IBM has an internal employee appreciation program called Thanks! Awards. This program allows employees to show appreciation to a fellow coworker for going above-and-beyond the call of duty. The award is actually a placeholder. After being given the recipient goes to a specific website to redeem the placeholder for an IBM-branded item of their choice.

Each employee is allowed to give up to 12 Thanks! awards a year and can receive up to 3 of them (the limit on receiving only 3 is presumably linked to the IRS regulations that says employees can gift up to $75 to an employee tax-free and the items to choose from are all easily under $25 each). I've maxed out the number of Thanks! awards that I can receive every year that I can remember, and each year I race with myself to see how close to January 1st I can max out. Not that I solicit them or do anything different than I usually do in my day-to-day job 'cause that would be cheating. In 2008 I received my 3rd award on Feb 25. This year it was on Feb 16. We'll see what happens in 2010. I'm not the only one who keeps track of this as a quick google says some people even mention the number they get on their resume.

After your limit is reached coworkers are suggested to send internal eCards instead - which are admittedly corny but in my mind have the same personal recognition impact. Because lets be honest, it isn't the IBM-branded stuff that's the big win from the Thanks! award program, but the recognition of a fellow coworker of a job well done.

And in that vein my work resolution for the new year is to be better about giving out Thanks! awards (and corny eCards if necessary) where appropriate.

Tags: recognition, work

I'm a software performance engineer - my job is to make software faster. The ideal way to make software faster is to stop making it do things that it doesn't need to be doing to get the job done. Any rational person would look at that sentence and say "well duh". Any sensible software developer will look at that sentence and should be appalled that such a statement is even necessary. That said, it is. Removing busy work can take many forms such as changing an SQL query, adding a database index, reducing abstraction for specific cases, reusing reusable objects instead of creating new ones at every iteration, and using the right data model/algorithm for the job. Ideally when you get done the software is faster while using fewer CPU cycles and the originating developer has been educated as to how it should have been coded to begin with.

Using fewer CPU cycles directly relates to the new environmental movement. The fewer CPU cycles a computer is using the less heat is being generated and the less electricity is used to both power the CPU and cool the data center. In addition, the fewer CPU cycles required by a single application the more applications can reasonably share a pool of CPU resources (either on the same server, sharing via virtualized hardware such as AIX LPARs, or sharing via virtualized software such as VMWare, AIX WPARs, or Solaris Zones). The more applications you can cram on a single physical server efficiently using server's resources the fewer servers you need, the less electricity you use, and the greener you are.

Thus my assertion is that performance engineers are green engineers. And not to make a too lofty point of it, but we play an important role of directly reducing the CO₂ emissions from the IT industry, which currently accounts for 2% overall -- the same as the airline industry. And if done well, the software we create just might help with reducing the other 98%.

Tags: environment, work

IBM is offering a voluntary pilot program called TakeTime this summer. The concept is rather simple: with management approval you can take between 10 and 20 days inclusive off in the months of June, July, and August and get paid 1/3 of your pay for the days you take off.

The days need not be taken contiguously and the money is taken out of your September paychecks in equal amounts allowing for folks to plan their cash flow. The days off are separate and distinct from your vacation. During the time you take off you're still a considered a full-time employee without any change in your insurance coverage, vacation accrual, etc.

IMHO this is a very exciting program because IBM is a stickler about vacation: you can't roll unused vacation over and you can't buy back vacation days -- what you have based on your tenure is it. For me that means 3 weeks of vacation which have been eaten up by travelling back to Texas for holidays the past two years.

Originally I wanted to take the full 20 days off but that didn't cash-flow well with travel expenses we'll have over the next few months and the tuition for Benjamin's summer classes. Instead I opted for the minimum 10 days. I'll be taking them every Friday in the months of July and August (8 as July the 3rd is a site holiday and I have off anyway) and 2 floating dates that I can use whenever in July or August.

What will I be doing with my Fridays off? Some of those will be spent visiting friends during some of our travel. Others will be spent doing some coding for PGDP. And yet others may be spent reading a book by the pool :)

Tags: work

Monday, June 1st was my 6th-year anniversary with Benjamin. We met 6 years ago on a blind date set up by a mutual friend to see Miss Saigon. We celebrated it by recreating our second date: we had dinner at Schlotzsky's and then proceeded to see the movie Up which was amazing. Well, technically our second date was dinner at Schlotzsky's and then dancing lessons at RCC so it wasn't a total recreation -- but neither were we 6 years younger either :) Benjamin did seem to enjoy his dozen + 5 roses.

Tuesday, June 2nd was our 3-year marriage anniversary. To celebrate that we're seeing Rent next week and staying in a hotel downtown.

Today, June 5th, is my 9-year anniversary at IBM. When I was hired at the peak of the dot-com boom I never thought I'd be at IBM for 5 years, much less 9. During my second performance evaluation roughly 18 months after I started I was told that I was getting a raise, not just because of my good performance but because if they didn't new hires would be making more than I did. It was then that I discovered that the hiring managers didn't consider me a strong candidate and weren't going to offer me the job until one manager stepped in and said he thought I'd be a good fit and would vouch for me. I never did end up working for him though. Thus I was hired at the lowest salary they could offer a college graduate (which was sadly the highest offer I received by far during my job search). Since then I've proceeded to impress folks -- at least according to my performance evaluations. Here I am 9 years later a well-respected Senior Software Engineer (band 9) and a performance subject-matter expert on all things ITIM, including the IBM LDAP server and DB2 database. It's been a fun ride! I'm looking forward to an extra week of vacation next year and seeing where IBM's headed from here.

Tags: work

Yet again I was rejected for the IBM Corporate Service Corps. Frustratingly they don't tell you "focus on X, Y, and Z and apply again". Drat².

Tags: work

The purchase of Sun by Oracle just a couple of days ago was a shocker to just about everyone. Sun employees were a bit shocked (according to a friend who works there) as were IBM employees who were assuming there were backroom discussions still going on between Sun and IBM.

The buyout is going to make things interesting in the Identity Management space -- which means it's going to make things interesting for me. Just in case you've been living under a rock, the product I work on is called IBM Tivoli Identity Manager and is considered one of the top 5 identity management solutions according to Burton Group. The other four major players in the space are Novell, CA, Oracle, and Sun.

The possibility of IBM buying Sun was creating mini clouds of doubt in my mind given that it was virtually impossible they would keep both ITIM and Sun's product, one of them was getting the axe. Thankfully I don't have to worry about that anymore.

Instead we get a nice jumble of confusion in the marketplace if Oracle's product or Sun's product is going to get the axe. Good news for ITIM, however you slice it.

Tags: work

Once again I've applied to the IBM Corporate Service Corps. I'm under the impression that the number of people applying (roughly 5k) keep going up so I'm not sure my odds are getting any better each time around. Oh well, there's no harm in trying!

Tags: work

As you've probably heard, IBM has recently done some layoffs. My grandmother has seen something on the news about it and called my mom at 8am on Monday morning to ask if I was impacted. [Unrelated aside: I was going to use the word affected here, but since I don't know if it is effected or affected and most folks won't grok [a|e]ffected I opted for impacted instead :) ] My mom assured her that "Casey is indispensable". What I think is funny is that my mom turns around and calls me yesterday evening to validate that assessment. Guess she didn't trust her judgment of my indispensableness! Just in case anyone else is reading this and concerned: thus far my project and my position have been spared.

The past two weeks I have been doing performance testing of the ITIM SAP adapter for a Large UK Bank (what's with me and large banks?). Today I presented the findings to the bank. They were both glad to hear how well the adapter performs in our test environment and yet not so happy given how amazingly poorly it is working in their environment. I left them with a todo list on some steps to diagnose it. From here I'm leaving the customer in the very capable hands of ITIM Support.

At my management team's request/orders I'm shifting my focus from customer issues to testing the performance of ITIM 5.1 which is still under development. I'm somewhat glad about this as it gives me an easy out for not getting involved in new customer issues and hopefully being able to decrease my involvement with existing customer issues. I've felt worn a little thin lately given the many customer issues I've been involved in the past several months. Granted, I haven't yet determined how I'm going to transition out of some of the existing issues or who to hand them off to, something high on my todo list. Tomorrow I have a total of 9 calls with at least one every hour, sometimes two per hour. 5 of them are directly related to my new ITIM 5.1 work so I'm most certainly hitting the ground running. The ITIM 5.1 performance work is high enough profile to not only merit pulling me off customer issues but to also get me some help! My manager let me know yesterday that the Powers That Be decided to pull someone (Eme) off an already under-staffed sister project to help me with the ITIM 5.1 performance work. I've worked with Eme before and am thrilled to be working with him again as he is very intelligent, self-motivated, self-directing, and even interested in performance work!

Tags: work

IBM released really good 2008 Q4 results today which was, to me at least, very surprising given the economy. Par usual, Sam sent out an email to all IBM employees thanking them for their work and giving a synopsis of the results released to the public (obviously after they were released to the public). Of particular interest to me was the information that the bonus and salary plans are still funded -- something I was not expecting given the current economic conditions.

On the flip side, there are still rumors that IBM will be issuing layoffs. We've (obviously) not been told anything internally although someone I trust has a feeling that if something were to go down, that it would go down this Friday. I'm not overly concerned about my position but you never know for sure until the dust settles.

2009/01/21 Update: IBM didn't wait until Friday. Some number of layoffs are happening within my organization starting today. We weren't informed how many or who was affected although I was told that I was not impacted.

Tags: work

Two months ago I was pondering what Linux distribution to use for my personal machine in the IBM Austin lab. I ended up going with Ubuntu Intrepid - Desktop. At first I had some problems with it albeit all user error like forgetting to disable the power settings so the machine went into suspend mode. After looking back on it, I should have installed the server, not desktop version. Now it seems to be operating just fine.

For my desktop, however, I decided to stick with what I know and went with Fedora 10 for my desktop. After running with Fedora 10 for 1.5 weeks I decided to take the jump on my T60p laptop as well and spent today getting that reinstalled. Overall I'm much happier than I was with the Redhat Enterprise Linux 5 Workstation-based image. Having a recent version of Evolution and other oft-used applications sure is nice, not to mention the little improvements that come with recent Gnome versions.

My desktop is suspending and unsuspending correctly (that should save a few kilowatts of energy over the course of a month) but every time I hibernate the machine it immediately boots back up after successfully writing out the hibernation file. I haven't had a chance to play with it too much however. I'm hoping I'll have more luck with the T60p.

Tags: work