Menlo Innovations Factory Tour
Today was my appointment to take the Factory Tour at Menlo Innovations. When I arrived, the tour group introduced ourselves briefly. There were other software development companies there, and then there was me. I said I did graphic design for print and the web. They looked a little confused, and thought Print And The Web might be the name of my company. I said I was also with Penguicon, a software convention in Troy. I said that I had read about High Tech Anthropology and was completely fascinated. At that point Rich Sheridan of Menlo explained to the other group members that HTAs were a very rare, very select (translation: we have too many of them already) group of people, and he would explain about them at the end.
I got to see a lot of their software development processes, some of which defied expectation. Mr. Sheridan told us that they defy Brooke's Law from The Mythical Man-Month: "Adding people to a late software project makes it later." Brooke's Law is one that I've known for a long time, and believed quite implicitly. I've seen this law hit like a meteor strike in the field I work in as well! If you add another designer in a big rush to meet a deadline, the team will be in too much of a hurry to properly bring that new person up to speed with what they've already done in the publication and why they did it. Everybody will be accidentally undoing each other's efforts. It makes the publication take longer and miss the press date. And yet Menlo says they just have no problem adding people. They have an interesting paper trail system that keeps the team on track, the work seems to be isolated into modules, and they have a great way of dealing with the expectations of clients when it comes to late-breaking emergencies. That could account for it.
It was extremely educational. They have a great environment there, and are some extremely smart people.
The event moved along briskly and was clearly geared toward two things: teaching other software shops how to improve, and generating new business. Not hiring. Besides, I wouldn't even know where to begin if I worked there. When the tour was complete, I got to invite Rich Sheridan to have reps from Menlo present a booth or give a presentation at Penguicon. Then he had to duck out quickly due to a family issue.
Another guy who took the tour approached me since he heard me say I work in graphic design for print and the web. He said his software house, MetaSpring, was looking for a graphic design freelancer who could do web work. So we exchanged business cards and chatted for a while. Freelancer is another word for unemployed, but it might turn into some income that can tide me over until I get a real job. This is if they have any work for which I'm qualified, and if they aren't the typical difficult client. I explained to him that I don't know programming languages, but he said they had lots of that already. Here's hoping they don't need anything with challenging CSS. I'll be going down to MetaSpring on Friday with my portfolio.
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