I'm pretty sure I wasn't trying to pitch anything. I just thought I'd share a (sadly) typical story, one of which happened to prompt me to write the light-on-content post to begin with.
I guess I just felt that way after reading the anecdote of developers writing their own PDF parser, and then giving up and purchasing yours. Though I'm sure it is evidence directly from your experience, it just feels a little salesman-ish to me :)
I think the article could be stronger with a few more thoughtful paragraphs on your thoughts, and maybe removing the link (though keeping the name) to your product?
That they purchased his product makes sense, because that's how he heard about it. His product acts like a funnel for such stories.
However, I agree it's a little too conveniently self-serving. Although an appealingly elegant coincidence, it's important to not only be neutral, but also to appear to be neutral.
Yeah, I'm positive there are better examples...the 'fable' I described is just a recurring theme for us, only because we're often called when things have run off the rails.
Presumably, if we thought more about why we're doing something and whether it's really advancing our position, we might not have to do five whys (or other flavours of RCA) as much.
I think I do quite well at "root objective analysis". But I was hoping to see some tips that might help me hone that skill. I really didn't see that. An anecdote about the yak shaving that brought people to your product really doesn't provide any instruction in how to effectively engage in "root objective analysis" -- other than, as some folks here have noted, to suggest the solution is "buy my product".
I think it easy to confuse activity with results-producing activity (e.g. productivity) which is why having a mentor or even personal coach (someone who is not biased) can help.
That's an interesting line if discussion, actually. What are results anyway? What is activity and what is productive activity?
Activity is a given even in the case of the body being paralyzed the mind is still active. So how do you define what meaningful or productive activity is? Results are also just another step in the activity chain, as a result will lead to yet another set of activities &c...
Firstly, death is characterized by in-activity; so you can't say that checking your friend's status on Facebook is in-active; managers would just call it irrelevant result producing activity (unless you were collaborating through FB or something).
Results are a subjective value based judgement - to the manager, writing a PDF library was a waste of time and didn't produce any usable results. To the programmer (most likely) it produced knowledge, a useful framework for honing skills, and a refinement in the ability to discern between what sounds like fun to work on and what feels like a waste of time.
Since results are based on a subjective value judgement, I could say that the author of the article engaged in yak-shaving when he wrote that article: how many articles are out there that could be linked to or paraphrased that address the same fundamental topic of efficiency and not reinventing the wheel?
However, from the author's point of view, the article was a solid result from the activity of writing and thinking; he gets to rehash a common topic in the context of his own software, thereby capturing the programming audience and feeding indirect and subtle marketing of his software as a byproduct of the article itself.
I think it is a useless personal exercise to attempt at determining whether I am yak-shaving or producing since all that really matters is that:
a) the world doesn't need anything (from humans)
b) the point of life is to enjoy whatever activity it is you are engaged in and,
> the point of life is to enjoy whatever activity it is you are engaged in
I think sometimes we get so involved in thinking about what we are not doing that we lose some enjoyment of whatever we are doing. That, and great expectations lead to great disappointment but doing something with realistic expectations but great enthusiasm can really make your day.
It generally means "apparently useless activity which, by allowing you to overcome intermediate difficulties, allows you to solve a larger problem." -- definition taken from Wiktionary (which claims the etymology comes from a Ren & Stimpy episode).
But in this case the blogger seems to be misusing it to describe needless wheel re-invention by corporate IT programmers who could either have used an open source solution or bought in the tool that the blog post advertises to solve the problem. I wouldn't use the term in such cases.
More accurate usage of the term would be finding yourself updating your entire system to support some obscure dependancy of the open source PDF library you decide to install, or spending time trying to get a software purchase authorized via your office bureaucracy.
In summary, "Be aware of what you're working on, don't shave yaks, and here is a link to buy our stuff!"