I did some consulting for a major industrial chemical company 20 years ago and one of the interesting lessons I learned was to use my waste.

Each chemical process they ran generated the desired output and some waste products. But, they thought of that waste as just another chemical compound that could be the input to another process. A big part of the business was designing and selling products that made use of waste that was being produced. For that new product, the waste had negative cost because they would have had to pay money to dispose of it.

Using waste helped me start App-o-Mat. I bought the domain as soon as the AppStore opened in 2008 because I thought it was a cool name. I didn’t do anything with it, but kept paying for it every year.

In 2013, I decided to leave my job and do consulting full-time, and I was hired to write an app using Cordova (PhoneGap). At the time, the online documentation for it was pretty bad, but I had figured it out and made my own template for projects that brought together and configured the most useful plugins I found to make Cordova apps look and act more like native ones.

But, I still thought that Cordova too hard to learn, so I made a YouTube tutorial series showing how to use my template and build a minimal blog reader app. I put it all up on App-o-Mat.

App-o-Mat has been valuable to me in two ways:

1. It has generated leads for my consulting business
2. The site itself is written in Django, which kept me sharp in Python and web development during the time I was doing iOS full-time.

But I might not have done it if I didn’t have some waste product I could use to get it started.

When I read I Will Teach You to Be Rich, I learned to concentrate on increasing income, not reducing costs. In that same book, Ramit Sethi also talks about the concept of money dials.

There are some things that you love so much that you would be willing to pay more to get a better version. You turn those dials up, and then you ruthlessly cut everywhere else.

The concept of money dials also applies to software product design. There are some things in your software which make it unique and valuable—is there a way to turn that up? Can you invest so much along those lines that it would be impossible for competitors to copy?

To afford that investment, what do you not need at all? What can you reduce to the minimum? It’s not just that it would cost less, it’s also less code and possible legacy thinking that stops you from making progress on areas where you have turned the dials up.

Layoffs are hard, but we shouldn’t try to make it easier with stack ranking because ranking is inherently one-dimensional and forces you to compare pairs of people. For layoffs, you should want to compare different multi-dimensional teams.

In programming, we know that whatever algorithm you use to sort a list, you need a function to compare two items. But sorting this way only works if comparing is transitive. This means that if a<b AND b<c then a<c. This works for numbers, but you need to be careful when you make your own comparators.

There’s no natural way to order people, so when you make one up, it’s often not transitive. The second problem is that the comparator only has the two people to compare, not any other context. That means that when you are considering the “value” difference in a pair of people you are not using the context of the team that they will be on.

Instead of sorting, consider this visual aid:

I explained this graph in Raising The Bar is a One Dimensional Concept. Each spike represents an attribute of a team member that you value. For example: coding skill, team gelling skill, writing ability, domain knowledge, code-base knowledge, mentoring—you can have as many as you want. Your team members may each excel in some, but lack skill in others. For each member, put a dot somewhere on each spike of the graph and connect it to make a polygon. By overlaying the individual graphs, you can see if you have a balanced team with diverse abilities and interests.

Here’s how I suggest you use this. Let’s say you have 10 developers and you need to lay off 20% of total salary. To decide, try evaluating each member on all the dimensions you value and create a team using your budget to pick the ones that result in the team you want.

Let’s say you start with some obvious top-performer. They have the most seniority, have mentored well, write great documentation. They are all-around a person that you want to keep. The next person to add is probably not someone similar to that. You want to end up with a good mix of junior and senior people, so the next person might be someone relatively unskilled, but perhaps with other desirable attributes.

The key is that you are thinking of that junior person in combination with the senior one, not comparing them against each other. To the extent you are comparing team members to add, you are considering which one is a better multi-dimensional addition to a multi-dimensional team, not looking at them in isolation. As you build up the team, you may notice things the team needs, and pick the next person based on that. You should try this a few different ways, with different starting points, and see if they converge.

Instead of thinking of people that you need to cut, you focus on building the best team you can afford. You should already know how to do this because this is a good way to recruit as well.

One of the most surprising things I learned in math was that complex numbers had no natural ordering. Meaning, less-than and greater-than are not defined for complex numbers. It makes sense when you think of it for a minute. The same applies to other multi-dimensional things like matrices and vectors.

So, why do we think we can rank order people? I’m specifically talking about companies that do this for their employees, but it comes up in other contexts (e.g. class rank).

Even if you were to think of people as a number, it wouldn’t be expressed as a 1-dimensional one. When I wrote about the concept of lowering/raising the bar, I said that that a bar is a 1-dimensional concept. So is rank ordering.

Just like with complex numbers, you can make up an order if you want. But then you lose information. For example, if you choose to order based on magnitude, then direction would no longer matter. Similarly, when you rank team members by, say, seniority, you lose orthogonal characteristics, like the ability to catalyze others.

The reason companies do this anyway is when they are looking to downsize. If they do need to lay someone off, it might well be the lowest ranked person, but it’s a terrible way to do this. I do have a suggestion, but I’ll get to that Monday. [EDIT: Here it is – Comparing People is Not Transitive]

Every week I get a few messages that start “I was looking at your profile and I noticed …” or something to that extent, and then they just have some generic, irrelevant pitch. They absolutely did not look at my profile. If they had, they would not have bothered contacting me. So, their very first words were a lie.

I’m open to being contacted by strangers on LinkedIn. To some extent, I am interested in how people contact others to see if I can learn. So, I should be thankful that I learned how much I hate this kind of opening, so I will never use it.