity that has been taking a lot of time recently is running.  In two weeks, I’m running the Reading Half Marathon.  The last half marathon I ran was the Kole Kole Pass Half Marathon in Hawaii back in 1993.  I was 21.  I’ve run ever since then, but never with the regularity to run 13 miles.  My practice runs take place in the very early mornings—the longest so far is 10 miles.  It’s odd to run 10 miles before 6am.  The run is long forgotten by lunch time.  At that time, it’s dark and quiet and cold.  Strangely, morning running suits me as it rarely has another activity (like a meeting at work or a situation at home) to delay it. 

The Half Marathon is on the 29th.  Baseball season starts a week later.  Perfect timing.  My early morning runs will be replaced with watching Padres night games in the early morning hours here.

Oh, and I recently bought Guitar Hero for the Wii.   Fantastic game.  I have a habit of buying video games thinking I immerse myself into them, but never do.  This game is different.  The big plastic guitar is fun to use and it’s an easy game to pick up, play for twenty minutes, and then move on to other things.

That’s it.  That’s what I’ve been up to.

Twitter is all the rage now and it seems to be all that anyone ever talks about these days in the blogosphere.  So, why should I be any different?

I set up a Twitter account before Christmas and haven’t used it much.  I’ll check it out every few days as a curiosity.  One or two tweets in a few weeks.  But, that’s not really in the spirit of trying something new.

For the past few days, I’ve tried to fully adopt it.  I have two followers.  I don’t know who they are or why they are following me, but maybe that’s just the way it works.  In the first few days of setting up the twitter account, I had several people subscribe to start following me.  I think these people troll for new accounts and subscribe, probably so I would reciprocate and follow them.  So that put me off a bit–the thought of oportunists praying on me. 

But I never gave Twitter much of a chance.

At this early stage, I’m not sure what to expect.  I would think that my followers would only be people I know.  Like family in the states or people I’ve had passing acquaintances with.  Or maybe readers of this blog. 

I have to admit, the whole 140 character thing makes me wonder how useful it is.  I can’t ramble on (a good thing perhaps) but I’m also limited to things like “Went to lunch.  Ate chicken”.  But, occasionally I’ll want to write something a little more spur of the moment like “Subqueries are almost always a symptom of bad database design” or “The guy sitting next to me doing Sudoku looks exactly like the guy three seats down doing Sudoku”.  Still, not really riveting, but better than hearing about my menu.

I’m only just getting used to Facebook.  When I log on, I see the status updates with something like a friend who “is making cookies.  Yumm.” This not only bores me to death, but makes me wonder if the social media is going too far.  I wonder if Twitter would be the same type of thing.

But, I’ll admit that I started blogging just to see what all the fuss was about and really enjoy it.  That was five years ago.  I like the idea that I can write whatever I feel like, whether it be a story about my past, an embarassing incident at work, or a bit of code I’ve been working on.  I don’t have many regular readers, but most people find the posts via a google search for something or other.  It was a fad I latched onto and now really enjoy.  Perhaps Twitter will be the same.  So many of my favourite bloggers are raving about it.  I’ll give it a go.

So far, it feels like sending text messages to no-one in particular.

There are still people who, when finding out I have a blog, say “Oh, Eric!  Why on Earth do you need a blog!”  I don’t need one, actually.  But I don’t need a lot of things.  I want one.  I enjoy it.  What I have to say may only be of interest to the occasional googler, but that doesn’t mean I can’t lend a voice here and there.  Besides, I’m the only American living in London– who speaks Mandarin, codes C#, works with offshore developers, is learning Hindi and who grew up in San Diego– that I know.  Everyone has a unique perspective on something.  No one needs permission to write it.

By the way, on Twitter I’m following the Diggnation guys, Stephen Fry, Scott Hanselman, and Scoble. 

My Twitter account is ericwroolie.  Feel free to follow and I’ll try to keep it interesting.  I’ve got a Twitter section in the sidebar of this blog which lists the last few posts.  You can set up your own account so I can follow you.  You might enjoy it, too.

See you in the Tweets.