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 [email protected] 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 [email protected]

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 [email protected])

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 ([email protected]) 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?

Hi!

Our AMA - Ask Managers Anything - last time was “How are you keeping morale up during these challenging times”? We got a couple of answers:

I’ve been doing basically the same communications work I did before but more of it - focussing on the big picture vision (which the team really cares about), lots of listening in one-on-ones and keeping an eye on slack. Early on we tried some team lunches (ordered delivery for everyone) and a couple team happy hours, and they were fine I guess but didn’t seem to move the needle.

Hi!

Our AMA (Ask Managers Anything) question last week was:

Hi!

Our question last week was about having difficult conversations with your team members. I got two responses from managers:

Haven’t really needed to have difficult conversations in my team; I have peers who do, but my use of has been effective. “May I give you some feedback? When you are on your phone during the staff meeting, it appears as disengagement and others can find that rude. Can you change that for the next meeting? Thanks.” Positive:negative feedback is about 8:1 or even more.

Hi!

Last week’s “Ask Managers Anything” question was “How are you making sure that junior staff get access to mentoring when everyone is working from home?” I got several replies back; paraphrasing them for anonymity:

• I don’t have any junior staff as direct reports, so it hasn’t been an issue

Hi, everyone!

“How are you making sure that junior staff get access to mentoring when everyone is working from home?” was the most popular question on our first go at Ask Managers Anything.

I’ll give my answer, and please send in yours (with indications as to whether I can use your name or not). I’ll collect them and include them in the next roundup - help our entire community learn from what you’re doing.

Hi everyone -

I hope it’s been a good week for you. On our side we’re setting up our first Jira sprint on a project I’m really excited about — and we have a really great PM helping us, shoring up one area where I personally am not great. Between the team, the project, and getting some help for a managerial area I’m weak in have me really eager and optimistic about how this is all going to go.

In terms of the newsletters, I’m gearing up to try the Q&A and the interviews that wee suggested.

For questions, the first version of the Research Computing Teams AMA (Ask Managers Anything) is up . Please post (they’re moderated for spam) and upvote questions! Top questions will get posed to the community every week with results summarized.

Hi, everyone:

I got a number of responses back from last week’s question about interviews or Q&A people were interested in both, at least trying it out.

The interviews will take a little while to line up. If you have suggestions for research computing managers you’d like to see interviewed, please send the suggestions along. And if you are interested in volunteering, please do volunteer too! I’ll build a list and then start asking people. And for Q&A I’ll set up an online question box.

And with that, on with the roundup! There’s a bit of a writing and hiring theme this week, as you’ll see below:

Hi!

Well, the move across institutions happened, which meant for one glorious moment I was at inbox zero on my work email. Other than that, the move was unremarkable, largely due to our insanely capable administrative staff.

In other news, this roundup now marks exactly 6 months of the RCT roundups; we’ve done 26 of them now, as well as a daily sequence for a week which didn’t work very well, and a quickstart on doing remote One-on-Ones once our offices all started closing. I’ve really enjoyed it and learned a lot.

Now that I think I’ve got the hang of the link roundups, I think it would be good to branch out. Two ideas that have come up a couple times are:

Hi, all:

Half the year has passed, it’s Canada Day week here, and it’s the last day at our teams organizational home for the past four years before moving to a neighbouring institution. It’s been a good opportunity to take stock, and our team has some suggestions for what we should do differently starting afresh next week.

And I’d definitely welcome input from you, too! A reminder that all tracking is disabled on this newsletter — I rely on the old-fashioned approach of you emailing me to tell me what is interesting, what isn’t, what you’d like more of, and what you could do without.

So with that, on to the — somewhat shorter for the holiday week — link roundup!

Hi!

As we get ready to move our team from one institution to another, we’re taking the opportunity to reconsider how we do things on our team and reset expectations about how we operate and what we’re aiming to achieve - as a team, and as a project.  The switch to working from home was an earlier opportunity to clarify and reset, too.

In Canada, 77% of IT organizations say that expectations around everyone going to the office everyday have been changed probably irreversably by the pandemic.  With universities, hospitals, and research institutes constantly tight on space, I have to think that a lot of our organizations are having similar conversations.  In the jobs section, there’s a first for the newsletter - a manager position listed a remote position.  At your org, are people discussing having work from home being a serious option in the future?  Is anyone considering operating as a fully- or mostly-distributed team indefinitely?

Hi, everyone!

It’s been a weird couple of weeks here at RCT Global Headquarters. Our entire team is moving institutions, following our boss, and so there’s been a flurry of paperwork, both helping coordinating offers and then arranging for the resignations once those were out.

Coordinating a mass resignation wasn’t quite as fun as it sounds. And it’s funny to see how invested we are in our teams; I actually had to suppress a momentary gasp of dismay when I received the first email with Subject: “Resignation Letter”, even though I (a) asked for the resignation letters and (b) provided the template, both less than an hour before.

The work won’t change at all, but we’re moving to a much larger institution, with more peer technical teams to interact with. So I’m looking forward to “being at” our new workplace, even virtually. Now there’s just the barrage of new hire paperwork and elearning orientation modules to go through. (And if you’re curious - even our boss, who’s moving into a C-level position, had to diligently work his way through those. HR processes will simply not be sidestepped.)

Hi!

Sorry for the late roundup this week - the week kind of got away from me.

But there’s been lots to talk about, so on we go!

Managing Teams

Hi, everyone.

Many people in our community — and in the broader research community we serve — are in pain this week. There’s another video of another Black man, George Floyd, begging for his life while being murdered by a police officer in Minneapolis. Here in Toronto a Black woman, Regis Korchinski-Paquet, died when what should have been a routine call resulted in a mystifying number of police officers showing up. With only police officers present in her apartment, she went over her high-rise balcony to her death, with her last words being, repeatedly, “Mom, help”. This is all taking place during a pandemic which is disproportionately killing and incapacitating Black people, Indigenous people, and people of colour because they have less access to jobs that can be worked from home, and are more likely to be living in overcrowded multi-generational homes.

So with news and social media being dominated by consequences of systemic racism, anti-Black violence in particular, and in reaction to anti-police-brutality protests, a lot of people are feeling despair and anguish.

Hi, all:

Some jurisdictions are starting to make plans for people returning to offices. For those of us who can readily work from home, that return may not be for a while; but planning is still worthwhile.

Return will likely look like “split offices” for a while - a few people going in in “shifts” while others work from home. The challenge then is to get the best of both worlds, convenience of WFH and serendipitous interactions, rather than the worst of isolation and cliquing up.

Hi!

I asked last week about your team’s productivity and how it is holding up. Here and on twitter you sent me the full range of answers; it was a rough 33% split between up/the same, down, and it’s complicated. Two factors out of our control caused much of the variation: personal circumstances of team members and the type of work done. But there are some things readers have done that have helped. Scoping work tighter than before, communicating explicit expectations ahead of time, and more frequent status reporting all seem to have worked.

Hi!

I asked last week about onboarding; people who responded last week said they weren’t bringing on student interns or new hires at all at this point in the pandemic. It sounded like at least our research computing team managers had succeeded in avoiding layoffs in their teams, sometimes despite an unfavourable - in one case very unfavourable - pre-COVID-19 environment, but several were not bringing on research students, either because of complexities on onboarding, that they just didn’t have the time, or because schools had stopped their placement programs.

A question for this week - how are work hours and productivity going in your team right now? There’s that after an initial dip, productivity has actually risen; but I think it’s more complicated than that, especially for research computing teams. has seen more hours worked (and more variable hours) but it’s not clear that total number of PRs or commits has gone up - people are working longer but not necessarily getting more done.

Hi!

Winter/spring semester is here, and our team is onboarding (completely virtually) new student interns. For the student working most closely with me, we’ve been very careful to spell out very specific goals for the first month or so, and scheduling lots of one-on-one chats with the whole team. So far it seems to be working well, but it’s definitely slower than the usual onboarding process! I’ll report back how it goes - are you bringing on interns (or new hires) now? What approaches have you been taking?

On to the roundup:

Managing Teams