Innovation in Software

Well, actually, that’s a little premature, but it’s hit news wires and is shaping up to being an interesting story:

According to gaming company Global Gaming Factory X, it is in the the process of acquiring The Pirate Bay for $7.8m (SEK 60 million). The acquisition is scheduled to be completed by August and will see the site launch new business models to compensate content providers and copyright owners.

Well, that’s surprising and rather intriguing. More so given it’s not the only acquisition that they’re after according to EuroInvestor:

GGF has entered into an agreement to acquire the shares in Peerialism AB. Peerialism AB is a software technology company with its origin in KTH Royal Institute of Technology and SICS, Swedish Institute of Computer Science and which presently is owned by the employees. The owners as well as the employees will continue to work for the company. Peerialism develops solutions for data distribution and distributed storage based on new p2p- technology. The access to the technology is secured by the acquisition. The consideration amounts to in aggregate MSEK 100 [$13 million] consisting of at least MSEK 50 [$6.5 million] in cash and up to the equivalent of MSEK 50 in newly issued shares in GGF (according to valuation during a period of ten days after the announcement). The share part of the purchase price should not exceed five percent of the total number of shares in GGF after the transaction. In addition GGF has undertaken to make initial investments of MSEK 25 [$3.25 million] in the acquired business.

There is however, a catch. Isn’t there always?

Completion of the acquisitions are primarily subject to GGF obtaining financing for the acquisition, that any necessary resolutions are adopted by a General Meeting of GGF, and that GGF and the Board of Directors consider that the acquired assets can be used in a legally and appropriate way. GGF intends to issue new shares in order to obtain the necessary financing for the acquisition. The acquisition is deemed to be completed in August 2009.

Well, what does it all mean? Quite simply that The Pirate Bay, is no longer going to be quite so Pirate-y. In fact, so worried are some people that TPB had to respond to make sure people calmed down a little:

If the new owners will screw around with the site, nobody will keep using it. That’s the biggest insurance one can have that the site will be run in the way that we all want to. And – you can now not only share files but shares with people. Everybody can indeed be the owner of The Pirate Bay now. That’s awesome and will take the heat of us.

The old crew is still around in different ways. We will also not stop being active in the politics of the internets – quite the opposite. Now we’re fueling up for going into the next gear. TPB will have economical muscles to let people evolve it. It will team up with great technicians to evolve the protocols. And we, the people interested in more than just technology, will have the time to focus on that. It’s win-win-win.

The profits from the sale will go into a foundation that is going to help with projects about freedom of speech, freedom of information and the openess of the nets. I hope everybody will help out in that and realize that this is the best option for all. Don’t worry – be happy!

In the final mix then, here are what seems to be the takeaway points:

1. GGF is buying up two new properties through issuing new shares. It’s not a given this will work, but they’re confident
2. If the finance is available they are going to take the technology from Peerialism AB that has some “new” P2P technology in its kit bag and ramp it up commercially
3. They’re also going to buy one of the most visited web sites on the planet and promise to “compensate rights holders” which it doesn’t at the moment
4. The Pirate Bay guys insist this isn’t in any way going to interfere with the site built on the premise that rights holders can go to hell
5. TPB insist in fact this is the start of a socialist utopia and will allow them to persue their political ambitions in the name of the users
6. The Pirate Bay users are already calling foul and looking to abandon them and go and create a new site somewhere else

I can’t see this working for GGF. They’ve walked into a political quagmire in the hope that there is some revenue in it. It seems the gambit they are taking is that Peerialism’s PeerTV product is going to fly when combined with TPB’s user base. However, it has several drawbacks including the need for a P2P CDN to be scattered across the globe at broadband operator’s expense (for which GGF is promising to compensate them), and for the TPB users to give up their insatiable desire to burn material to disc (perhaps to sell down the pub for £5 a DVD), and avoid incurring any charges or being interrupted with advertising. Doesn’t seem plausible to me.

This suggests then that the TPB users who already are screaming the words “betrayal” and “capitalists” from the roof tops in response, are going to move on somewhere else. This is a perfect example of how an innovative change in technology can produce the possibility of a new business model that the users do not want, but the investors don’t care and will plug on regardless.

However, it does create a new business model, with a new user base, that technologically and commercially is interesting. Watch this space.

One of the problems with modern journalism is that some of the barriers taken for granted have broken down, and that can mean new ethical dilemmas being created every day.

Take the story of David Rohde’s kidnapping. Who he? You might very well ask. A reporter for the New York Times, he was kidnapped around seven months ago by the Taliban. You didn’t read about it in the papers? Well, no. Despite it being picked up by an Afghan news agency and being reported in some UGC news websites, the New York Times conducted a cover-up operation over the last seven months.

The only people who didn’t play ball the NYTimes were worried about were a couple (perhaps only one) of the Wikipedia editors who spent a reasonable amount of effort trying to insert one single reference to the kidnapping in Rohde’s Wikipedia article.

The Wikipedia team conspired to remove the edit and temporarily block the page from time to time. The New York Time have decided to point out how tricky dealing with this was by way of a free puff piece for Wikipedia and Jimmy Wales.

It’s an interesting case in how truth takes a back seat for a while, and raises some interesting questions for me about how exactly news organisations are meant to behave in a new era of constant information flow.

First, their reasoning for suppressing this information:

Times executives believed that publicity would raise Mr. Rohde’s value to his captors as a bargaining chip and reduce his chance of survival. Persuading another publication or a broadcaster not to report the kidnapping usually meant just a phone call from one editor to another, said Bill Keller, executive editor of The Times.

Well, that doesn’t seem very sound logic. Yes, if it had been splashed across CNN for a couple of news cycles because there wasn’t much going on that weekend, you’d have a problem. However, that wouldn’t happen. Even the original news stories that were published intimated journalists being kidnapped were not big news, and part of daily life in that part of the World.

In fact, the story not getting sympathetic coverage could well have caused more damage – why feed and keep a man who is worthless to you and his fellow journalists? If no ransom is possible,  wouldn’t it be simpler to just kill him?

Then there is their attempt to change history that irks a little:

Two days after the kidnapping, a Wikipedia user altered the entry on Mr. Rohde to emphasize his work that could be seen as sympathetic to Muslims, like his reporting on Guantánamo, and his coverage of the Srebrenica massacre of Bosnian Muslims. Mr. Rohde won a Pulitzer Prize for his Bosnia coverage in 1996, when he worked for The Christian Science Monitor.The Wikipedia editor in that case was Michael Moss, an investigative reporter at The Times and friend of Mr. Rohde who has written extensively about groups like Al Qaeda and the Taliban. Like many Wikipedia editors, he adopted a user name that hid his true identity.

“I knew from my jihad reporting that the captors would be very quick to get online and assess who he was and what he’d done, what his value to them might be,” he said. “I’d never edited a Wikipedia page before.”

With his editors’ blessing, Mr. Moss had already made similar changes to Mr. Rohde’s “topic page” on The Times’s Web site, and in both cases he omitted the name of Mr. Rohde’s former employer, because it contained the word Christian.

Woah, there! That’s some pretty hefty editing going on there. First, Michael Moss edits the page to make Rohde look more sympathetic to Muslims, under a pseudonym. Then he edits up the NYTimes.com topic pages, all the while trying to get rid of the mention of his previous employer.

I have to ask, why? The most prominent article on Rohde found through Google before the story of his escape and this cover-up broke over the weekend, points out quite clearly who his previous employer was. This was, in essence, a futile exercise that did not take or remove any information away from the Internet that was already out there, and simply made the NY Times look like they were practising their Stalinist air-brushing techniques.

I’m disappointed in all involved. I don’t think Rohde would have been killed if things had been left as they were. I don’t think a short mention on the evening news would even have happened. A couple of small pieces in competing papers pointing out his work in highlighting issues Muslims around the World faced might actually have helped him gain an earlier release. Either way, if he was still alive after seven months, there was little chance he would be killed at any point by his captors.

Wikipedia might be the biggest boy in town when it comes to UGC news content, but it won’t be for long. You won’t be able to suppress stories in future that are based in fact, and the final line of the NYTimes pieces:

…the idea of a pure openness, a pure democracy, is a naïve one.”

Harks of naïveness in itself: journalists are no longer gate-keepers to truth. Yes, lives are involved and everybody is glad that Rohde managed to escape over the last couple of days. However the guys sat in news rooms – foreign correspondents whose lives are on the line, even more so – are going to have to accept this behaviour just isn’t going to be possible a few years from now. The real question then is should it be?

There’s a lot of interesting things happening out there right now. HTML 5 is about to make a whole suite of new applications possible thanks to:

• Much better rendering of graphics on the fly
• Client-side storage of application data
• Drag-and-drop interfaces that make web apps feel more desktop-like

But there has to be something we are missing out on that is niggling us all at the back of our collective group-think mind. Perhaps watching the Google Wave introduction got you psyched about something that suddenly became possible. Perhaps the very way the web inherently works bothers you, and you envisage a new platform.

I’m interested in hearing about it now the comments are getting a little bit of love across articles. Go crazy. Throw them in there…

Development is a creative pursuit. Whilst many think of it as a purely technical challenge, it requires a level of lateral thinking about the World that is a cross between doing a crossword puzzle, composing a symphony and having an argument with people who don’t exist. It’s not surprising some of us are a little eccentric.

It reminds me of the writing process a lot. You sit down at a blank screen after having conducted your research and you have to just dig in and find some way of making progress. Many a developer struggles with a blank IDE screen much in the same way many a writer struggles to find influence. When I was learning how to write properly, I was told that “a professional writer can not be like the poet who spends a morning taking out a comma, and the afternoon putting it back in”. We need to work hard. Same with code. A block then is a real problem.

Slashdot this weekend asked How to Get Out of Developer’s Block?, or rather a user asked:

I have spent the past six months working on a software project, and while I can come up with ideas, I just can’t seem to sit down in front of the computer to code. I sit there and I just can’t concentrate. I don’t know whether this is akin to writer’s block, but it feels like it. Have any other Slashdotters run into this and if so how did you get out of it? It is bothering me since the project has ground to a halt and I really want to get started again. I am the sole developer on the project, if that makes a difference.

The comments that follow in the thread that range from the sensible to the bizarre. I have a bunch of tricks I use when I’m struggling, so thought I’d put them together

1. Get enough sleep – you have no idea how sleep deprivation can mess you up when you’re trying to concentrate. When I’m working on code, I take a minimum of 10 hours sleep a night. Anything less, and I’m not going to be able to think in purely abstract terms for 8 hours straight during the day.
2. Exercise – and whilst those of you who know me might laugh, it’s important. I actually do get regular exercise when I’m coding full-time. Just a long walk at the start or end of the day can be enough. Something that gets the hear rate up helps though (perhaps explaining why I always code better the day after… errr… private stuff that gets my heart rate up!).
3. Don’t drink alcohol – this was something I got when I was trying to sort out my pilot’s license. When you’re going flying, I don’t drink for 24 hours before getting into the plane. I found my workload was easier, my writing got more fluid and my code went up a gear. On big client projects I don’t drink at all on school nights. If I’m drinking in the evenings whilst on a project, it’s because the project isn’t challenging me and I’m bored.
4. Clear your environment out – I’m currently sat at a desk with perhaps 150 items of paperwork on it. In this environment, I can not focus on code. My mental processes are cluttered because my physical processes are. Tidying up might seem like a stupid way to get out of a block, but I genuinely find that a clear working environment leads to much clearer mental processes. I don’t know how or why, it fascinates me, but just get your physical environment fixed up and suddenly your mental environment starts to fire a little better than before.
5. Write a trivial test – this is the code version of “free-writing” that I sometimes use to unblock on writing an article. Basically write a small test (or spec if you’re BDD) for something almost trivial and then get it to pass. Repeat. Now you’re back in the game.
6. Work on the design – it’s amazing how bad we collectively are at really thinking through a problem. Go and work on some wireframes or develop some sketches of the underlying schemas and try and simplify them. Reduce things down, and suddenly you’ll see areas you can work on right away outside of the problem you’re blocked on. If you’re not able to delve into design or architecture because of the nature of the project, quite frankly you need another bunch of guys to work with.
7. Try and find it done already – I once spent a lot of time trying to work out how to solve a particular problem. The answer was non-trivial to implement in my mind. I kept putting it off. I was scared of how bad I could end up making my solution. In a fit of procrastination I spent an hour digging around the problem area and eventually found an open-source tool that did exactly what I needed, out of the box. Well, that solves that problem…
8. Are you scared of success? It might sound like a stupid question because success is good, right? But when we succeed at something, we conquer some barrier we have worked to overcome for a period, things change. Suddenly people might look at you differently. Perhaps you end up having to work on a less interesting project. You might want your current project to be a success for other reasons. Ask yourself whether you really want this project to succeed. And then realise there’s no getting out of it: failing, or staying where you are is just as bad an outcome and harms you, your self-confidence and your reputation.
9. Find a SCRUM meeting somewhere – one of the very best things about daily stand-up meetings in SCRUM projects is that the meeting only has three topics of conversation: outcomes from stuff you agreed to do in the last meeting; what you plan to do today to further the project, if anything; and obstacles in your way. Not everybody has a team (and sole development is the hardest form there is, trust me), so find a SCRUM somewhere else. Use Twitter, your blog, a group of friends down the pub, anything. Just talk about what’s stopping you and see if anybody can help you in any way, or offer suggestions. Obviously asking a friend about a tricky problem relating to class inheritance isn’t going to yield results if they don’t know what you’re on about, but ask around more liberally than you have done to date.
10. Work on something else – we all have other projects on the go. If the above isn’t working, just go and get on with something else. Your subconscious is dealing with the problem and will come up with a solution. Just make sure you hit your deliverables schedule if you have one!

Now comments are back up, I look forward to hearing of any other tips people might have.

It’s now become a little bit more common knowledge that Vagueware is growing. Quickly. That has come as a bit of a surprise, but I’m embracing it fully as I see the opportunity to grow a great company and do some amazing things over the years to come. And I know I can’t do it alone.

The reality is that by 2Q2010 I might need a staff roster into the double digits. Given that the Vagueware Christmas party has to date consisted of me having a quiet drink on my own for the last three years, this is a big shift.

So, what gives? I’ve always been open about business development, even when I’ve later changed my mind, and I think some of you reading this will be impacted by the changes I’m seeing in the industry and thought I’d share. There’s more than enough to go around.

First, some background:

How the Manchester web development industry has worked so far

Manchester has until the last year or so basically been defined as a services-orientated new-media provider. What that means is that if you are a high street chain or building a brand you will go to the “boutiques” across the Northern Quarter, look at portfolios and appoint one of them to develop a website. Client choices are generally driven by a mixture of aesthetic, price and experience.

Then the agency will realise that there is some hard programming going on under the bonnet somewhere and will either have programmers in-house to handle it, or they might out-source it to a friendly coder who can help them out.

This means that a £50,000-£100,000 new media build might result in about £5,000-£10,000 of development work being commissioned.

The other part of the industry is the “pure code” sector. That’s where Vagueware has traditionally been – rich, highly interactive logic-focused applications that need design laying over it. Sometimes Vagueware has just overseen development to make sure the developers aren’t pulling anything over the eyes of the client. This generally results in about a 50/50 split between code and “media” work, but there has not been much of it around in the past and often some of us team up to work together.

This has worked very well until recently, and has produced some amazing output. High street brands send their work to Manchester, and the richness of the design community here is massively under-rated. The Big Chip Awards do something to offset that, but it causes a few issues:

• Developers are stuck at the bottom of the food chain causing growth and sustainability issues
• We struggle to build product-based companies in the city meaning the national media get sniffy with our efforts
• Those of us who aren’t designers are off the radar for funding streams and more positive media promotion

However, this is not going to be the case for ever more:

How the Manchester scene is changing

Quite simply, developers are getting more important. Part of this is down to people wanting to be more sophisticated about what they want to achieve. It’s no longer good enough to have a website with some ActionScript doing something funky-looking in Flash. Clients are seeking clones of YouTube or Facebook, iPhone applications, rich complicated services that need to sit on cloud infrastructures.

In short: they need propeller heads to make their dreams come true.

That means instead of being approached by an agency to take on a slice of a pie, developers are starting to get commissioned work directly and then seeking designers to take a slice of the pie.

It clicked for me a few weeks ago when I realised that the projects on the book at the moment were turning Vagueware into an agency, but not one dominated by new media but by big, complicated infrastructure requirements. Deep “Information Architecture” planning, behaviour-driven development with bags of specs, deploying onto clouds because clients want to scale to millions of users when they get traction, and so on. You get the idea.

“Oh, and can you find somebody to make it look nice?”. Sure we can!

I’m not saying this is the death of the traditional new media agency, but there *is* something going on here. People are using complex web and iPhone applications more often and are being inspired to commission their own ideas. Experience of off-shoring has meant fewer are likely to take it out to the cheapest bid – they want a great partner they trust and can discuss ideas with over a coffee.

By going to a “software development agency” as I am now referring to them, they not only get a quicker time to market but often they pay less too: Vagueware’s current rate can be doubled when handled via a middle man, and when you’re talking about a 40-day build plan, that adds up.

Designers are critical, and I can’t wait to work with more of them: some guys out there leave me astounded and wishing I had a more visually creative mind. However, I think their grip on the power base of this industry is slipping a little as more people want to build functional products.

And that means change. And wherever there is change, there is opportunity, which leads me onto:

How Vagueware is changing

Vagueware is going to ultimately have two revenue streams: products and services. Simple.

Products the things like Conveyor Belt (more on that next week), Kagtum and a few other tricks up various (rolled-up) sleeves at Vagueware HQ. We don’t expect these to monetise quickly, but they give us skin in the game in a couple of key areas that help us understand how parts of the industry work in a way just being a service provider can’t.

Services are what Vagueware does right now, but as a software development agency. Got a cool idea but have no idea how to implement it or even if it’s possible? You could go to a traditional new media agency but they might just call us. You could go to a design agency like Ideo but they might call us too. You know what you could do? Just call us. We’ll help make it happen and if it needs strong design, we’ll handle that and make it all dance beautifully in front of your very eyes.

Then there is the additional stuff I’m looking at developing over time: training, research and analysis, reports and other things I can’t talk about right now.

There is one other difference about what comes next too: we’re not limiting ourselves to the local market. In the next two months we’re going to be hitting London quite hard and by the year end I expect to be getting clients onto the books from North America (I’ve traditionally always had one or two in the US but will be growing that), and hopefully – albeit rather scarily – continental Europe.

In other words, I’m going for it. It’s scary, but the opportunity is ripe and the skills are available. The only reason I’ve not done this before is because it was hard to get commissions for rich, complex bespoke web app development. No longer.

Of course, I might have got it all wrong and it could all blow up in my face, but you never know until you try and there is always the ability to adapt if further down the line it becomes clear a bad decision has been made.

For the last three years, this blog was using the Mephisto blogging platform – a Ruby on Rails application that I intended to expand myself in all sorts of ways.

To be frank, the code base for Mephisto suffers a little from bit-rot, and it seems to me that the original authors have almost given up on supporting the system. Hey, it’s still not made a 1.0 release, so I’m sure it’s just a lack of time, we’re all busy, etc. but I need something with a more active developer community (and I know I’m part of the problem by not diving in myself).

Handily, in the time that has elapsed, Wordpress has gone from being a rather annoying and slightly odd PHP blogging platform into a really slick CMS with tons of widgets, themes and plugins. So I’ve switched.

And at the same time, I’ve also decided that comments need to be opened up on articles. Right now, all articles published from 1st June 2009 have comments open so if you saw something you liked (or hated), feel free to make a comment now.

P.S. thanks to Jason Morris for the script modification that helped me move 3 years of blog posts in about 15 minutes, itself based on a script by David Murphy

It seems I’m not the only person slightly bemused by the reaction to Steve Jobs’ revelation he had a liver transplant.

Other people’s reactions include:

• He owes me more work because I’m a fan of his work
• My share portfolio is at risk because of this
• I want more shiny plastic things from Apple. This worries me they won’t be as shiny.
• He didn’t tell us something personal that we deserve to know

My reaction:

• You just had a fricking liver transplant? Wow, get well soon and don’t listen to those guys baying for your attention, you need rest, ‘k?

This isn’t about shares or gadgets or what he owes you. It’s about somebody who is seriously ill taking some time out to make sure they can live a little longer. You know “life”, that thing you take for granted? The thing that isn’t really about accumulating possessions but being able to breathe, eat, love, dream? The mob doesn’t get that – perhaps because it isn’t available to download in the App Store or listed on the Nasdaq…

And yet, somehow, this reaction is predictable. Much in the same way that sexism is alive and well in the industry, selfishness – in particular consumerist self-absorption – is rife. We are the pinnacle of consumerism. We thrive on early adopters, so we grow them. And what we grow, we reap – this is another problem we need to think about.

As a collective the consumers seem no longer to see the humanity behind technology, choosing instead to become voyeuristic onanists viewing technology almost in the form of a fetish they are addicted to. In fact, porn is a good metaphor for where we are right now: dehumanise and objectify humanity to serve a selfish need. It doesn’t matter if the lens the fetish is viewed through is that of a camera or the blogosphere, providing it’s possible to sit at screens satisfying our cravings in private.

Maybe that’s just the Catholic in me talking. The Agnostic in me thinks we can do better too, though.

Some will argue this is just the fruit of modern capitalism. All advertising in a capitalist free-market society relies on a principle of false idolatry, designed to invoke a sense of inferiority in our subconsciousness. Apple does it better than anybody else on Earth, taking their marketing cues from designer label brands.

I think we might have gone a step too far. We might need to dial it back a notch or three and re-imagine what we’re here to do. There is something pure about what we do that is beyond the gadget and the price tag, the plastic or the electronics. As Dijkstra said (and is quoted as saying on my business cards): Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes.

Yet here we are complaining about the telescope manufacturer needing a liver transplant because all we want is more telescopes. Good. Grief.

We should be grateful for the genius behind every design decision that comes out of our great technology companies, and they should rightly be rewarded with praise – they advance society one little increment at a time. But when somebody takes time out to have a life-saving operation, there is something distasteful about a swarm of self-interested parties demanding to know where their share of the grief is going to come from.

I don’t know the answer, I don’t have the solution. All I know is that I don’t want to be part of the problem.

P.S. writing this story I was reminded of the most human thing I ever read by Jobs’: his commencement speech at Stanford in 2005 which I highly recommend taking the time to read.

Vagueware sometimes does all the delivery of a project when doing service provision, sometimes it partners up, and sometimes we get asked just to keep an eye on things from afar.

More recently however we’ve been asked several times to sit down, talk through an idea, codify it into a loose specification and manage putting it out to tender for any firms interested in working on the project. This allows us to do what we do well, and others to get access to interesting and profitable projects.

We have recently been engaged by a client to produce a video portal site, the main selling point of which is the business execution behind it. We can’t go into explicit details on that front, but if you’re interested in looking at a sub-£10,000 build for a relatively simple video-to-mobile solution, we’d ask you to consider taking a look at the invitation to tender below.

Click here for invitation to tender

Please send all proposals back to me at paul AT vagueware DOT com by Tuesday the 30th June. Any further queries or questions should be directed via that address too.

I have pretty standard business cards when you first look at them. The company logo, my name (no job title – such things are no-nos even for a one-man business when your head is built like mine), phone number, address, email, yadda, yadda.

The address is changing soon and so I’m about to commission some new ones from my favourite printer, and that leads me to the feature few people ever notice about them: the reverse.

The back of my business card is where I do a little of my “philosophy thing”. One person saw it and immediately thought I was a prat. Another spent 10 minutes thinking about the phrases there and came back asking me questions. Most people don’t see them. Either way, it represents a lot of me and my original hopes for the company. Some of them work a couple of years on, some don’t. So, as part of the change, this will get a revamp.

I’ve decided to make the current version available as high-res desktop images, one dark and one light. The slightly strange dimensions are due to the fact they are derived from the original 300dpi business card design used to create my actual cards.

I also appreciate that some will point out that DHH is not the first person to come out with the “best way to predict the future” quote or at the least his version is a derivative, but I like it, and DHH’s work has obviously been important to my business being a RoR shop and all that.

Enjoy, read, query, do with them as you like. I had the dark one as my laptop’s desktop wallpaper for quite a while now (hence the reason it doesn’t have a “version number” on it).

Suggestions as to what to put on the back of v2.0 are welcome via email.

Light (click for full size):

Dark (click for full size):

P.S. The French at the bottom translates roughly as: The future is not what is coming towards us, but what we are heading towards

Vagueware Ltd is just over 3 years old. In all that time, there has only ever been one full-time employee – myself. I’ve sub-contracted work occasionally before but I’ve resisted hiring because the amount of work I’ve been doing has been enough that I’ve not been able to invest as much time needed in sales to secure somebody else’s salary.

That now needs to change, as the amount of work is growing and the number of products due for launch is increasing. Revenues for the next six months will exceed the total for the previous three years combined, and it’s all getting very busy.

Before I go on please do not contact me if you are a recruitment consultant, because whilst I know you’re different from all the rest and I really should give you a chance, I really am not prepared to work with any agency or recruitment consultant. I want direct approaches from talented individuals only. Sorry, and good luck with your continuing search for employers.

Now, with that out of the way…

Who am I hiring? For what positions? And how much am I paying?

Well, quite simply: you tell me.

This might seem like a joke. It isn’t. I am deadly serious in my approach, and the fact that somebody is prepared to respond to this kind of a call for CVs shows they have jumped over a mental hurdle that makes them a good fit from day one. I’ve wanted to do this for years.

The Philosophy

Around eight years ago I read the story of Ricardo Semler and knew immediately that was how I wanted to run my business. It works like this:

• Everybody in the company can see the accounts at any time they want
• They can ask for any salary they want
• They mostly – with management guidance – dictate their own job role
• Rather than managers hiring staff, staff hire their managers
• Everybody in the company given the above information (including other people’s salaries), police themselves into making a good company a great one

Mix into that the principles of W.L. Gore & Associates where everybody has the same job title and the structure grows into a lattice, I think you can see where I want Vagueware to be five years from now:

• Completely flat in terms of management structure (UK law requires there to be a director, and I’m currently sole shareholder, but we can think through a way out this if what I propose begins to work)
• A meritocracy where the quality of your work is what counts
• Staff choosing their own hours
• Staff choosing their own salary
• Staff choosing their own input into each project
• Everybody is accountable to everybody else in the company, not to a boss who doesn’t understand what you do (even if in the early years I have to pretend I do).

Yes, it’s a little radical. However, I wouldn’t want it any other way. When I talk about R&D I want it to mean “Radical & Daring” as much as it does “Research & Development”

What can Vagueware offer you?

Vagueware has for the last three years focused on developing bespoke software solutions for a range of clients including government departments, charities, trendy companies staffed by guys too cool to go to school, and beyond. The Vagueware Blog (you’re reading it right now), gets thousands of readers a week and is about to be restructured to engage with multiple audiences in a deeper and much more meaningful way within the software R&D communities. I personally am known across the region and within the industry as an opinionated and engaging thinker who works so hard, he never seems to get anything done (except behind the scenes, beautiful things happen daily).

Vagueware has delivered a range of services in the past: Ruby on Rails development; infrastructure planning and deployment; training; analysis, reporting and management reviews; quality assurance assessments of development projects; project management; technical writing, columns for papers and trade magazines; and on one occasion Vagueware was retained by a client to “argue” with their ideas. That was fun.

In the next year projects are likely to include overseeing delivery of an amazing tool for training, a logistics application for a trendy niche sector and oversight & assistance on a project that has major influence in central and local government departments.

Other client projects that are further away on the sales pipeline involve big information architecture issues, research & development using some of the coolest technology around, and migration of many projects to cloud services and the building of tools and services to give clients the best combination of flexibility and scalability in the sector.

In addition, we’re looking to launch Kagtum and a set of associated tools around some collaborative intelligence algorithms, a new project management tool that makes life easier for everybody involved in producing outputs, and in the long run a whole boatload of projects including many ideas coming from our peers, colleagues and clients.

It’s also planned that work concerning industry analysis, training and research will increase dramatically.

Over the next 9 months the company will need to re-invent itself in a few areas to fit around a changing economy and marketplace, and there’s a good chance there will never really be a true “head office” unless you want to build it yourself: if you want to work in a provided office, great. Otherwise work where you like.

In addition to choosing your own salary, work location, job role and hours, Vagueware will provide an annual equipment budget to furnish yourself with work equipment of your choosing. We won’t go out and buy you an Apple laptop and sit you in an Aeron chair against your will just because it sounds “cool”, but we’ll allow you to buy them yourself on our account if that’s what you feel you need to do your job.

You can find out more about some of the things the company does from the laughably-in-need-of-an-update-and-redesign-and-restructure website

What do we want from you?

Vagueware is looking for people who think they have something to offer to come and spell it out.

Skills I’m personally interested in hearing about include:

• PR, marketing and sales people who understand relationships and why Vagueware is a little bit different
• Developers – we’re currently 100% RoR, but all languages and frameworks considered
• Designers with lickable portfolios
• Project Managers/Account Managers who can beat the drum in such a way people dance whilst they work
• Analysts/researchers/writers who are interested in people, technology and the industry because it’s interesting not just because it’s profitable
• Technology Philosophers. No, really, thinking is important to what the company does.

Ideally you should be interested in doing something in more than one of these areas, simply because silos can’t really exist in this marketplace any more and people who like to be pushed into new skills are ideal fits for the culture Vagueware hopes to grow.

Ultimately, you should love technology, society, their collective potential and spend your time dreaming of what your place in the industry could be a few years from now, and be prepared to act to get there.

You should be committed to the company goals I’ve spelled out above and work actively towards a flat management structure, with open accounting standards and the ability o work without keeping your salary a closely-guarded secret.

You can be located anywhere on the planet, but there is an advantage if you’re based in the EU and entitled to work in the EU. If you’re not entitled to work in the EU but want to work here, sorry but no dice for now: reconsider whether you could work where you are. If you want to work whilst you travel, that’s fine, just explain how it’ll work.

To apply, send me an e-mail to paul AT vagueware dot com with the following:

• A one-page CV
• Some links to work you’ve done if applicable
• A short covering letter explaining:
  • what you want to do for Vagueware
  • how much you want to be paid for your talents (we are not looking for cheap labour, be realistic about what gives you a comfortable lifestyle!)
  • the location you want to work from and if you need an office providing
  • the hours you want to work
  • and how hiring you is the best thing I can do for you – I’ll work out for myself if it’s the best thing for Vagueware, I’m interested in your side of the story right now.

Right now, don’t go overboard on this. Go with your first draft – I want to see you writing from your gut – and the CV you have drafted to hand (you always have a CV to hand, right?).

It may be that right now, as in today, I can’t take advantage of the skills you have and I need to put your application on file (I’ll tell you when I do), but if you’re good enough you will get a call the moment I can work out how to meet your salary demands. For now then, keep it simple and if you pique my interest I’ll get back to you and ask you some more questions.

All applications will be kept in confidence, and whilst it shouldn’t need spelling out: we’re an equal opportunities employer and do not discriminate against gender, sexuality, age, ethnicity or religion.

This might all seem a very strange, hippy-esque thing to do. In some ways it is. It’s an experiment and I’m keen to hear from the people get in touch. If it doesn’t work, I’ll be very disappointed, but I’ll keep trying.

I look forward to hearing from you, and thank you for you interest in considering Vagueware as the company where you get to do your thing.

Paul Robinson