Hi, everyone:

I hope that as the start of the academic year approaches in the northern hemisphere, those of you who are going back to campus are comfortable doing so, and supported by administration.

Thanks to community members volunteering, we have a small core of 4-5 people who will start helping with resources for the community making suggestions to guide the newsletter. If you have suggestions, or want to take part, just hit reply or email me.

Thanks, everyone, for your responses last week.

I’ve been thinking a lot about strategy in other contexts lately - some of you will have noticed that I’ve been back on my nonsense on twitter, about the importance of having a focus. The very insightful comments and suggestions you sent last week about how we can help more research computing teams were very on point, and I think combine to a feasible strategy.

Because within this newsletter community we’ve built together, we have a number of strengths:

Hi, all:

So the last newsletter resonated quite a bit (welcome to new members of the Research Computing Teams community)! It was a bit of a cri de coeur about research computing’s inferiority complex that comes from unfairly comparing ourselves to both research and tech industry computing, and - to my mind - explains why we don’t advocate as well for ourselves as we could, support each other as well as we could, and why too often we don’t hold ourselves to high enough standards. It’s easy enough to see some of the results; poorly supported and run teams, not enough of institutional backing, demoralized team members, people leaving or checking out.

Research computing and data, as a community, has an inferiority complex. And it’s a problem.

This week I saw yet another press release - I won’t link to it, there’s no point in calling out this University or team in particular, it’s not like they’re sole offenders here - about how their new HPC cluster would “transform research”. Look — no it won’t. What would that even mean? Transform it into what? A biscuit? Rugby?

The infuriating thing here is that by all accounts, this was a good and useful procurement. Not only did it increase capacity (even if not to the “capacity knows no bounds” limit specified in the press release) but also the range of capabilities, with heterogenous nodes and a more flexible scheduler. That mean the existing researchers will have access to more resources, and it looks like it’ll be easier to provide support to a wider range of researchers, including those whose needs weren’t being met before.

Hi there:

We’re going into a long weekend here in Toronto - the second-to-last one of the summer - and it’s very much needed. We have a number of pretty ambitious efforts we’re working on, and it’s been a long year already. I hope that you and your team are taking care of yourself, and that you in particular as manager or team lead are taking some time off. There’s an article below on the importance - both for you and your team - of you taking some time off, to recharge yourself and give your team the opportunity to step up.

Also, there was some interest in the AWS ARM HPC hackathon that was in the roundup last week. I know that a number of readers are, like me, in the genomics space right now. Let me know if you think you or your team might be interested in participating in a similar week-long hackathon for ARM specifically around genomics; as always, just hit “reply” if you get this in your email, or email jonathan@researchcomputingteams.org if you want to talk about that or about anything that comes up in the newsletter.

And on to the roundup:

Hi, all:

Success as a manger is defined by a lot of hard work and tough conversations that will pay off over very long timescales. It’s way less immediately gratifying than deploying a new feature or making the CI/CD dashboard lights all green again.

Success or possible success for me this week week: I think I managed to convince some stakeholders to not make a bad and limiting data-related decision which would have limited the scientific effort of a four-year effort; and I’m coaching some team members to take on increasing planning and coordination responsibilities, with an eye towards gauging their interest and current ability towards being leads themselves, over a process which will likely take months. Small steps, tough conversations (there’ll be a lot of feedback conversations about effectiveness in the new responsibilities - many giving positive feedback, but not all), long term payoff.

Hi, everyone:

I hope you’re doing well.

I’ve neglected the “managing your own career” section lately, which I’m going to try to fix; we spend a lot of time here talking about helping our team members develop their skills, which is good and we certainly have an important role to play there, but we have to look after our own careers as well. Luckily in the past week several very relevant articles have crossed my browser, and so I present for you this week an attempt to bring that back into balance a bit.

Are there particular things you’re doing to track your own career progress, or get ready for future next steps? Are their particular gaps you’re not sure how to address or questions about how to progress? Please feel free to email me at jonathan@researchcomputingteams.org or just hit reply, and I’ll answer as best as I can and with your permission ask the newsletter readership to chime in, too.

Hi, everyone!

I hope you’re having a good weekend, and that the past week was good for you and your team.

I’m working (with some help) on tidying up and improving the material from the hiring and performance management series from the newsletter at the start of the year; I’d like to turn those into expanded and more coherent writeups that can help other research computing team leaders (or those interested in becoming one). Other topics that came up when last I asked for suggestions were:

Hi, all!

Here our team is continuing to make post-pandemic plans for how work will work.

Others are further ahead. This week Apple confirmed their very office-centric plans, and similar plans came up again. Apple, which is very much a product company relying on close integration of the work of software, hardware, industrial design, and even materials science teams, very dramatically doubled down on its office-based approach - with a surprisingly flexible (for Apple) approach of allowing up to two days a week remote for some teams, and an unsurprisingly (for Apple) inflexible approach of firing people who leaked internal Apple discussions to the world. Asana is requiring even more on-site time, 4 days a week (the 5th day being their long-held tradition of no-meetings Wednesdays), but with increased flexibility in working hours and conditions.

Hi there, everyone!

It’s been a busy week here of contacting recommended potential job candidates, building consensus among stakeholders, debugging code, and juggling finances - a normal set of activities in research computing management land, where if we’re very lucky we got some training in maybe one of those things.

I’m starting to see some out-of-office notifications in response to newsletter issues, which genuinely delights me - it’s been a long 16 months and we all deserve a break. I hope that those who haven’t managed to take significant time off in a while get the opportunity over the summer or fall.

I also had a very nice conversation this past week with one reader; we’re looking into one possibility for a community forum (which might make unnecessary a revisit of the “Ask Managers Anything” feature from last year), and toying with the idea of community video chats. I’m pretty excited about how a couple of those things might work.

Hi!

I’m back and refreshed from my mini-break from the newsletter; there’s a lot of optimism in the air here as COVID-19 numbers continue to drop and projects are moving forwards.

I don’t have a lot else to add right now, so let’s go straight to the roundup!

Managing Teams

Hi, everyone!

Mainly taking the week off from the newsletter this week (for positive reasons - some family celebrations); things will return to normal next week. But there were some things I wanted to share with you.

First, on the discussion from last week of planning for hybrid distributed/local work, we heard from long-time reader Adam DeConinck about what he’s learned:

Hi, everyone:

We have several items this week about post pandemic management and continuing to manage a distributed team.

It’s hard to hire and retain excellent staff in research computing, particularly (but not only!) in academia. We can’t offer FAANG-type salaries or perks, and if we’re even trying to compete on those terms we’re doomed. Our only option is to play to every advantage we do have: challenging, meaningful work; flexibility in work (which has always been a perk of academic environments); strong benefit plans; stability of employment; ability to support wide ranges of interesting projects; and clear and up-front staff salary bands (making wide disparities between people hired into the same jobs less likely). And we can play to those strengths while doing our best to attract the kinds of candidates want to have real impact on research, feel part of a research and education community, value learning new things and working in new areas, and who intend to occupy a job long enough that the benefits we do often offer (like pensions) matter.

Hi, all:

I think I helped a team find the courage (and the organizational support) to say “no” to things this week.

Strategy for research computing teams is hard. I’ve sort of given up on trying to find strategy articles for the roundup that are suitable for us; most are for either large organizations with many moving parts which make no sense in our context, or for tech product strategy. The product strategy ones start off okay, but they really imagine being able to pivot products to very different markets, and that doesn’t work well for our super-specialized tools. We’re not normally going to be able to take an unsuccessful piece of software for geophysical applications and pivot it into a digital humanities platform. We work as part of the research “market”, not outside of it, and “finding product-market fit” for our individual products isn’t the problem.

Hi, everyone!

This week’s RCT Newsletter is a little slow going out; the reason ties into something I’ve been meaning to write a bit more about, usual research funding grants vs nonprofit grants and what research computing and data teams can learn from that. (Or you can go straight to the roundup).

Any funder has things they want to accomplish, and the goal as a potential fundee is to find something in the intersection of “work that helps the funder accomplish their goals” and “work that we are able to do and that is aligned with our goals”. Excellent work that isn’t in that first set won’t get funding. Money attached to work that isn’t in the second set is at best a distraction, at worst drains your teams’ credibility.

Hi, all:

I got an important question and comment from longtime newsletter reader Laura Kinkead at University of Zurich:

Do you have any recommendations for online management or leadership courses? My manager has given me the go head to take a course or two, and I’m wondering if you have any recommendations for what may be more or less relevant to the research environment. If it would help to be more specific, an area that I’d like to focus on is coaching and giving feedback.

Hi, all:

I hope you’re enjoying the change of seasons. The end of April here brings an onslaught of deadlines, meetings, and events, but things are settling back down now.

Details of the basecamp fiasco continue to come out. As the raw signal folks , discomfort as a leader isn’t inherently bad or a signal of a problem. It’s not our lot as leaders to be comfortable about everything. Listen to your team, even - especially! - when you don’t love what you’re hearing.

Hi, everyone!

If you paid any attention to tech management twitter at all in the past week, you heard about how Basecamp started the week by announcing - in a public blogpost! - a new internal policy about how all committees in the company including the new DEI committee was disbanded, and how politics was now forbidden from discussion inside Basecamp or on official accounts, and how it ended the week with 30% of their 50-some-odd company leaving.

I swore I wouldn’t get drawn into that morass for the newsletter, because “managers behaving badly” isn’t the beat I want to be on - it’s depressing, plentiful, and frankly there’s precious little new to be learned from any given episode. There’s a million ways that managers can do things poorly, with many fewer to do things right, and helping managers do things right is where I want this newsletter to be.

But the actual underlying story of what ended up being being so mundane, so petty, and such an easy trap to fall into I kind of feel like it’s worth addressing.

Hi, everyone!

I have a somewhat short newsletter for you this week; exciting things are happening at work with product adoption and hiring, both of which are taking up a lot of time but are unmistakably good. In addition, we’re having increasingly lovely weather, dear friends are getting vaccinated, and actions and decisions made months ago are are finally appearing in outcomes that are beginning to come together in a pleasingly coherent manner. I hope you, yours, and your team are doing equally well.

For now, on to the roundup!

Managing Teams

Hi, everyone:

Thanks for your comments about earlier hiring and feedback posts. I’m taking those responses and getting some help pulling those together, incorporating the input, adding more material, and putting into some kinds of coherent wholes that can be made more widely available (like the getting started with one-on-ones material). As always, I appreciate your comments, questions, suggestions, and feedback - please always feel free to hit reply or email me at jonathan@researchcomputingteams.org at any time.

For now, the roundup!

Hi, everyone:

I hope you’ve been well; I’ve had a short week with a 4-day Easter long weekend. Between being recharged for the weekend, and finally having a couple of days of work where I could focus on high-leverage activities - hiring discussions for our team and pushing forward a hiring process at an organizational level; writing a document useful in itself but also that will be a model for team members to write others in the future; getting two teams aligned and getting them to find a really good solution to a shared design problem - it’s been a really good week.

It took me a long time to re-orient myself to understanding what “a good day’s work” looks like for a manager. Everything is so much more direct and quicker-feedback as an individual contributor; the thing works or it doesn’t. As a manager, quick wins are few and far between - and you can only be really sure you made the right decision months after making it. So having two or three good managerial days in a row is a nice feeling and a good way to wind down a week.

I hope you’re having similar success.

Hi there - if this is a long weekend for you, I hope you’re enjoying it.

Last time we spoke a little bit about expectations, and routine feedback to team members and peers when those expectations are met or not met. This time, let’s consider - or skip to the roundup.

Feedback is a mechanism to align expectations with your team members in the moment, and to encourage meeting those expectations in the future. Sometimes those expectations were explicit; other times, they were implicit and it’s a helpful way of making them explicit. This is a simple, extremely useful and scandalously underused tool, particularly in research environments. What’s more, your team members want feedback. Do you want more feedback from your manager about how you’re doing? Why do you think your team members feel differently than you do?

Hi, all!

Last issue, I left you with a couple of models for giving feedback. We had Situation-Behaviour-Impact:

“When you presented the proposed plan at the project kickoff meeting, the material you presented had a really good balance of just enough relevant context and case for the plan overview. That helped ensure the discussion afterwards was well informed and not sidetracked into irrelevant details.”

The Manager-Tools model:

Hi, everyone:

This week I want to talk a little bit about giving routine feedback to team members; or you can skip to the roundup.

I mentioned that I find thinking about team members performance in terms of expectations clarifying. That’s more obvious when talking about longer-term goal setting or performance reviews - here are our expectations for the next quarter/year, and then those expectations were met, or not - but I think it’s especially useful when thinking of more immediate on individual tasks.

Hi, everyone -

Here in Toronto we’re enjoying the traditional season of “False Spring”, where a burst of warm weather and blue skies lures the unwary into putting away winter coats - but even so it’s cheering and encouraging, and spirits everywhere are notably lifted.

I’m going to write a little bit about performance management in the next three newsletters. I have a brief introduction to my preferred philosophy of performance management below (or skip to the roundup); in the next issue we’ll talk a bit about short-term performance management (feedback) in the following we’ll talk about longer-term performance (goal-setting and review), and finally we’ll talk about what happens if people are or aren’t consistently meeting expectations.

Hi!

It’s been a big week here - we finally got a long-awaited paper submitted, attended one virtual conference, and are gearing up for another.

I hope you and your team has had successes this week too - are there any you want to share? If so, or if you have any feedback, suggestions, ideas, or questions, let me know - reply, or send me something at jonathan@researchcomputingteams.org.

For now, on to the roundup!

Hi, all!

Thanks for your responses to last newsletter. Readers who responded were broadly pretty happy with the all-in-one newsletter, even if gets a little long; topics that were of interest for future write-ups were (in order of number of votes):

• Performance management

Hi, everyone:

I hope you’re doing well! I have two questions for you.

This week kind of got away from me - it’s been an exciting couple of weeks, with two new team members joining and our project getting ready to take on new responsibilities - but it means that the final instalment on research computing hiring will be delayed until next week.

So I’ll ask two question that I was going to ask at the end of the series.

Hi!

So you’ve got a list of hiring requirements written up - the next step is to think about how to evaluate candidates against the requirements. That’s next, or you can skip ahead to the roundup.

Once you have a pretty clear list of job requirements and a sketched out job description that the team members and other stakeholders have agreed on, the next step, before even a job ad, is to figure out how you will evaluate candidates against the job description.

Hi!

I hope you’re having a good week. Below is the continuation of our discussion on hiring, stemming in part from the more formalized pipeline that we’re working on; you can also skip to the roundup.

Last week I started with the basic premise - you have a hypothesis that you’ve found a good candidate (and they have a hypothesis that your team would be a good match for them). Then, as scientists, the nob is to disprove the hypothesis.

Hi!

The good news is that my team, and the larger organization I’m a part of, is going to be growing substantially in the coming year. That’s also the bad news. We have to hire.

Hiring team members is a time-consuming, exhausting job - and probably rightly so, since it’s the most important thing we do. A lot of planning, organizational, and process mistakes we make as managers can be mitigated if we’ve helped assemble a terrific team; on the other hand there’s only so much pulling on those same levers can help us if we’ve made poor hiring choices. Your research computing team members are the people who do the work of supporting research with working code, data curation/analysis/systems, or computing systems. Putting that time and effort into hiring that makes it time consuming and tiring is absolutely appropriate.

Hiring, like anything else in management, is a practice that you can improve on by having a process you go through that you learn from and improve each time through. That means being a lot more deliberate about hiring (or really any other aspect of management) than we usually are in academia-adjacent areas. It’s also, to be honest, more work. But hiring is the most important decision you’ll make as a manager. Decisions you make about new team members will last even after you leave. A good hiring choice will make everyone’s job easier, and a poor hiring choice will make everyone’s job worse.

Hi, all!

This is the last part of the stop doing things challenge - the change management of actually stopping doing something. Or you can skip straight to the roundup.

The hardest thing about stopping doing things, of course, isn’t the identifying what things to stop doing, but actually stopping and staying stopped doing them.

Hi, all:

Most of us are now well and truly back into the swing of things; I hope you and your team are doing well.

Skip to the roundup

Hi!

Happy New Year, everyone. I hope you had some time over the holidays to rest and recuperate. A lot of us have discovered that it wasn’t enough - we’re still dragging - but we’re less tired than before, research needs us and our teams, and so we’re back into it.

An awful lot of early January writing always advocates for people to start something new - develop a new useful habit, start learning a new skill, make time for other important activities.

Those can be great! But we only have so much time in the day, and to add something useful to our routine we have to drop something else, especially with our and our teams energy levels still low. To add a new high priority effort we need to de-prioritize - possibly to zero - something else.

Congratulations, everyone; we did it.

If you’re at a University, 2020 is now or is soon to be officially at a close. For the rest of us, while there is some work remaining to be done, things are winding down. We made it to the end of 20-frickin’-20.

I started this newsletter together with you in January, which seems like a decade ago. It’s been a hard year for our teams, and a hard year for managers. We’ve had to keep things together and moving with the world falling apart; help team members through incredibly tough times and keep the research and researchers who depend on us going.

We’ve done incredible work, and because of what we’ve done as managers our teams are going to come out in late 2021 stronger than when this started. The trust we’ve built with our teams by seeing them through the tough times will make the team work even better together. Our improving and making more intentional our team communications, necessary for the abrupt move to all-distributed, will be of benefit in the years to come. Our upping our management and prioritization skills will help our team through whatever future challenges come our way.

Research Computing Teams Link Roundup, 11 Dec 2020

Hi, everyone!

I don’t have anything of my own to share with you this issue, but it’s been an interesting week in research computing and so there’s lots of nuggets in the link roundup.

As always, if you find anything particularly interesting, or if there are topics you’d like covered, please let me know! Feedback is a gift, and even though I’ve been shamefully slow getting back to a couple of readers this week I really value your thoughts. I enjoy getting email back, even about things that you don’t like or disagree with.

Hi, everyone:

There were two big stories in the news this week about what’s possible with sustained research infrastructure funding and what happens when research infrastructure isn’t sustained.

In the first, you’ve probably read about AlphaFold, Google Brain’s efforts to bring deep learning to protein folding. It did very well in the 14th annual Critical Assessment of (protein) Structure Prediction (CASP) contest. Predictably but unfortunately, Google’s press releases wildly overhyped the results - “Protein Folding Solved”.

Hi!

I wrote a few weeks ago that, post-pandemic, we in research computing teams are going to have to work to make our value clear to administrations, funders, researchers, and our team members.

A lot of the link roundup items I’ve pointed to over the past year have focussed on our team members, which is crucial - we can’t support research without an excellent, motivated, aligned team doing the work. But there’s a lot less material out coming out on communicating research computing teams’ value to funders and administrators - what are we for, why should this team in particular continue to be here, why are the right team to take on this new, strategically important, project?

Hi, all:

Sorry for the late issue. Between some stuff going on at my end and me still figuring out what a revamped newsletter will look like, this week’s newsletter is both a little late and a bit of a hybrid between where I’d like it to go and what it has been. (As always, suggestions for things you would like to see change to change or would like to stay the same are welcome - just hit reply or email me at jonathan@researchcomputingteams.org)

The big news of the past week has been Apple’s new . Don’t worry, this newsletter is going to degenerate into the cliched HPC/research computing blog writing solely and breathlessly about various new CPUs/network cards/SSDs and endlessly comparing speeds-and-feeds. The M1’s specs in and of themselves aren’t what’s interesting. Rather, the M1 is an example of how CPUs are going to get more different as time goes on, and that will have impacts on research computing teams. The M1 going to be a trial run for a future of more diverse computing architectures that we’d do well to get ready for.

Hi!

This is email #50, and a good time to think about what’s next. It helps that events of this week - the US election, Pfizer’s vaccine - make thinking about the future much less discouraging.

I wrote last week that post-pandemic challenges that research computing teams will be facing include:

Hi!

I’ve had to have a few different difficult discussions around our project this week, and while they were exhausting it’s been great to clear the air. And as far as I can tell they’ve strengthened rather than weakened the working relationships.

I also sat through a meeting with peer who essentially ran a denial-of-service attack on the meeting through his need to talk at length about anything even tangentially related to the topics at hand. It (almost) killed any chance that the meeting would accomplish anything. I’ve been trying to push myself to talk less and ask questions more during conversations; some days are better than others, but that experience has encouraged me to redouble my efforts.

It’s been a long seven days for a number of us, for a lot of reasons. I hope the week has been good to you and your team.

Hi!

Most of us have made so many half-plans about the future after COVID (“In a couple months, when this blows over..”, “By August, we should be able to…”) we’re a little wary of putting time into deciding on next steps.

But planning for the future is part of the job. Earlier this week I wrote up my thoughts on what academic research computing specifically is likely to look like after the pandemic is fully controlled.

Hi all -

The folks at Raw Signal Group’s latest newsletter points out that while a lot of bosses are managing to keep the big things going, a lot of us are dropping balls these days especially on the little stuff. There’s a lot to handle.

When I get busy I tend to lose discipline at exactly those things that keep me focussed and productive - prioritization, todo lists, staying on task, - and that leads to dropped balls. In the last week or so I’ve managed to claw my way back up from that and have got things going pretty smoothly again - but it took a while. So I hope you and your team is doing ok and that you’re spending the time you need on keeping yourself well.

Hi, everyone:

I had a couple of good talks with fellow research computing team managers (in title or de facto) this week resulting from either the newsletter or the SORSE talk last week.

The problems each were wrestling with were tricky and stressful, and it was a reminder of how lonely management can be. I hope this newsletter - and the AMAs (Ask Managers Anything) section we had for a while, and will have again - helps cut through that a little bit. I also I hope we can find or build more forums for exchanging knowledge, advice, or even just sharing the victories and defeats in research computing.

Hi, all:

As I write this, the jurisdiction I live in (Ontario, Canada) is almost certainly about to start additional COVID-19 restrictions - 4-8 weeks later than it should have. The predictable, and predicted, second wave is reminding us that we’re going to be dealing with the pandemic for some time to come.

This time has been hard for some of us, and extremely hard for others. I hope your team is doing well. I do think we will come out of this experience better managers - more deliberate about finding out our team members needs and in our communications, more thoughtful in our planning - but it’s challenging and tiring, and I hope you take some time for yourself.

The roundup follows:

Hi, all:

It’s been a good week here to remind me of the breadth of skills we need as research computing managers. I’ve had to meet separately with several groups of research stakeholders, and with a legal team on topics of licensing and privacy, helped a team member debug a service, clarifed the scope of multiple tasks, put together a budget for a project that might never be, helped configure some authentication, give a presentation, and coached a team member on presentation skills.

One of the things I’d like this newsletter to grow into in year two is a bit more of a community where we can exchange tips, best practices, and knowledge on the dizzying number of sills we need to have at our command. To put it mildly, my training as an astrophysicist did not prepare me for this.

But it was nonetheless a great week! The team continued on without me with zero issues while I was away for two days (an experiment I’ve been needlessly hesitant to try since the pandemic started), progress is outstanding, and efforts with other stakeholders started months ago are starting to pay off. Our skills from our previous careers do carry over, and we can be successful - sometimes it just takes more trial-and-error than it would have if we had a bit more of a community of research computing team managers.

Hi, everyone:

Sorry again about the slightly irregular time, and the lack of much of a preamble - heavy deadlines these past two weeks, and I’ve been thinking about directions we can steer the newsletter in the coming year. But the deadlines are past now and it’s back to normal.

As always, share your thoughts with me - just reply to this, or email me - about directions you’d like to see this go. There’s so little out there specifically for us research computing team managers that there’s a lot of things we could usefully do! I’m always interested in direction from the community.

Hi -

Sorry for sending the newsletter out somewhat late today. There’s a lot of good material in the roundup - noticing change, understanding why your team is doing things you don’t think they should, Rust in science, transferring knowledge, telling stories with video, HDF5, a better tar, and underwater data centres.

As always, reply or email me (jonathan@researchcomputing.org) if there are things you’d like to hear more about, stories or topics you think our readers would like to read, or any other feedback.

Now on to the roundup!

Hi, all!

Just a short introduction this week - there’s a full set of links to round up this week, with a lot on communicating with teams, watching out for burnout in ourselves, academic communities, and

The newsletter is nine months old now. As the list of resources covered here grows, and we see where the gaps are for topics research computing team members need to be discussed, my plan is over the coming weeks to trim down the number of links covered each week and to focus on a bit of writing on topics that aren’t widely covered. That would mean things like grant writing for research computing, research community building and the like. That will probably also include interviews with research computing leaders.

What do you think; what would you like to see more of, and what do you think the newsletter could do with less of? Hit reply and let me know.

Hi!

Our last AMA (Ask Managers Anything) question was:

For non-embedded teams, what do you do to keep researcher clients / stakeholders up to date on progress of work?