Week 1: Projects, emails and VMs

My first week with the Italian Digital Team

After 10 years abroad and 6 years in California, I had my first week here in Rome working with Diego Piacentini on the Italian Digital Team.

You know about the Italian Digital Team, right? Well, the idea is similar to the USDS one: a startup within the Government to bring a fresh air of new ideas, innovation, and improve our Government wherever we can. Except we are talking about Italy, not the United States.

So, how did my first week go? It was exciting. But it was also strange. And most often, it was both exciting and strange at the same time.

Where was it exciting? I think Diego put together an incredible team. People from all sorts of backgrounds from different parts of the world and the economy. All with a great and strong bag of experiences. All that decided to leave whatever life they were living before with the dream of contributing all they learned back to our country.

It was also exciting to learn about the projects: the problems to fix, the things we could do, and the impact we could have on so many people.

And most problems are not hard to solve. Well, at least not in the typical way a computer scientist would describe hard problems: it’s unlikely we will need to come up with any new algorithm, no NP hard problems or combinatorial explosions, no memory/CPU/latency constraints that require the last drop of juice in terms of performance, no incredible needs in terms of scalability or reliability, no need to keep an infrastructure that has to serve million of users per second running, and generally not much new to invent. And if the team gets to those problems a few years down the road, I’ll be really proud: it’ll mean we managed to achieve something truly amazing.

But… back to reality: how was this all very strange?

Well, I could go on for a while. But the first impression is that all the problems I have seen so far are very solvable. From a purely technical standpoint, the technologies and methods to quickly address them exist and are well known. The hard part seems to find ways to break the existing balances in a giant and complex machine that works by an intrigue of its own rules. To get it to carefully start tipping over and quickly gain speed rolling toward a direction of innovation and improvement. Ideally, faster than technology evolves: otherwise we are doomed to never catch up, and remain stuck in the past.

It is a craft we’ll have to get better at. It’s a new set of rules we’ll need to play by. It’s certainly something very few can claim to have tried at this scale, and not something anyone can claim experience with.

And of course, there’s a few more earthly and practical experiences that one way or another felt strange to me. Mind me: the use of “strange” here is intentional. I certainly don’t mean “wrong”, and certainly don’t mean offence to anyone. By strange, I just mean “different from what I am used to”.

Need VMs or resources? We first need to figure out how to buy them. Can I just use my credit card and expense them? Nope. Well, at least not that easily. Maybe we’ll need a tender? Yes, if you have PLENTY of time. Maybe we can find some other administration willing to sell us resources? Or maybe we can rely on a tender that was assigned a few months ago. But there is paperwork to fill. A ton of it. It’s not as simple as going on a web site, or running your favorite tool to bring up more. For scale: 2 weeks have gone by, we tried very very hard, and we still only have test or donated resources, nothing we can use in production. For something that in a startup or technologically oriented company would take mere minutes.

And maybe we can talk about emails. Over the years, I had to learn the hard way that the probability of anyone reading past the first two lines of any email is pretty much NONE. Well, unless you manage to catch their attention on those two lines of real estate.

So, very short emails, down to the point, clear questions trying to get a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer, or at least clearly outlining the direction and what you think. So you can immediately take action. Move forward. Desires and intentions expressed clearly. Explicitly. Trying to avoid any doubt or ambiguity. Calling out problems, people, and directions by first and last name.

With the clear goal of exchanging as few emails as necessary and avoiding meetings. And if a meeting is necessary, keep it to 30 mins, focus on the controversial points, no more, no less. And move forward. Without waiting. With the understanding that often a fast but risky decision is better than no decision. Or a rough decision might still be good enough to achieve your goal. And waiting for more data or the perfect decision, you know, may strictly be worse. We can still improve later, right? There is no shame in admitting a mistake, and if we keep making our software better, we can always change our mind and direction as we move forward.

At the end of the day it might be the difference between achieving something — getting something done — and sitting still waiting for someone else to tell you what to do. Time and inactivity always have a cost, even if just in terms of missed opportunities, of lessons we could have learned by going with the simple and immediate solution first.

But for the last week, short emails have only been an exception. Formality, complex rounds of words to get to a point that you often can only guess through a thread of emails are the norm. Is this because of our role? Or is this for plausible deniability? To avoid the risk of blame? Cultural politeness? Or fear of what will happen based on the answers? Who knows. Dante certainly put the “Ignavi” just before the gates of hell in “The Divine Comedy”.

I suspect I have already been labeled “the bad guy” (as in good cop/bad cop), for asking pointed questions with very little sugar around them. Or asking questions directly to people in various threads. Like ‘Stefano: can you tell me why? or how? …’.

I apologize in advance, but I’ll keep doing this. At least for as long as I can hold on to it (and mind me: I have already switched gear).

I suspect I will write more about what I learned here. But it’s already a long post and as they say, ignorance is often bliss. So keep on with your life, and wish us luck.