You Are Not Alone

Imagine that you live alone. I don't mean living by yourself in an apartment or house, I mean imagine you are the only person in the world. Furthermore, imagine that no other people have ever touched the world, so that you are living in a wilderness without any of the artifacts of humanity. Kind of like Brian in Hatchet, but without the hatchet. And without any clothes or any other manufactured items

Think about what you have to do to survive:

• Gather or hunt your own food and prepare it
• Protect yourself from predators and parasites
• Create protection from the environment, such as clothes and a shelter
• Care for your own injuries and illnesses

In that situation, how much could you accomplish? What could you create? What wealth could you accumulate?

The Only Human

But let's go one step further. Think about all of the knowledge you have that you learned from someone else rather than from direct experience. Now imagine that you did not know any of that. You only know the things that you have learned through you own interactions with the world. We'll be generous and say you also know things that you might reasonably have discovered on your own.

Now how much could you accomplish?

Remember, you can only work with available natural materials such as wood and stone. You can't use metal, ceramic, plastic, rubber, or cloth unless and until you can make it yourself. Remember also, we are assuming you don't have any knowledge except that which you have learned through direct experience. You are unlikely to even know that any of those materials exist or are possible, let alone know how to create them.

Would you be able to survive? Would you have any time left over to start the long process of discovering, learning about, and making any of the unavailable materials just mentioned? Compared to what you own today, and the accomplishments of your real life so far, how much could you have collected or accomplished in our imaginary situation?

Knowledge is Power

Let's ease up on the restrictions a bit and allow you to retain all of the knowledge you have. In fact, let's take it one step further and make available to you all of the collected knowledge and experience of humankind. Basically let's say you have internet access. Now you can look up anything you want, even if you have never thought about it before. You can read about and watch videos on how to make a bow and arrow, or how to knap flint to make an arrowhead, or how to make steel, or how a computer works.

Of course, reading about how to do something and actually being able to do it are not the same thing. If you want to make an arrowhead, first you'll have to find and identify some flint, then you'll have to practice, practice, practice knapping before you get a decent arrowhead. You should eventually be able to make your flint arrowhead and an arrow to attach it to, and with a lot more work you'll be able to make a functional bow. Your internet connection will provide you with many details that would take much longer to get right if you had to figure them out yourself, such as what kind of wood to use, how to fletch and nock the arrow, how to make string, how to make glue, and how to string your bow.

The knowledge you can get from your internet connection will help you much more quickly learn how to identify edible and poisonous plants, skin and cure animal hides, make fire (it's harder than you might think; rubbing two sticks together is not an effective approach), make and fire ceramic (clay), and maybe, if you are lucky enough to find some copper ore (which your internet knowledge can help you identify), create some metal tools.

There are many things you will not be able to create by yourself, even with a long and healthy life and with access to all that information. As examples, producing integrated circuits and stainless steel require far more prerequisite infrastructure than you could create in one lifetime. But having access to the distilled knowledge of millions of lifetimes of exploration and experimentation will allow you to create much more than you could if, as in our initial supposition, you had to learn everything yourself.

With all that knowledge available to you, how much could you create and accomplish in a world without other people and their creations as compared to your current life?

We've seen how much more you would likely be able to create if you had access to the knowledge of humankind via the internet. In the real world as well, we use that knowledge to help us accomplish much more than we could without it. We don't have to rely solely on what we have directly learned from our own experience. We benefit from the experiences and knowledge collected by many other people.

The Wealth of the World

What if, in addition to the knowledge humankind has collected, you also had access to the physical things humankind has created? Let's now assume that the world exists just as it does today, with all of its roads, factories, and other infrastructure, but with no other people. What could you accomplish?

The first question is, how long will all that infrastructure continue to operate without any people? How long will you continue to have electricity, water, communications, or the internet? If you were to apply your time and energy towards keeping those systems up, how much difference would it make? Probably not a lot. Those systems are too big, there are too many, and they require too much experience for your efforts as one person to make much difference. Without the continuing work of a very large number of people, all of these systems, that we rely on in the ordinary course of our lives, would likely fail relatively quickly.

If all those systems fail, what could you accomplish? You could perhaps figure out how to generate some electricity, but keeping that system running would certainly take some of your time. And you would still have to spend some time collecting and preparing food. For a while you could live off canned and preserved food that you could raid from a grocery store, but eventually you'd have to start gathering or hunting again, and that would cut into the time you have available for doing other work.

But for our imaginary scenario, let's say all of those systems continued to work. Let's even take it a step further, and stipulate that all of the factories and supply chains continue to operate. We'll even say you can order stuff online. So basically, everything works as it does in the real world, except that you don't have the ability to communicate or collaborate with any people. Now we are essentially asking, how much can you create or accomplish in the real world if you do not collaborate with anyone else or specifically ask anyone else to do some custom work for you?

People Power

This is not that much different that the way many people operate, and some people can create amazing things. One person can create a wonderful piece of art, or a fun computer program, or an elegant piece of furniture. But most of the things in the world, and all of the most complex and sophisticated things, are made by groups of people, sometimes very large groups of people, collaborating towards a common goal.

I hope that this exercise has helped you see how much all of us rely on the work of other people to accomplish what we do. In all of our lives, there are innumerable people who have helped us get to where we are and whose labors continue to contribute to our success. There is no person walking this earth who has not been helped by someone else at some point. As babies, we would have died if there were no one feeding us and caring for us. We have all learned things from teachers, friends, strangers, and, through media, from people we have never met. We have all inherited wealth from our ancestors, whether it is a personal mansion or the use of our public streets, bridges, and other infrastructure. We use knowledge from around the world and across time. We benefit from the factories and other capital created by our ancestors that provide us with better and less expensive goods. We rely on the labor of others to provide us with food, clean water, electricity, and many other things, so that we can focus on our own specialty. For large projects, we collaborate with others to get more done, and even for small projects we may solicit some piece of custom work from someone else. In all of these ways, the work of other people, both past and present, makes it possible for us to own more, do more, and produce more than we could without them.

The next time you think "I did it all myself", please remember to be grateful for all the people who helped you do it: all the people who kept you alive and cared for you as a baby or beyond, all the people who gained the knowledge of the world, all the people who helped you learn some of it, all the people who built the world around you, all the people who made things that you now have, and all the people who are still providing goods and services to you. You are not alone.

FiOS - A Cautionary Tale

I delayed signing up for Frontier FiOS because I was concerned they might screw things up. I should have been more concerned.

This is a long post. Consider it entertainment. Or just skip to the Answers.

Contents

• The Need for Speed
• My Unusual Situation
• Questions
• Research
• Ordering
• Trouble
• Mistakes
• Good Stuff
• Answers
• Frontier's Problems
• Timeline
• Selected Quotes

The Need for Speed

I have had internet connectivity for decades, starting back with modems so slow, I knew people who had to pause in their typing to let the modem catch up. I appreciated every doubling of speed as each generation of modem arrived. I was surprised when modem speeds reached 4800 and then 9600 baud - how could you get more bits per second than the 3K bandwidth of a phone line? - and I was astounded with the jump to 56K modems.

When DSL came out, I waited impatiently for it to be available in my neighborhood, and signed up as soon as I could. After years of using a 56K modem, my 740Kbps DSL line was satisfyingly fast.

I lived with 740Kbps for six years, until one day my DSL modem broke. While researching new modems, I learned that I could have my service switched from Frame Relay to ATM and bump up my speed to 3Mbps. Normally this would mean my service would be out for 10 days while they did that, but since it was already out, it seemed like a good time to make the switch. The speed bump from 740Kbps to 3Mbps was a mere 4x, far less than the 13x increase from the 56K modem to 740Kbps DSL, but still, 3Mbps was satisfyingly fast.

Verizon actually offered FiOS in my neighborhood fairly early, but I was pretty happy with my DSL service, and I wasn't doing anything that I thought needed more than 3Mbps bandwidth. I remained happy with my 3Mbps for over a decade. But technology marches on; I bought some HDTVs, started watching more YouTube, and started working from home more often using bandwidth-hungry remote desktop applications. My 3Mbps connection was not sufficient to stream HDTV movies and YouTube clips, and my remote desktop experience was annoyingly slow. I was finally feeling the bandwidth squeeze.

Still, I delayed upgrading to FiOS. I had heard that I would have to give up my copper-wire land lines, which I was not keen to do. Some years ago our power was out for over a week; batteries everywhere ran down - even the local cell towers ran out of juice after a few days, so there was no cell service in our neighborhood - but, with our copper wires, we had phone service the whole time. I liked that.

In addition, by this time Verizon had sold to Frontier, and based on my experience and anecdotes I read, I was concerned that Frontier would mess something up when dealing with my service change request, particularly since my situation was rather unusual.

My Unusual Situation

In my case, there were a number of things about my situation that gave me pause when thinking about asking for any kind of change.

1. I have a land line. This has become increasingly rare, and it seems Frontier is deprioritizing phone service so they can focus on providing internet and television service. It seems they want to provide packages that include everything, or at least include both internet and television.
2. Actually, I have two land lines. I'm not sure I know anybody else who has two land lines at home any more. I used to have three, but finally got rid of the third line after disposing of my last FAX machine years ago. Although I have two lines, they have not both shown up on my monthly bill for many years now. Oh, I am paying for two lines, it's just that the second line is not itemized anywhere. If you didn't know a-priori that I had two phone lines, you would hardly be able to tell that by looking at my phone bill. Based on conversations I have had with support and billing people at Frontier, it's not obvious to them either, although after I point it out, and with enough digging, some of them could figure it out.
3. I had a DSL line. As I mentioned, I delayed for quite some time in switching from DSL to FiOS. The longer I delayed, the fewer people had DSL lines, and the less Frontier cared about them. For this particular problem, I suppose my delaying upgrading perhaps made things worse.
4. My DSL service provider was not Frontier. This caused a fair amount of frustration any time I had a service issue with my DSL line.

My DSL service was perhaps the most unusual part of my situation. Back in 1999, when I originally ordered DSL, GTE (yes, it was that long ago!) had partnerships with Internet Service Providers who provided the actual internet service. These are known as CLECs (Competitive Local Exchange Carriers). So GTE provided the line, and my selected ISP provided the internet service. Originally I paid GTE directly for the line and I paid the ISP for the internet service. But when I switched from Frame Relay to ATM service, my billing also changed so that I paid everything to the CLEC, and they paid Verizon for the line.

Back then many of the carrier ISPs had annoying policies such as blocking some ports, so it was nice to be a customer of a smaller ISP that was more interested in making its customers happy. The downside was that, whenever there was a service problem, I had to deal with two companies, and they each tended to say it was the other company's problem.

By the time I was considering switching from DSL to FiOS this year, it had become perhaps comically bad: when I talked to support and billing people at Frontier, they were completely unaware that I had DSL service on my Frontier phone line, and even with a lot of digging, nobody I talked to at Frontier this year was ever able to find even a trace of information about my DSL line.

On the other side, my ISP had been acquired multiple times over the years, each time by a larger and more remote company, until by this year they were no longer in the DSL business and no longer in the residential ISP business. Somehow through all this, my residential DSL line kept working, but I did start to feel I was skating on ever-thinning ice.

It was time to take the plunge and upgrade.

Questions

Before ordering FiOS service, I wanted to get the answers to four questions:

1. What service options do I have?
2. What equipment will be installed and where?
3. What is the installation process?
4. How much will it cost?

How does one answer questions like these in today's world? Hit up the internet, of course.

Research

Frontier's Web Site

I started by browsing Frontier's web site looking for information about their service offerings.

NOTE: Frontier's offerings are regional, so you may see different web pages than what I describe.

Their FiOS page shows four levels of service: 50Mbps, 75Mbps, 100Mbps or 150Mbps. Since I wanted both internet and phone service, I headed over to the bundles page to see what I could get. I don't want their television service, so I unchecked the "Video" box. This shows three bundles: two that include 30Mbps internet service (30? that's not one of the speeds listed on their FiOS page!) and one that includes 50Mbps. Do they offer bundles that include internet service faster than 50Mbps? Their web site doesn't say.

Their Phone page shows me information about copper-line phone service (lower in the page it says "Our reliable copper power stays on even when the power goes out or in an emergency"), where they list two plans that differ by $3. Confusingly, this phone service - you know, POTS using analog signals on copper wires - is called "Digital Essentials." Are there any other optional add-ons? There are a fair number of features bundled with the basic phone service, and a lot more bundled with that extra $3, but is that it? Like, I currently have an unlisted phone number, what's the charge for that? Sorry, that kind of stuff is not on their web site. Ah, here on the the Digital Phone Unlimited page, it says "Optional international calling packages are available for great savings", so apparently there are other options available - but it's not a link, so I have no idea what kind of packages they might offer.

How about a second phone line, how much does that cost? Sorry, that's not on the web page. VoIP? Oh, maybe you mean FiOS Digital Voice. Beats me what the scoop is on that. If you go to Frontier's FiOS Bundles page, where it says the phone service in their bundles is Digital Phone Unlimited, and you click on the Learn More button for the phone service, it takes you to that phone page I mentioned above - you know, the one that says "Our reliable copper power stays on even when the power goes out or in an emergency." So, if I get a bundle that includes FiOS internet, does that bundle include Digital Phone Unlimited running on copper wires?

The details of the above web pages are what they look like now, in June 2017. I believe they have changed since I did my initial research a few months ago, but the gist is the same: I was unable to figure out what options were available to me by reading their web site.

Besides looking at Frontier's web pages, I did a lot of Googling and browsing of other web sites. I learned a lot in general about equipment, but it was hard to know how much of it would apply to my situation. Although I did not record the time I spent browsing Frontier's and others' web sites, I estimate it was probably about five hours.

It was time to move on to online chat to get more answers.

Online Chat

I had six online chats with Frontier, totaling about 4 1/2 hours. Between each chat I did more online research, looking for details about the equipment and the installation experience both inside and outside the house. It was difficult to get a good handle on these details, particularly since I sometimes got conflicting answers from the Frontier people I chatted with.

For example, one of my questions was whether I could keep my copper phone lines, or whether I would be required to switch my phone service to fiber. One of the people I chatted with said this:

You would have to switch to a digital phone service ! Voip. Which basically means Voice over Internet

Another one said I could keep my phone service on copper and get their "Simply FiOS" service, which is fiber with only internet service.

Ordering

Once I reached the point where I felt I had as good answers as I could get - which admittedly were not always very good - it was time to place my order.

On April 9 I called Frontier to place my order. I would say the fact that it took me well over an hour to place my order was the first hint of trouble, but in truth there were plenty of hints during the many chats I had, where I was not getting consistent answers.

Part of the reason the phone call took so long was due to my unusual situation. The DSL was not much of an issue during ordering, since it was completely invisible to them and they couldn't do anything about it. The real trouble was that second phone line. Figuring out how to deal with that took probably 45 minutes.

When I asked if I was required to switch my phone service from copper to fiber, the service rep first said no, but then went and asked someone else, came back and said yes, I would have to switch. I would have preferred to keep my phones on copper (and especially I would have preferred it given how much trouble I have had with the switch), but I was not given that option. So I placed the order to switch both of my phone lines over to fiber.

At some point I learned that each phone number at Frontier is on a separate account. This was completely invisible to me because both of my phone lines are billed on the account for my primary number, so that's the only account I see. Some of the Frontier people I talked to were able to find the separate account for the secondary line, but it always seemed to take them a while. In the end, I think that the fact that the secondary phone was actually a separate account has saved me some hassle with it: because it was on a separate account, the order to change the second phone over to fiber was done with a separate work order, scheduled for the day following the primary work order. Once the trouble started, I was able to cancel that second work order before anything was done to the second line; but the work had already started on the first line, and that has been the headache. I wonder now if there was any way I could have convinced them to just treat the internet service as a new internet-only account and so leave the phone lines and their account completely untouched.

I was pleased that my installation was scheduled very quickly, just two days later, on April 11. I should not have been. As it turned out, I did not actually get my FiOS service until April 18.

I wonder, had I known then what I know now, what I might have been able to do to avoid any of the troubles I have had.

Trouble

On the morning of April 11, I was a bit surprised that the installer did not call first to confirm I was home before coming by. When he arrived, I learned why: although he had two different phone numbers for me, somehow he had typos in both of them. These two numbers were for my two Frontier phone lines. I would have thought the computer would have just copied those numbers into the work order, but I assume now that a person manually put in those phone numbers, and somehow got them both wrong.

Unfortunately, the person who took my order scheduled my installer visit without first scheduling the preceding two steps of the installation process. As a result, when the installer came out for the April 11 appointment, he was unable to do his work, and had to leave having done nothing.

Before that first installer left, he told me he would call in the work orders to do the steps that should have been done before he got there. He might have done this right away, but when I called Frontier a little bit later that day, I was still unable to reschedule the installation because they didn't have the notes from that day's work order yet. So I had to wait and call back a couple of days later.

I was disappointed that I would have to wait longer to get my fast internet service, but that was just a mild disappointment. What was more annoying was that my DSL service went out on April 13, two days after that original installation date.

As I mentioned above, due to my unusual DSL situation, it was very difficult for me to get anyone to take any action on my DSL line. I called my ISP, and they said everything looked fine to them. I called Frontier and they couldn't help me at all; they had absolutely zero visibility into my DSL service. One tech said he would run a DSL line check on my line, but the computer wouldn't let him because it said there was no DSL service on my line.

My ISP suggested that my DSL modem may have died, and while I admit that is a possibility, the timing of the outage, plus the fact that the modem lights indicated no DSL carrier, leads me to believe that the work order to switch my copper line to fiber triggered some follow-on internal work order to turn off the DSL on that line, and because my DSL service was invisible to everyone who looked at my account, they had no way to manage that internal work order.

After a few frustrating and fruitless phone calls trying to get my DSL line fixed, I decided to forget it and hope that my new fiber internet connection would be running soon. In the meantime, I tethered my computer to my phone when I wanted to use the internet, so I did not have to suffer internet withdrawal while waiting for FiOS. Ironically, this gave me a faster connection than my 3Mbps DSL line, although I never got it working as a gateway for my entire LAN, but only used it on one computer at a time.

The first step in the installation process is for the utility locators to come out and spray lines marking the location of the existing utilities so that the people burying the fiber don't damage any existing buried utilities. Two days after the aborted initial installation appointment, on the same day my DSL service went out, various colored lines started appearing in my front yard marking the utilities. The following morning the fiber installers came out and buried the fiber cable running from the curb to my house (yay!). BUT - that afternoon, yet another utility locator came out to locate more utilities. So the fiber installers jumped the gun by installing the fiber before all of the utilities were located. Fortunately, they did not damage any of the unlocated utilities, so although they did not follow the prescribed procedure, at least no harm resulted from that mistake.

On April 18, now that the fiber was in place, the second installer came out to finish the installation. In about two hours he installed all the equipment and got the FiOS internet service working (yay!). For much of the next hour he worked over the phone with a technician trying to get the primary phone line working over fiber. After some discussion with me, they finally gave up and moved the phone line back to copper.

I was perfectly happy keeping my phone service on copper, as that's what I had originally wanted anyway. If only it had been so easy.

I learned from the installer that the second phone line was on a separate work order, to be moved from copper to fiber the next day. Given that they were unable to move the first line, and were willing to keep it on copper (I thought), I called and canceled the service call that was scheduled for the next day. I'm pretty sure doing that has saved me a lot of grief on my second phone line, as so far I have not had any problems with it, and it has continued working just fine on copper, as well as being billed properly.

On April 25, one week after the FiOS installation, I learned that my primary phone was not working properly. It may be that it stopped working a day or two sooner, but this is the day I realized it. It was broken in a strange way: I could place outgoing calls, and I could receive incoming calls from another phone number in the same exchange, such as my second phone line, but calls from outside the exchange would not go through. When I called from my mobile phone, which has a different area code, I could hear a ringback on my mobile, but my landline never rang. When I called from my wife's mobile phone, which is in the same area code but not in the same exchange, I immediately got a message saying "Your call can not be completed." I spent a couple of hours on the phone with Frontier over this.

On April 30, five days later, they finally managed to get the phone working again. We got a call at 8:15am that Sunday morning from a repair man testing to see if the line was working. Fortunately, we were already awake.

Two days later, on May 2, the phone service went out again, in the same way. Another hour on the phone with Frontier, and this time it "only" took them two days to get it fixed. So far, from then until now (mid-June), the phone service has not gone out again, so I am hopeful that they really have fixed it.

On May 8, I received my first bill from Frontier since getting my new FiOS service. It had a couple of minor errors on it, which I was able to deal with on the phone to Frontier in about 15 minutes.

On June 7, I received my second bill from Frontier since getting my new FiOS service. This one had more serious problems, and I spent closer to an hour on the phone with Frontier. The most significant problem is that, although my phone service never got switched over to fiber, which also would have included switching to a new service plan, the billing did get switched to the new plan. My old plan was $18.90/month, the new plan is $30.99/month. So I am being charged an extra $12.09 for exactly the same service that I was getting before the FiOS installation. The billing person I talked to told me she was unable to change my phone service back to the old plan because I had been grandfathered in at that old rate. I assume the computer did not provide her any way to go back to that grandfathered rate.

So here I am, two months after ordering FiOS, trying to figure out what I should do about my phone service. Try harder to get it back to the old rate? Try to get it changed to the service plan I am now being forced to pay for?

Or maybe I should just cancel it. Who has land lines these days anyway?

Mistakes

Here is a list of what I believe are the mistakes Frontier made that led to the above trouble.

• When taking my order, the service rep scheduled the equipment installation without first scheduling utility location and fiber installation
• Both of my phone numbers were entered incorrectly in the original work order
• The fiber installers buried the fiber before all of the utilities were located
• When the original installation was postponed, the order to disconnect my DSL service was not also postponed
• When the installer was unable to move the phone service to fiber, and kept it on copper, he should have canceled the rest of the service order for moving the phone service (although I suspect the computer would not have let him do that, since he had already done some of the work on it)
• When the phone went out the first time, and the repair man got it working again, he must have missed some piece of the puzzle, since it went out again two days later
• Given that the phone service never actually got switched to the new plan on fiber, the billing likewise should not have changed

Good Stuff

While I think far more has gone badly than is reasonable, not everything has gone wrong. In fairness, I list here some good things.

• The fiber installer did a very nice job burying the fiber line from the curb to the house. We could hardly see where they ran it, including through sod, and even where they had to run it under a bed of solid pachysandra, they only damaged a strip a few inches wide.
• The equipment installer cheerfully ran ethernet cable from the ONT, across the ceiling in my garage, through a wall, into my network equipment closet, and to a wall-mounted jack.
• My 100/100 internet service came up smoothly on the (second) scheduled date, and has been working well ever since. It is satisfyingly fast.
• When I run speed tests, I consistently do get 100Mbps both up and down.
• The Arris wifi router they included in the installation was actually pretty nice (although it would be better if there were some documentation available somewhere). If I were a less technically demanding customer, I would probably still be using it.
• Both installers who came to my house were friendly and competent. A few of the tech support people I talked to also seemed quite competent.
• Almost everyone I have communicated with at Frontier has been friendly and has (as far as I can tell) tried their best to help me. They always let me stay on the line asking questions as long as I wanted to; I never felt anyone was trying to get me to hang up.
• I have not had any trouble getting credits applied to my bill.

Answers

This section lists what I think are the answers to the four questions I started with. YMMV: service, equipment, processes and prices may vary across regions and over time, and depending on your situation.

What service options do I have?

Sadly, I can't give you good answers here, so you will probably have to call or chat with Frontier and experience your own frustration at getting a different answer each time.

I do, however, have a few things to point out.

One point, that was always unclear to me when researching FiOS, is that there is no technical reason you can not keep your copper-wire phone along with FiOS. The fiber line is installed completely independently of the copper wires, and the service is likewise independent. Frontier may tell you that you must switch your phone service over to fiber service (either TDM, in which the phone signal is sent over the fiber separately from the Internet signal, or VoIP, where it is sent on top of the Internet signal), but that is purely a business issue.

A possible sticking point is the way Frontier handles their accounts: if your phone service is on the same account as your FiOS internet service, they are constrained as to what the computer will let them do with that phone service. If you want to keep your copper phone lines and they are telling you you can't, perhaps you can ask to put the Internet service on a separate account. You can then ask to have both accounts billed together. But you might lose out on some bundling discounts this way.

One of the differences between POTS over copper wires and VoIP is that POTS is regulated phone service, but VoIP is not. More specifically, under the Telecommunications Act of 1996 VoIP is considered an information service rather than a communications service, the upshot being that you don't have the same level of guarantees as POTS, which is regulated as a communications service. However, IANAL, and I was unable to determine whether or how later laws may have modified this situation, or whether those regulations are still being enforced, so this may be a moot point.

What equipment will be installed and where?

Not including the fiber from the street to your house that gets buried as part of the installation process, the installer installs three pieces of equipment:

1. The ONT (Optical Network Terminal), which converts between the optical signal carried on the fiber to the electrical signals used in the house. The ONT has the following connections:
   • An optical connection that gets connected to the fiber from the street
   • Two 8P8C (RJ45) ethernet jacks for the internet connection
   • Two RJ-11 jacks for phone connections
   • A coaxial connector for the cable connection
   The ONT can be configured to provide internet service either through the 8P8C connector on a standard ethernet cable, or through the coaxial cable using MOCA.
   The ONT is typically mounted on the outside of the garage. The fiber from the street is routed first into a holding box, typically mounted behind the actual ONT, where the excess cable is wrapped in big loops to take up all the slack, then from there it enters the ONT.
2. A power supply that includes a small battery backup for the ONT. This is typically mounted inside the garage, ideally just opposite where the ONT is mounted on the outside, and near a power outlet. The installer will then drill a hole through the garage wall to feed through the power wire from the supply to the ONT, and possibly another to bring the ethernet and coaxial cables into the garage if they will be routed through the garage. By default, the battery backup provides power only for the phone lines. It can be hacked to provide power for the internet portion of the ONT, or you can just buy your own UPS and plug the ONT power supply into that (although Frontier recommends plugging the ONT power supply directly into an outlet).
3. A MOCA-capable router. In my case this was an Arris NVG468MQ, which is a reasonably nice wireless router, except that they didn't give me a manual, and I was unable to find anything of substance online. The router has the following connections:
   • A WAN ethernet port
   • Four LAN ethernet ports
   • A coax connector in case the internet signal is being supplied using MOCA
   • A four-wire RJ-11 phone jack for up to two phone lines
   If you have a good installer, they should be willing to let you decide where you want to put your router, and run ethernet cable (or coax if using MOCA) to that location, including drilling holes and installing a wall jack.

The internet signal from the ONT to the router can run either over an ethernet cable or over a coax cable. If you are getting TV service, they will have to run a coax cable for the TV service. If your internet service is slower than 100/100, it is possible to run the internet service over that same cable to the MOCA-capable router. If your internet service is 100/100 or faster, you probably want to run that over an ethernet cable; and you might someday want to upgrade to 100/100 or faster service later, so you probably should have them install that ethernet cable now anyway and have them run the internet signal through that to the router. Plus, that gives you the option of replacing their router with one of your own choice that doesn't do MOCA.

What is the installation process?

Installation of new FiOS service - not including preliminary research, placing the order, and post-installation followup to correct problems - consists of three sequential steps:

1. Locate existing utilities: one or more people come out with metal detectors that they use to locate existing utilities such as power, water, sewer, gas, phone, and cable, and paint different colored lines marking those locations so that the fiber installers don't accidentally damage the existing utilities.
2. Bury fiber from curb to house: a fiber installer puts in that last piece of fiber from the drop point (by the street near your house) to your house, typically to the garage. In the other direction, the fiber at the curb runs to a nearby junction box, where the installer connects it to an available port. At this point a signal is available at the fiber end by the house.
3. Install equipment outside and inside the house: an equipment installer installs the equipment on the outside of your house and inside your house, and connects everything up. If you have existing POTS service and are switching to FiOS phone service, the phone lines that lead into the house are disconnected from the old copper lines and connected to the output of the ONT. The installer calls the plant and works with them to bring up the services you have ordered.

How much will it cost?

Perhaps because I am a long-time customer, Frontier did not charge me any kind of installation fee, which was nice. I don't know if that is standard. One person told me the regular installation fee is $80.

For the monthly fees, it may cost significantly more than you expect.

Frontier advertises their 100/100 internet service as $60 per month. They have not yet managed to send me a clean monthly bill since my upgrade, but based on my estimate of what that monthly amount is going to be, I believe the effective cost of my 100/100 service is actually over $100 per month. Here's how that breaks down:

• The $60 rate is only if you sign a two year contract and only for the first six months. This is stated in the fine print on their web page, along with "Equip. and other fees apply." I did not sign a contract, so my monthly fee is $85.
• After Frontier told me I was required to change my phone service to a new plan, and then was unable to deliver, my old grandfathered-in rate of $18.90 disappeared and was replaced by the $30.99 rate for Digital Phone Unlimited, despite the fact that I don't actually have that service. So I am currently paying an additional $12.09 per month for exactly the same phone service that I had before ordering FiOS internet service.
• Taxes look like they will be about an additional $6 per month.

One other annoyance relating to cost: Frontier offered me a $100 gift card for signing up with them for FiOS internet. When I went to activate the gift card on their web site, I was presented with a terms and conditions screen requiring me to agree to a new 1 year term agreement. I had chosen not to sign a contract and to pay $85/month rather than $60/month, so it felt kind of like they were trying to pull a fast one on me by hoping I would activate the gift card without reading the fine print.

Frontier's Problems

• Frontier's web site does not provide very good information about what service options are available.
• If you call their Customer Service outside of their working hours, you get a message telling you they are closed, but that message does not tell you when they are open, and it's not an easy thing to find on their web site.
• Different people at Frontier will give you different answers to the same questions. For example, I asked whether I would need to upgrade my copper-wire phone service to fiber; some said yes, some said no. Or sometimes first one answer then the other. One person suggested I put my phone service on a separate account from my internet service; another told me I could not do that.
• Frontier's phone bills provide tons of details about taxes, but almost no details about regular charges. For example, I have two phone lines, and for most of the last few years they were billed as one line item labeled "Residence Line", with no indication that there were two lines.
• Frontier's computers significantly constrain what their people can see and do. Or maybe their programs are just really hard to use. The customer service reps can't see the details of service calls, and the service techs can't see the account details. It is apparently not obvious when a customer has multiple accounts being billed together. And nobody could see anything about my DSL line.

Timeline

Date	Event
2017-03-02 Th	Online chat #1 with Frontier (43 minutes)
2017-03-06 Mo	Online chat #2 with Frontier (23 minutes)
2017-03-15 We	Online chat #3 with Frontier (55 minutes)
2017-03-18 Sa	Online chat #4 with Frontier (20 minutes, then cut off)
2017-03-20 Mo	Online chat #5 with Frontier (estimated 20 minutes)
2017-03-21 Tu	Online chat #6 with Frontier (1 hour and 38 minutes)
2017-04-09 Su	Phone call with Frontier to order FiOS, service scheduled for Apr 11 (1 hour and 17 minutes)
2017-04-11 Tu	Installer came out, couldn't do anything because they have not yet buried the fiber from the curb to the house
2017-04-11 Tu	Called Frontier to reschedule installation, was told the current installer has not yet entered his notes, please call back in 24 hours (12 minutes)
2017-04-13 Th	DSL service died at about 12:30pm
2017-04-13 Th	Utility locators started painting colored lines where existing services are buried
2017-04-13 Th	Called Frontier to try to get DSL line fixed (24 minutes)
2017-04-14 Fr	Fiber installers installed the curb-to-house fiber (before all the locators had painted their lines)
2017-04-14 Fr	Another locator came out to paint lines; when I pointed out that the fiber had already been installed, he stopped painting, took his final photos, and left
2017-04-14 Fr	Called ISP to try to get DSL line fixed (12 minutes)
2017-04-14 Fr	Called Frontier (multiple times) to check on status of FiOS order (the fiber was installed this morning, but they said the order had not yet been updated to show that) (8 minutes + 13 minutes + 12 minutes + 25 minutes)
2017-04-15 Sa	Called Frontier to check on the status of my FiOS order (8 minutes)
2017-04-18 Tu	Installer came out and completed the physical installation of the equipment, got the FiOS internet service working. He was unable to get the phones working over fiber, so switched everything back to copper and left, with everything working (3 hours and 10 minutes)
2017-04-18 Tu	Called Frontier, canceled the remaining order to move the second line over to fiber (scheduled for tomorrow) (7 minutes)
2017-04-25 Tu	Our main line stopped working, was unable to be reached from outside our exchange
2017-04-25 Tu	Called Frontier to report our main phone line not working (44 minutes)
2017-04-26 We	Called Frontier to continue discussions about non-working phone (1 hour and 35 minutes)
2017-04-30 Su	Received a call from Frontier at about 8:15am this morning on the main line, he said it was now fixed (1 minute)
2017-05-01 Mo	Phone seems to have been working today, we received at least one incoming phone call
2017-05-02 Tu	Called Frontier in the morning because my main phone was not working again (39 minutes, then was cut off)
2017-05-02 Tu	My wife called Frontier mid-day about the non-working phone (15 minutes)
2017-05-02 Tu	Called Frontier in the evening to continue the call from this morning (14 minutes)
2017-05-04 Th	Frontier called, the line is working again
2017-05-08 Mo	Called Frontier to have them correct errors on my April bill (the first received since I started FiOS service) (12 minutes)
2017-06-07 We	Received second bill since switching to FiOS - still wrong
2017-06-14 We	Called Frontier to deal with problems on my May bill (48 minutes)

Total time (as of June 14): 20.3 hours

• Web research: 5 hours
• Chat: 4.3 hours
• Place order: 1.3 hours
• Installer: 3.2 hours
• Followup phone calls (through June 14): 6.5 hours

Selected Quotes

I took notes on all my phone calls with Frontier, including writing down certain things verbatim. For your entertainment, I present here some of those quotes, in no particular order. I will let you imagine the context.

• That is very confusing.
• Why can't I see that one?
• I don't know why they didn't just leave it alone.
• The program is wrong.
• How are you an R-U out of Washington?
• ... and that's what I'm not seeing.
• We don't do these very often.
• Within our system we have nine different portals where we have to test things.
• This is very new to me, I have never dealt with two lines like this.
• Sorry this is taking so long, we'll get it figured out for you.
• It's not giving me anything.

The Rule Of Law

A layman's view of The Rule of Law. IANAL.

Contents

• This I Believe
• The Importance of Law
• Prescriptive and Proscriptive Law
• Law versus Convention
• Multiple Systems of Law
• Meta Law
• Law and Software
• Law and Object-Oriented Programming
• Law and Mind

This I Believe

Some years ago NPR started running a series called This I Believe as a tribute to Edward R. Murrow and his original 1951 radio program of the same name. As I commuted I would occasionally catch an episode and hear an essay about the topic in which a contributor believed. I would listen to an essay around a weighty topic as God, Love, Funerals, Good and Evil or Public Service and think, "no", "maybe", or "yeah, sure". Then one day I heard Michael Mullane's essay on The Rule Of Law and I thought "Yes! This I believe!"

I particularly liked Michael's point that the Tinkerbell effect applies to the Rule of Law. As he says, God exists (or does not exist) whether or not you or I believe that to be so, but with the Rule of Law, it can only exist if almost all of us believe in it and follow it. As Death says to a human near the end of Terry Pratchett's Discworld book Hogfather, "YOU NEED TO BELIEVE IN THINGS THAT AREN'T TRUE. HOW ELSE CAN THEY BECOME?" (Death always talks IN CAPITAL LETTERS.)

The Importance of Law

Why is law important? The American Declaration of Independence asserts that "all men are created equal" and The Universal Declaration of Human Rights asserts that "all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights." To support that position we need a system of law that in fact treats all people equally. But even if the law does not protect all of the fundamental human rights, it can provide an important benefit to its society: stability through predictability.

To be predictable, the system of laws must be:

• Understandable - the laws can be understood by most people.
• Consistent - individual laws do not conflict with each other.
• Extensive - the laws cover all common situations and a large portion of less common situations.

There have been many successful nations that followed the Rule of Law with different laws for different classes of people, including Rome and Greece. A system of law can provide stability and a foundation for an orderly and effective society without treating all people equally.

Prescriptive and Proscriptive Law

Prescriptive laws are those that tell us what we must do, such as Honour thy father and thy mother. Proscriptive laws are those that tell us what we must not do, such as "Thou shalt not kill".

You can think of prescriptive law as additive manufacturing: you can start with nothing, and add pieces until you get something useful, like building up a sculpture by adding little pieces of clay, or 3D printing.

Proscriptive law is more like subtractive manufacturing: you start with a block of something and carve away pieces until you get the desired result, like starting with a chunk of marble and carving a sculpture out of it, or machining.

(But don't try searching for additive law or subtractive law unless you are working with primary colors. :-) )

Given the assumption of freedom in both of the Declarations above, it's easier to start by saying people can do anything, then add proscriptive laws specifying what they can't do. Compared to the complete freedom and anarchy of a society with no laws, you can get pretty far down the road to stability just with proscriptive laws. Of the Ten Commandments, eight are proscriptive and only two are prescriptive.

Law versus Convention

While the Rule of Law normally refers to the explicit and codified laws on the books, which can be enforced by the state, there is another set of rules that most of us live by which are not legally mandated. These conventions include social guidelines that prescribe how to behave and communicate, including when and how it is appropriate to touch (such as shaking hands or a pat on the back), to ask for something (with "please" and "thank you"), to offer advice ("true/kind/necessary") or apologies, and many other behaviors.

These conventions don't have the force of law. If you break these rules, you won't be sent to jail or be forced to pay someone monetary damages - but you might find that you are a little less successful and your life might be a little less pleasant. Like laws, conventions are only useful if most of us agree on them, and like laws, a widely accepted and understood set of conventions helps make the world a little bit more predictable, which in turn makes it a little bit easier for people to make plans and be successful.

In effect, social conventions are simply another layer of "laws" that sit below the constitutional laws and the statute laws (and in reality the American legal system has many other levels than just those two).

Multiple Systems of Law

I am intrigued by the fact that we have so many different implementations of the Rule of Law. Every nation on Earth that abides by the Rule of Law has its own system of law. The ways in which the laws of nations interact is as varied as the relationships between the nations. For example, American Law has specific sections dealing with the fact that there are Native American "domestic dependent nations" within its borders that have their own laws.

Similarly, every nation has a different set of social conventions, those unwritten rules that lubricate our everyday interactions.

On top of all those different systems of law, we have International Law, with the intent of providing structure for interactions between nations when those nations have different and possibly incompatible systems of laws. Two aspects of International Law that I find particularly thought-provoking are the Law of War, and Jurisdiction.

(For an interesting bit of history about Jurisdiction, read about Peine forte et dure.)

Meta Law

In order to be predictable, the laws must be stable and not change often; but the laws must sometimes be changed in order to cover new situations or to correct problems in existing laws. One approach to improving the predictability of the system of laws while still allowing for change is to use a layered approach, where some laws are considered more important than others and are thus harder to change. The set of harder-to-change laws typically includes the rules on how to change the laws. This is the basis of the constitutional model, as is used in the United States, in which the most important laws are embodied in the constitution, with rules that make those laws much harder to change than regular laws. A constitution will typically include rules on how both "normal" rules and the rules embodied in the constitution can be changed.

Back in 1982, a "constitution" game by Peter Suber called Nomic appeared in Douglas R. Hofstadter's column, "Metamagical Themas," in Scientific American. In this game, players take turns proposing changes to the rules of the game. The rules start out in two categories, "immutable" and "mutable", corresponding to the simple two-level "constitutional" and "statute" law that Americans are taught in civics classes. The rules of the game tell how a player wins the game, and also tell how the rules can be changed - including how to change the rules that tell how to win and how to change the rules. The Nomic game is intended to illustrate the mechanisms and possibilities described in Peter Suber's book The Paradox of Self-Amendment, available online. For the quickest read on the game, you can jump straight to the rules, but the game description, although somewhat lengthy, is also interesting.

In Suber's book he starts by asking how a legal system can deal with paradox, when there are laws that directly contradict each other, and he notes that "paradoxes come and go without much notice and are dealt with without much ado."

Given that systems of laws seem always to be self-referential (since they include rules about how to change the rules), attempting to craft a system of laws that is also complete and consistent would seem to run into a version of Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem. In practice, systems of laws are not really complete and still blithely violate consistency, yet manage to be quite useful despite their flaws.

Law and Software

The title of this section might refer to laws that affect software, such as copyright law, or it might refer to the use of software to assist in the application of law, such as computerized law indexes or Regulation by Software; but in fact, I am referring to the use of law as a concept in defining how software works.

As in a society, a programming language is built on a set of rules that describe how statements in the language are interpreted by the computer. The developer uses his knowledge of these rules to create a program that instructs the computer to do something that is useful to the developer.

Imagine trying to program in a computer language with no rules. How could you get anything done? You could never predict the results of a statement, so you could never make a program that produced anything predictable.

Just as different societies each have their own set of rules, different programming languages each have their own set of rules. And just as with social conventions, different groups of programmers typically adopt programming conventions that are not enforced by the compiler but are intended to make life a bit simpler for the developers in the group.

In fact, all of the concepts discussed above are applicable to software. You can consider that as we take a look at what it means to define software in terms of laws.

Law and Object-Oriented Programming

Back in 1987 Naftaly Minsky and David Rozenshtein published "A Law-Based Approach to Object-Oriented Programming" (available for purchase on-line) in which they discussed how an object-oriented system can be described in terms of the laws that control the exchange of messages between objects. (Minsky has published quite a few other papers on related topics concerning law and software.)

They start by defining objects as containing state and program, with four primitive messages (prefixed by the octothorpe character, #) to create (#new) and destroy (#kill) objects and to get (#get) and set (#mutate) state. Messages are defined as a triplet of sender, message text, and target. Message delivery goes through the law system, which can take one of three actions:

1. The message can be delivered to its target.
2. The message text and/or target can be modified and then delivered.
3. The message can be blocked and thus not delivered.

With these definitions and a permissive law that allows any object to send any message to any other object, the system does not exhibit many of the characteristics typically associated with object-oriented systems.

They then examine the effect of different kinds of laws, such as allowing primitive messages to be sent only by the same object. Through this approach they show how to implement common object-oriented features such as encapsulation, inheritance, and class variables as well as less common features such as multiple inheritance, exclusion of methods from inheritance, and triggers.

Given that the program is part of the state of the object, it can be modified with a #mutate message, so it is possible to describe self-modifying programs within this framework. The laws of the system control whether and how this message is allowed to be sent.

By defining the laws in objects that are themselves part of the system, those laws can then be changed. The system could start with a separate subset of laws that control how the laws can be changed, making this approach look very much like Suber's Constitution game.

The law system allows the laws to modify the content of a message or redirect it to a different target, allowing for the implementation of security checks and other forms of enforced delegation.

I am not aware of a production system that directly uses this style of law-based control of message passing, but there are some systems that use a conceptually similar method of applying a set of rules to some messages to control their delivery. For example, in the Java security model different environments can have different implementations of the SecurityManager, each with its own definition of the security policy (i.e. rules) that controls whether certain actions are allowed to be taken, which can be viewed as allowing the messages requesting those actions to be delivered. The OSGi security model goes further towards being a general law-based system, including the ability to specify rules via a string and to compose multiple security policies.

Law and Mind

For both societies and software, laws are rules telling us what we must and must not do, or do differently, and conventions are rules telling us what we should and should not do, or do differently. By following these rules and conventions, a society or a software system can be far more productive than one with the same underlying capabilities but where the rules and laws are less cohesive and effective or are not followed.

Could it be that the same is true for our minds? According to Marvin Minsky's theory of the mind as set forth in Society of Mind, our minds are composed of many small agents communicating with each other. Minsky's agents are very small pieces, and the communication between them is below our level of awareness. Perhaps our minds use something like Naftaly Minsky's law-based message delivery mechanism to monitor and control these low-level communications between agents.

Maybe the biggest difference between people who are productive and those who are not is in the different internal rules the two minds follow, and not so much a difference in raw underlying capability. Maybe productive people have a better set of mental rules controlling the messages within their minds. And if that is true, that leads to an interesting question: to what extent is it possible for people to rewrite their own low-level internal communication rules to improve their performance, and how might that be accomplished?

From Obvious To Agile

What do you do when obvious isn't?

Installing new fence posts

Many years ago I had a fence that needed to be repaired. I got a recommendation for a fence repair man from a friend and had him come out to take a look. He said the panels between the posts were fine and did not need to be replaced, I just needed new posts. He quoted me a price for installing new fence posts that seemed quite reasonable, and I accepted his bid.

A few days later he came back to do the job. After he had been out there working for a while, I went out to take a look. I was surprised when I saw how he had installed the new fence posts. He had not removed the old posts and put new posts in their places, as I had assumed; instead, he simply planted a new post next to each old post and strapped them together. I was flabbergasted, and complained to him that my expectation was that he was going to take out the old posts and replace them with new posts. He was nonplussed. "I told you I would install new posts," he said. "Taking out the old posts would be way more work, and I would have to charge you more."

Well, he had me: he had indeed said only that he would install new posts. I was the one who assumed he would take out the old posts. I grumbled, paid him extra to replace a few of the old posts where it was particularly troublesome to have an extra post sticking out, and had the whole fence replaced the right way a few years later.

Keep using gmail

One of the startups at which I worked used gmail and was acquired by a large company that used Exchange. Concerned about the possibility of having to move to what we felt was a worse system, we asked what would happen with email. We were relieved when they said we could keep using gmail.

On the very first day that we were officially part of the new company, we were all told that we now had Exchange email accounts. "Hey!," we said, "you told us we could keep our gmail accounts." "Yes, you can," came the response, "but you also need to have an Exchange account for all official company email."

This was, of course, not what we had expected when we asked if we could keep our gmail accounts. But, as with the new fence posts, they had in fact kept their word and let us keep our gmail accounts; it was we who assumed that that would continue to be our only email account.

Everything under SCCS

At one of the places I worked, we hired a contractor to work on a subsystem. At one point we became concerned about how he was managing his source code, so we asked how he was doing that. "Everything is under sccs," he said. (This was well before the days of git, subversion, cvs, or even rcs; at the time, sccs (Source Code Control System) was what most people in our industry were using.) When he finally delivered the source code to us, we were annoyed to discover that he simply had a directory named "sccs", and all of his source code was contained in that directory; there was in fact no versioning or history.

Once again, this was not what we had expected. When he said "sccs" we assumed he was talking about the source code control system, when in fact he was just referring to a directory name; and when he said "under" we assumed he meant "managed by", when in fact he just meant "contained in."

A new and improved version of Android

My first smart phone was an Android phone running version 2.2. I watched as the newer versions of Android came out, filled with interesting new features. Finally, an over-the-air update was available for my phone. I eagerly updated and started playing with the new features. My first disappointment was with the new and definitely not improved performance: my phone was slow and laggy, and it no longer lasted even one day on a full charge.

I was even more dismayed to discover that they had removed USB Mass Storage Mode (MSC or UMS) and replaced it with a significantly less functional alternative, MTP (Media Transfer Protocol). In my case, it was completely non-functional for my use, because my home desktop machine was running Linux, and at the time there was not a working Linux driver for MTP mode.

I was, as you might expect, pretty ticked off. I had assumed without thinking about it that they would not remove a significant feature from a new version of the software, but they never said that.

Alternate Interpretations

Ask yourself: when reading the above anecdotes, did you realize in advance of the denouement what the problem would be for all of them? If it had been you, would you have made the same assumptions as I did?

Sometimes something seems so obvious to us that it does not even cross our minds that there might be an alternate interpretation.

I don't think it is possible for us to see these alternative interpretations in every case; often it is something with which we have had no experience, so could not be expected to know. We do, of course, sometimes consider alternative interpretations. In the future, if someone tells me they will install new fence posts, I will be sure to ask for more details. But we have to make assumptions as we deal with the world every day. If we examined every statement and every experience for alternative interpretations, that would consume all of our time, and we would not have any time left to pursue new thoughts. We learn to make instant and unconscious judgment calls: as long as what we hear and see has a high enough probability of an unambiguous interpretation, the possibility that there is an alternate interpretation does not bubble up to our conscious minds. Overall this is a very effective strategy that lets us focus our mental energies on situations where an unusual outcome is more likely. But this does mean that every once in a while we will miss something, with undesired results.

Going beyond obvious

I have already given my recommendation to State The Obvious. However, as you can see from the above anecdotes, this is not always enough. But what else can we do?

If you consider the anecdotes above, you might notice that, in most of them, by the time I realized that I had made an incorrect assumption, the deed was done and I was stuck with an undesired result. But the fence post story was a little different: in that case, I checked up on the work before it was done. Because I discovered the problem while it was happening, I was able to ask for changes and get a result that was closer to what I wanted.

Software Development

Not all of my blog posts are about software development, but in this case the application is obvious. Well, it seems obvious to me, but just in case it is not obvious to everyone, I will follow my own advice and explain in detail.

In the traditional waterfall process, a complete and detailed specification of the desired system is created before doing any of the implementation work. Once that spec is done, the system is built to match it. But, as we have seen from the anecdotes above, even a very simple spec, such as "install new fence posts", might be interpreted in a bizarre way that still matches the letter of the specification. In this case, the result might be something that arguably matches what was specified, but is not what was wanted.

Based on my personal experience and anecdotes I have heard from others, I believe that it is very difficult to write a good spec for something new, and impossible to write a spec that can not be interpreted by somebody in some bizarre way that satisfies the spec but is not the desired result.

Given that we can't guarantee that we can write a spec that will not be misinterpreted, what is the alternative? I think the only alternative is to do what I did in the fence-post case: check up on the work and make corrections along the way. This is embodied in a couple of the value statements in The Agile Manifesto: "Customer collaboration over contract negotiation" and "Responding to change over following a plan".

If you are asking someone to create something that is very similar to things that have been created before, and through previous common experience there is already a shared vocabulary sufficient to describe how the desired result compares to those previous creations, then you can perhaps write a spec that will get you what you want. The closer the new thing is to those previously created things, the easier that will be. But in software development, where the goal is often specifically to create something novel, this is particularly difficult. In that situation, I think that creating and then relying solely on a detailed spec is less likely to result in a satisfactory outcome; I believe an agreement on direction and major points, followed by keeping a close eye on progress, paying particular attention when something is being done for the first time, is the key to good results.

Writing a Spec

I'm not saying don't write a spec. I'm saying you need to recognize that a spec won't take you all the way, and a poorly written spec can hinder your progress. Writing a spec is like looking at a map and planning your route: often necessary but seldom sufficient. You need to be prepared for construction closures, blocking accidents, or even additional interesting sights you might decide to see along the way. For any of these diversions, you will need to reexamine your route in the middle of the trip and select an alternative. For a short trip, you might not run into any such problems and thus not need to modify your route, but the longer the journey the more likely that at some point you will need or want to deviate from your original route.

If you are familiar with the roads and have a clear destination, you might be able to dispense with the initial route planning completely: just head in the right direction and follow the signs. Or if you are on a discovery road trip and don't have a specific destination, then heading out without a planned route is fine. In most cases, though, some level of advance route planning will save time. You just need to stay agile and be prepared to change your route along the way.

Levels of Expertise

An attempt to improve the objectivity of skill self-ratings.

Contents

• Discussion
• Scale
• References

Discussion

We are often asked to rate things on a scale, typically 1 to 5 or 1 to 10. Rarely is there an attempt to define what those different numbers mean. From a statistician's point of view, this makes the values useful for the sole purpose of comparing a single individual's ratings against other ratings of that individual. In particular, without a good definition of what the various levels mean, I don't see how there can be any effective communication from one person to another of the meaning of such a rating.

When my doctor asks me to tell him how much something hurts on a scale of 1 to 10, I have no idea what information he expects to get when I say "3" or "7".

I once asked an acquaintance to rate, on a scale of 1 (bad) to 10 (good), a movie he had just seen. He said it was a 9. I was suspicious of this answer, so I asked him how he would rate Star Wars, which I knew to be his all-time favorite movie, on the same 1-to-10 scale. He said 12.

I personally consider it an aspect of innumeracy, but people often try to emphasize something by using numbers that are outside of the valid range. We may chuckle when Nigel says he likes his amp better because it goes to 11, but how often have you heard someone talking in all seriousness about putting in a "110% effort"? What does that actually mean? How would you know if someone were putting in 110% versus 100%? If 110% is a valid number, then presumably so is 120%, so anyone suggesting a mere 110% is clearly not asking for enough effort.

People tend to overestimate how good they are at all sorts of things, including cognitive, social and physical skills. If we all overrate ourselves by the same amount, I suppose that could all cancel out and you could still compare people's ratings - but without knowing a priori what their ratings should be, we don't know how much they might be overrating themselves.

When people consider their own expertise, it is common for those with less expertise to overvalue themselves more than people with more expertise. With more expertise comes more awareness of what one could do better. Einstein said, "As our circle of knowledge expands, so does the circumference of darkness surrounding it." Relative beginners easily fall into the Sophomore Illusion of thinking they know a lot because the circumference of their knowledge is not yet large enough for them to recognize the size of the surrounding darkness.

In 1989, psychologist John Hayes at Carnegie Mellon University identified what is now called the "ten-year rule" (although there are earlier commenters, including Herbert Simon, who was also at CMU). As Leonard Mlodinow says in "The Drunkard's Walk", "Experts often speak of the 'ten-year rule,' meaning that it takes at least a decade of hard work, patience and striving to become highly successful in most endeavors." (links mine) The ten-year rule is related to the idea that it takes about 10,000 hours of practice at something to become an expert; with 5 hours of practice per business day and 200 business days per year, it would take ten years to rack up that many hours. If you find yourself thinking how wonderfully expert you are in something that you have practiced for only a few years, perhaps you should consider the ten-year rule and temper your evaluation.

Given that people are so bad at these ratings, it seems to me that the only way to get any useful information from someone when asking this kind of self-rating question is to have an objective definition of what each level means.

One way to think about a scale is by how many people fall into each level. There are currently 7 billion people in the world, or almost 10 to the 10th power. This conveniently maps to a logarithmic scale from 0 to 10, allowing us to define eleven levels starting with level 0 containing all approximately 10 billion people in the world and with each higher level having one tenth the number of people as the level just below it. If the descriptions of a level are hard to interpret, perhaps the size of that level will help give an indication of whether a person should be rated there.

Years ago, during a job interview, I was asked to rate my level of expertise in various subjects, such as programming languages and development tools. This was not an unusual question, I had been asked this question before and have been asked it since. What was different that time was that the interviewer included a scale with some relatively objective descriptions for determining level of expertise. I rather liked the scale, so although I don't recall the exact definition of his levels, I have tried to reproduce that concept here, using descriptions somewhat similar to those given by that interviewer. Unfortunately, I don't remember who introduced that scale to me, so I am unable to give credit.

There are many reasons one might want a scale of expertise, including rating potential employees or creating a summary of the amount of expertise within a company. The scale I present here is intended to be very general; given its logarithmic nature that can include the entire world population, it is capable of allowing comparison of expertise across everyone in the world. You might think that would make it suboptimal for rating (potential) employee expertise, but I think there are enough levels to make it useful for that purpose.

Scale

The scale below includes the following columns:

• Level: a number for the level, from 0 to 10, with 10 being the highest level of expertise.
• Name: a name for the level. These are taken from a set of expertise level names proposed by the Traveling School of Life. My use of them probably doesn't quite match their intent, but I liked the names and thought the ten words matched my levels pretty well, so I applied them to my levels and added "ignorant" for level 0.
• Description: a brief description of the level. The descriptions are worded as if for a technical tool; for application to other areas or concepts, modify accordingly. Comments referring to companies assume a large company (10,000+ people) with large divisions (1000+ people); being a company-wide guru in a company with 100 people might not get you past level 6.
• Size: the approximate number of people expected to be at that level worldwide. As mentioned above, this is a simple logarithmic scale. The number of people in a level is 10^10-L where L is the level number.
• Practice: the approximate amount of practice that could be required to reach that level of expertise. Putting in that many hours does not guarantee reaching that level, and reaching that level does not necessarily require putting in that many hours. The conversion factors are 1,000 hours per year or 5 hours per day.

All of these different factors are rough estimates, not intended as absolutes but merely as guidelines to help people rank themselves in a way that allows for more meaningful results. I don't have any research to show how well my guesses about Description, Size and Practice correlate; if anyone knows of something along those lines, that would be interesting.

Level	Name	Description	Size	Practice
0	ignorant	I have never heard of it.	10,000,000,000	none
1	interested	I have heard a little about it, but don't know much.	1,000,000,000	1 hour
2	pursuing	I have read an article or two about it and understand the basics of what it is, but nothing in depth.	100,000,000	1 day (5 hours)
3	beginner	I have read an in-depth article, primer, or how-to book, and/or have played with it a bit.	10,000,000	1 week (25 hours)
4	apprentice	I have used it for at least a few months and have successfully completed a small project using it.	1,000,000	3 months (250 hours)
5	intermediate	I have used it for a year or more on a daily or regular basis, and am comfortable using it in moderately complex projects.	100,000	1 year (1,000 hours)
6	advanced	I have been using it for many years, know all of the basic aspects, and am comfortable using it as a key element in complex projects. People in my group come to me with their questions.	10,000	5 years (5,000 hours)
7	accomplished	I am a local expert, with ten or more years of solid experience. People in my division come to me with their questions.	1,000	10 years (10,000 hours)
8	master	I am a company-wide guru with twenty or more years of experience; people from other divisions come to me with their questions.	100	20 years (20,000 hours)
9	grandmaster	I am a recognized international authority on it.	10	30 years (30,000 hours)
10	great-grandmaster	I created it, and am the number 1 expert in the world.	1	50 years (50,000 hours)

References

Other scales of expertise:

• Ted Neward describes four levels in his post of August 16: Apprentice, Journeyman, Master, Adept.
• The Dreyfus model of skill acquisition: Novice, (Advanced) Beginner, Competent, Proficient, Expert.
• Paul Schempp's take on Dreyfus's five levels, with "Capable" rather than "Advanced Beginner".
• The Four Stages of Competence of Thomas Gordon: Unconscious Incompetence, Conscious Incompetence, Conscious Competence, Unconscious Competence. And how they might apply to programming.

Other articles:

• Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years, by Peter Norvig, 2001.
• From Novice to Expert: Harnessing the Stages of Expertise Development in the Online World, by Douglas A Kranach, in the 2009 ASCUE Proceedings.
• A College Student's Guide to Computers in Education, by Dave Moursund; Chapter 3, "Expertise and Problem Solving", page 25, with a discussion of expertise as related to hours of study and practice.
• An 2006 excerpt from Jonah Lehrer on the importance of practice for Mozart and Tiger Woods.

Sledgehammer Words

Words are tools that we use to clarify our concepts, express our emotions and persuade others to our positions. We use those tools to craft mental models which we deliver to our listener. The better the job we do with those tools, the more effectively we can communicate our message.

The words we use every day are our basic tools. Like screwdrivers and pliers, these words are simple but versatile, performing adequately for most tasks. Occasionally we might want to use a more esoteric word for a specific task, as we might pull out a pair of bent needle nose pliers when that tool is just right for the job.

The better your selection of tools, the better job you can do at making a beautiful and effective work. In a pinch you can use a slot-head screwdriver to set a Phillips screw, but you stand a higher chance of damaging the screw head and it is more difficult to set it just right. Similarly but more subtly, you may be able to use a Phillips screwdriver to set a Frearson screw, but you will be able to do a better job if you have a Frearson driver. Most of us will probably not need this level of distinction and can get by with just a Phillips, or indeed perhaps with just a slot-head driver, but if you want to be able to craft the best results over the widest range of projects, having that Frearson screwdriver in your toolbox will provide one more area in which you can do things better.

Swear words are the sledgehammers of our verbal toolbox. Like a sledgehammer, a swear word can pack a lot of punch, and like a sledgehammer it lacks precision. Sometimes a sledgehammer is the right tool for the job: when you need to smash a hole in something, one good whack with a sledgehammer can be far more effective than trying to use pliers and screwdrivers to do the same thing.

But for most of us, most of the time, that's not the job we are trying to do. Most of the time we are more interested in making a neat hole, and we should pull out the electric drill, or the hole saw, or even the Sawzall to do the job; or we just need to tap in a small nail, where a standard hammer would work nicely. If we smash it with a sledgehammer, it's likely that we will then need to spend a lot of time cleaning things up afterwards, which would probably be more work than using one of the other tools in the first place.

Some people seem to have a very small toolbox and are constantly swinging around that sledgehammer. They use it for almost everything; rather than pulling out a screwdriver to set a screw, they whack it with their sledgehammer. To me, everything these people say seems like a pile of smashed rubble. I doubt that's really the message they want to deliver.

Even a single use of a sledgehammer word can derail any kind of nuance or subtlety, and casual use will likely overwhelm everything else in the message.

So go ahead and use a sledgehammer when it is appropriate, but do so deliberately and fully conscious of your intended result. Make an effort to add a good assortment of tools to your toolbox, understand what you are trying to accomplish, learn to use the best tool for the job and use it well.

Fun With Feedback

When I was in high school I participated in an interesting exercise to demonstrate the importance of feedback. You might want to try this out as a party game. It is easy to laugh at others when they do poorly at this seemingly simple exercise, but it is in fact a rather difficult task.

Get a set of children's building blocks, such as a set of hardwood unit blocks, with a variety of shapes and sizes. From the original set of blocks, create two identical sets. Each set should have at least ten blocks in it with at least four different shapes. More variety is better. Having blocks within each set that are similar but not identical, such as two different kinds of triangles, makes it more difficult. Given these two identical sets, anything you can build with one set can be built with the other set.

Arrange two desks or tables, with their chairs, for two people such that there is a level work space in front of each person in which that person can build, and each person can hear the other, but neither can see the other person or the other blocks. On each of the two work spaces, place one of the two sets of blocks you created above. The two work spaces should be as close to identical as is practical to ensure that any structure built on one work space can be built on the other work space. One possible arrangement is to place a large vertical separator in the middle of a table such that it separates the two ends of the table, then have each person sit on an opposite end of the table facing each other. The separator must be large enough to prevent the two people from seeing each other (and stable enough not to fall over). This allows onlookers to stand on the sides of the table and easily see both of the builders and constructions.

Select two test subjects and sit them down in front of their respective work spaces and blocks. Designate one as the master and the other as the apprentice (or one as the speaker and the other as the listener, if you prefer). The master builds a structure with his blocks (any structure of his choice containing a least a designated minimum number of blocks), and instructs the apprentice as to how to build exactly the same structure. The apprentice is not allowed to ask questions or provide any other kind of feedback to the master. The apprentice must build the same structure as the master based solely on the verbal description given by the master. The master, in turn, must provide his verbal description of his structure without any knowledge of what the apprentice is doing.

It turns out that this is surprisingly difficult to do well. In most cases, the apprentice's construction will diverge from the master's construction after only a few blocks, and by the time the master is placing his tenth block and describing it to the apprentice, the apprentice is completely lost and unable to place the block in any location remotely resembling the master's description. At some point along the way, the apprentice becomes aware that something is wrong, but can't do anything about it - and the master, blithely unaware of the apprentice's difficulty, inexorably continues to build and describe something that the apprentice no longer understands. An alert master may be able to tell from the reactions of the viewers that the apprentice is having a problem, but without any feedback will not be able to know quite what the problem is, so will be unable to correct it and will have to forge on.

I watched a number of other pairs who attempted this exercise fail to build structures of any significant size, and I was determined to do a better job. When it was my turn to be master, I very carefully described each block I selected, how I oriented it, and how I placed it next to other previously placed blocks. I was describing everything at an excruciating level of detail, far more than I would in normal circumstances. And, as I learned at the end of my turn, for a while this was working quite well, and my apprentice was able to construct significantly more than had anyone else.

But there was a snag: at one point I selected a small triangular block, which happened to be a right equilateral triangle. When placing it, I instructed my apprentice to orient the triangle by pointing the corner which was a right angle in a certain direction. Unfortunately, math was not a strong point for my apprentice, and for a while she was unable to recall what a right angle was. As a consequence, she did not understand what I meant concerning the orientation of the block, but because I was unaware of her problem and continued my building and describing, she had to guess about how to place the block, and she guessed wrong. Of course, errors cascaded from there because further steps which relied on the placement of that block could not be done properly.

Had she been able to ask me a couple of simple questions, I could easily and quickly have clarified for her what I meant. Without any feedback at all, the failure to understand one small detail meant the game was over.

You can try the same exercise, but this time let the apprentice ask questions. It is amazing how much difference it makes. Without feedback, almost nobody can succeed on this task, and when they do it requires an extraordinary amount of redundancy in the master's descriptions. With verbal feedback, most people can do quite a good job, and much faster than without feedback, since the master has the liberty to be much sloppier in his initial description, confident in the knowledge that the apprentice will ask for more details on any part he does not understand. With visual feedback, virtually every apprentice can quite speedily reproduce the master's design. The speed and accuracy of communication improves dramatically as the feedback bandwidth increases.

I highly recommend this exercise for teaching the value of precise communication (especially when there is no or little feedback available), the power of a high-bandwidth feedback channel (especially when there is any complexity involved) and the recognition that some tasks are far harder than they appear (especially when you have not directly attempted the task yourself).