Business talk

Many people working in large companies speak business-buzzwords as a second language. Business language is full of pretty meaningless words. I Don’t Understand What Anyone Is Saying Anymore article tells that the language of internet business models has made the problem even worse. There are several strains of this epidemic: We have forgotten how to use the real names of real things, acronymitis, and Meaningless Expressions (like “Our goal is to exceed the customer’s expectation”). This would all be funny if it weren’t true. Observe it, deconstruct it, and appreciate just how ridiculous most business conversation has become.

Check out this brilliant Web Economy Bullshit Generator page. It generates random bullshit text based on the often used words in business language. And most of the material it generates look something you would expect from IT executives and their speechwriters (those are randomly generated with Web Economy Bullshit Generator):

“scale viral web services”
“integrate holistic mindshare”
“transform back-end solutions”
“incentivize revolutionary portals”
“synergize out-of-the-box platforms”
“enhance world-class schemas”
“aggregate revolutionary paradigms”
“enable cross-media relationships”

How to talk like a CIO article tries to tell how do CIOs talk, and what do they talk about, and why they do it like they do it. It sometimes makes sense to analyze the speaking and comportment styles of the people who’ve already climbed the corporate ladder if you want to do the same.

The Most Annoying, Pretentious And Useless Business Jargon article tells that the stupid business talk is longer solely the province of consultants, investors and business-school types, this annoying gobbledygook has mesmerized the rank and file around the globe. The next time you feel the need to reach out, touch base, shift a paradigm, leverage a best practice or join a tiger team, by all means do it. Just don’t say you’re doing it. If you have to ask why, chances are you’ve fallen under the poisonous spell of business jargon. Jargon masks real meaning. The Most Annoying, Pretentious And Useless Business Jargon article has a cache of expressions to assiduously avoid (if you look out you will see those used way too many times in business documents and press releases).

Is Innovation the Most Abused Word In Business? article tells that most of what is called innovation today is mere distraction, according to a paper by economist Robert Gordon. Innovation is the most abused word in tech. The iPad is about as innovative as the toaster. You can still read books without an iPad, and you can still toast bread without a toaster. True innovation radically alters the way we interact with the world. But in tech, every little thing is called “innovative.” If you were to believe business grads then “innovation” includes their “ideas” along the lines of “a website like *only better*” or “that thing which everyone is already doing but which I think is my neat new idea” Whether or not the word “innovation” has become the most abused word in the business context, that remains to be seen. “Innovation” itself has already been abused by the patent trolls.

Using stories to catch ‘smart-talk’ article tells that smart-talk is information without understanding, theory without practice – ‘all mouth and no trousers’, as the old aphorism puts it. It’s all too common amongst would-be ‘experts’ – and likewise amongst ‘rising stars’ in management and elsewhere. He looks the part; he knows all the right buzzwords; he can quote chapter-and-verse from all the best-known pundits and practitioners. But is it all just empty ‘smart-talk’? Even if unintentional on their part, people who indulge in smart-talk can be genuinely dangerous. They’ll seem plausible enough at first, but in reality they’ll often know just enough to get everyone into real trouble, but not enough to get out of it again. Smart-talk is the bane of most business – and probably of most communities too. So what can we do to catch it?

2,579 Comments

  1. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Have a Plan A, and Plan B – just don’t go down with the ship
    Paranoia and obsessiveness will keep you afloat
    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/10/30/disaster_recovery_thats_not_a_disaster/

    When planning for disaster recovery, our natural inclination is to focus on the technical design. We work to strike the perfect balance between controlling infrastructure spend and the required capacity.

    Technical considerations are of course paramount – replication schedules based on delta changes and available bandwidth, the impact of synchronous versus asynchronous writes, calculations of recovery time and recovery point objectives – all to ensure that the required data and systems are available at the secondary site.

    This is of course the primary purpose of the disaster recovery solution, and nobody would argue that the technical implementation isn’t paramount.

    It’s easy to get caught up in these finer technical details, though, and overlook some fundamental pitfalls that could turn your recovery into a bigger disaster than any problem your system was supposed to cope with.

    Let’s examine some of these scenarios and consider how you can mitigate against them.
    Man down

    This is a morbid scenario to open up with, but the possibility is very real. More often than not, you’ll be forced to switch to a disaster recovery site

    There is always the possibility that the disaster you’re recovering could be a real killer

    What happens if your sysadmins were in the building at the time of the disaster? What happens if they were hauling ass to the data centre together to put out the fire, and were in a car wreck en route? What happens if they were on the plane that left your data centre as a big smoking wreckage?

    If your sysadmin team is large then having two or three of them incapacitated might not be the end of the world, but there’s always the chance you might find yourself with all of your sysadmins unavailable to implement the disaster recovery plan. So what happens then?

    It helps to have nominated seconds within your organisation.

    Document everything

    It goes without saying, but the best disaster recovery system in the world could be rendered somewhat pointless without proper documentation to support it, particularly if you’re relying on one of the aforementioned deputised sysadmins to save the day.

    It may sound like a stereotype, but IT folk are notorious for not documenting their processes well. Whether it’s down to innocent absent-mindedness or a cynical desire to protect their own position through knowledge-siloing, there will be very few among us who could honestly say they literally couldn’t document any better.

    You need to document every step of switching from your primary to secondary site, in the most excruciating detail. It sounds obvious (and tedious) but this cannot be overstated.

    You need to consider: what steps do you take to access the disaster recovery site? How can you check that all data and services have been replicated before you allow customers access? What method do you use to bring databases back online at the secondary site?

    Test and test again

    The chap in question wouldn’t be offended if I said he was one of those stereotypically poor documenters, yet his Oracle disaster recovery plan was meticulous and surgically precise – in addition to being a welcome relief in a time of crisis – so why was that single piece of Oracle documentation so good?

    Because, it was rigorously tested, and the same should be true of your disaster recovery system (and of course, its associated documentation).

    Remember to treat any disaster recovery trial as a test of the documentation and the plan as much as the system, and try to have someone who didn’t write the plan perform the test; this is the perfect opportunity to test out your deputised sysadmins, and ensure the process works no matter who is at the helm on the day.

    You, your team, and the business stakeholders will all sleep better at night as a result.

    Reply
  2. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Josh Dzieza / The Verge:
    With rating systems, companies like Uber and TaskRabbit turn customers into ruthless middle managers

    The rating game
    How Uber and its peers turned us into horrible bosses
    http://www.theverge.com/2015/10/28/9625968/rating-system-on-demand-economy-uber-olive-garden

    Rating systems have turned customers into unwitting and sometimes unwittingly ruthless middle managers

    “Customers expect Ritz Carlton service at McDonald’s prices.”

    It’s a strange amount of power for customers to hold

    “You’re in a state of neurotic anxious terror of making the tiniest slip up.”

    Several drivers said the best way to behave is like a servant

    ‘I won’t let them bring alcohol in my car and you’re firing me?’

    In rating systems, the customer is literally always right

    Rating systems are too efficient a model not to spread

    Reply
  3. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Tech Pros’ Struggle For Work-Life Balance Continues
    http://it.slashdot.org/story/15/11/11/2118246/tech-pros-struggle-for-work-life-balance-continues?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Slashdot%2Fslashdot%2Fto+%28%28Title%29Slashdot+%28rdf%29%29

    Work-life balance among technology professionals is very much in the news following a much-discussed New York Times article about workday conditions at Amazon. That piece painted a picture of a harsh workplace where employees literally cried at their desks.

    Tech Pros’ Quest for Work-Life Balance
    http://insights.dice.com/2015/11/11/tech-pros-quest-for-work-life-balance/

    Reply
  4. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Hackathons: Don’t try them if you don’t like risks
    Rules and tools to get the most out of your pizza-replete staff
    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/11/12/hackathon_risks/

    When organisations grind to a halt, weighed down by their own bureaucracy, inertia and politics, they flail about for something to give a short, sharp shock to their vitals. Something to get them moving again.

    The techniques used to get things humming along again have varied over the years – a rogue’s gallery of specious business trends and fads. Twenty years ago, it might have been role playing. Ten years ago, an offsite with those cringeworthy trust-building games.

    Today, we turn to hackathons.

    Until quite recently, hackathons were the exclusive preserve of the tech startup community, thriving on the 48-hours-locked-in-a-room-together intensity followed by the near-orgasmic release of a great pitch. Suddenly, both big business and big government, in a collective penny-drop moment, have adopted the hackathon methodology to inspire employees and capture innovative ideas.

    That should be making us suspicious. The purpose of a hackathon is to create a space so unconstrained by conventional wisdom as to be truly disruptive. Owing nothing to anyone, participants can be free to ‘think different’.

    That’s the theory, anyway – but I doubt anything would be more terrifying to a big organisation.

    Big bureaucracies – whether corporate or government – are at odds with hackathons, so they try to have it both ways: they stack the deck of the hackathon, then complain if they don’t get the promised results.

    One: You can establish the questions – but not the answers

    The most common defensive strategy in any hackathon is an attempt to control outcomes. That’s often done by framing the questions so narrowly only one answer is possible, or by limiting the terms of discussion, or limiting the range of proposed solutions.

    Two: Conflict resolution skills are key

    One recent hackathon saw one team split by an irreconcilable impasse. Half the group wanted to go in one direction, half in another – but they were only given one pitch. Their solution? Clumsily glue the two pitches together, doing a disservice to both.

    Three: Meta-moderation

    Every hackathon needs a meta-moderator whose sole purpose is to keep each team of hackathoners moving smoothly toward their goal. Meta-moderators check in regularly with each team, observing group dynamics, and stepping in with tweaks as needed, using their own conflict resolution skills to keep the teams coherent, focused, and productive – while passing those skills along to the team.
    They’re the ultimate arbiters, and use their powers to help each team achieve the best possible outcome.

    Four: Expect mixed results

    Hackathons will never produce uniformly excellent results. The mixture of personalities and ideas and organisation is too variable to provide any guarantee of success. Instead, every hackathon will likely produce a few standouts, a few good efforts, and a few disappointments. That’s as it should be: even the most disappointing pitches will teach you something you didn’t know before.

    Five: Don’t expect anything to stick

    Throwing a group of individuals into a crucible may produce an excellent pitch, but everything after that is left to the organisation supporting those individuals.

    Reply
  5. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Five Bad Marketing Habits to Stop in 2016
    http://www.eetimes.com/author.asp?section_id=36&doc_id=1328225&

    Do NOT keep positioning your company or product, as if it can do everything. It can’t, and you will lose the battle on Google and with your competition if you do this. Position for growth by differentiating and say NO to distractions that are not aligned to this position so you can focus and GROW in the areas where you are differentiated.

    Do not invest in any new marketing activities until your website is fully functioning. It must be designed for mobile use and have a user-friendly content management system that makes uploading new content easy. Engineers like graphics and images, so use them.

    Do not create any new content until you have a plan along the entire marketing and sales funnel that includes optimizing (for keywords your audience searches on), amplifying (for greater reach), and repurposing each piece (for full leverage of your investment).

    Do not keep spinning your wheels on repetitive marketing tasks and missing valuable intelligence gathering that come with implementing marketing automation.

    Do not invest in marketing without a clear picture of your expected ROI, timeframe, and process and tools to measure, tweak, and improve. As the saying goes, if you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there.

    Reply
  6. Tomi Engdahl says:

    New York Times:
    LivingSocial’s growth-at-all-costs strategy serves as a lesson for today’s unicorns as the firm struggles to retain staff and pivots away from daily deals

    LivingSocial Offers a Cautionary Tale to Today’s Unicorns
    http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/22/technology/livingsocial-once-a-unicorn-is-losing-its-magic.html?_r=0

    The first thing you see when walking into the headquarters of LivingSocial is row upon row of mostly empty desks, broken up by small street signs that employees once needed to find one another when the office teemed with people.

    The technology industry’s boom over the last few years has been defined by the rise of “unicorns,” the private companies that investors have valued at $1 billion or more. Before the term came into vogue, LivingSocial was among the biggest unicorns of its day. It now offers a glimpse of what some of today’s unicorns might look like several years down the road if things go awry.

    Today, LivingSocial is more unicorpse than unicorn. The company never filed for an initial public offering and consumer fervor for daily deals has cooled.

    LivingSocial is now struggling to evolve its business by focusing on “new experiences,” such as a coupon-free program that puts cash back on customers’ credit cards when they dine at certain restaurants. The company is grappling with employee retention. It has also been selling nearly all of the foreign companies it bought and closing offices it opened during its boom days.

    “It’s hard to change a business at scale overnight,”

    LivingSocial may soon have more company. There are now 142 unicorns that are together valued at around $500 billion, according to the research firm CB Insights. Some of those highly valued start-ups are starting to show some cracks.

    Snapchat, the messaging company, and Dropbox, the online storage business, were recently marked down in value by mutual fund investors. Zenefits, a human resources start-up, has said it missed sales targets and that it is slowing its hiring. On Wednesday, the payments company Square, which was valued at $6 billion by private investors last year, priced its public offering at $2.9 billion. Silicon Valley venture capitalists such as Bill Gurley of Benchmark and Michael Moritz of Sequoia Capital have warned that a unicorn shakeout is coming.

    But even as it spent big, the underlying business was not sound. Amazon’s recent financial filings show that in 2011, LivingSocial generated $238 million in revenue — but lost $499 million.

    Groupon, which was also unprofitable, went public in November 2011 and promptly faced investor skepticism about its sustainability. The suspicions were contagious, infecting LivingSocial and halting its chances of going public.

    LivingSocial’s investors now say it is easy to see that the growth-at-all-costs strategy created a downward spiral of overhiring and overexpansion. No one paid much attention to how the company would ultimately make money.

    There is other evidence that the daily deals fad is passing. Amazon recently shut down its own daily deals business. And Rich Williams, the new chief of Groupon, said in a blog post on Thursday that the company was “misunderstood” and that it was a myth that Groupon was an email daily deals company.

    Reply
  7. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Marissa Mayer explained how ‘Larry and Sergey dollars’ created a black market for hiring at Google
    http://uk.businessinsider.com/marissa-mayer-on-how-larry-and-sergey-dollars-created-a-black-market-for-hiring-at-google-2015-11?r=US&IR=T

    Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer offered some insights into how Google kept its scale from going overboard in the early days — and it involved currency and a black market.

    things changed once Eric Schmidt joined the team. He shot down Google’s plan to double its size from 200 people to 400 at the time, convinced they couldn’t “keep [their] quality and culture at [their] high bar” by doing so.

    “He made the decision to only let the company hire 50 people in total for the whole year (down by 4x) and enforced this using these things called ‘Larry and Sergey dollars,’” Mayer explained.

    That’s right, Schmidt created physical, laminated currency that were used as a hiring tool.

    “Eric literally had laminated bills printed out and when you hired someone you would have to hand in a Larry and Sergey dollar along with their paperwork,” Mayer went on to say. “There became this huge black market for Larry and Sergey dollars which actually made things more efficient.”

    “As painful as it was, it made us much more thoughtful on how we scaled in the early days on prioritizing which was the most important people to add,” she said. “Hypergrowth is fun but you have to be careful.”

    Reply
  8. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Cecilia Kang / New York Times:
    Startups including Hello Alfred, Magic Leap, and Zenefits are increasing lobbying in Washington to create good will and minimize potential regulatory issues

    Start-Up Leaders Embrace Lobbying as Part of the Job
    http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/23/technology/start-up-leaders-embrace-lobbying-as-part-of-the-job.html

    WASHINGTON — Last year, the personal butler service Hello Alfred won a top prize in Silicon Valley created for promising new technology start-ups, putting the company on a path toward millions of dollars in investment.

    This year, the start-up has received attention of a different sort, for being at the center of a national debate about the rights of the workers hired through its service and others like it.

    Unlike start-ups of years past, though, Hello Alfred has not shied from the political stage. Its leaders have appeared on numerous policy panels and have written op-eds. They have been invited to a White House summit event on the future of labor. And Marcela Sapone, the company’s chief executive, has made two trips to Capitol Hill to urge lawmakers, research organizations and the political press to rethink labor laws for the digital age.

    Reply
  9. Tomi Engdahl says:

    6 proven strategies for evaluating and prioritizing IT projects
    http://www.cio.com/article/3007575/project-management/6-proven-strategies-for-evaluating-and-prioritizing-it-projects.html

    Within most large organizations – as well as smaller businesses – time and resources are in short supply yet high demand, making project selection more difficult. Evaluating and prioritizing projects can be complex, but this vital first step can negatively impact the business if not assessed carefully.

    1. Become involved in strategic level planning

    The first step for a program, portfolio or project manager is to become involved in strategic level planning. Sit down with the leadership team to gain a full understanding of the direction of the business, the timing, and their overall vision; there is no such thing as too much detail here.

    2. Identify project drivers

    Talk with management to identify which of the following drivers are motivating each proposed project.

    Competitive advantage
    Cost savings/financial benefit
    Operational efficiency/process improvement
    Legislative/legal/ tax implications
    Improving quality
    Risk reduction
    Growth/ business opportunities

    3. Quantify strategic value

    Ask management to discuss the various projects they are considering to determine the impact and desired project outcomes. This will help to better understand and quantify the strategic value, immediate and/or long-term impact as well as anticipated benefits of each project being considered. The risks of not starting certain projects on schedule will also have to be weighed carefully.

    4. Determine factors that may impact project success

    Additional factors that should carefully be considered are the return on investment (ROI), budgeted funds, available resources, and timing, and if there are any dependencies or limitations (among other factors). Company budgets and timing are almost always limited, making it impossible to take on all project ideas conceived.

    5. Create an evaluation and prioritization matrix

    Once you have gathered all the applicable information from management and other sources, create a project evaluation and prioritization matrix to identify and rate each project in terms of criteria.

    6. Close the loop

    After projects have been carefully weighted and prioritized, before initiating any of the projects sit down again with management and review the project evaluation and prioritization matrix, and any other findings, to ensure expectations are clear with all parties involved. This allows management an additional opportunity for added input, and to confirm if they are in agreement with your findings.

    Reply
  10. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Leadership hibernation

    A November Sote-match and getting showed a very clear way what happens when you take a lead. The results created a tight schedule!

    Prime Minister Sipilä considered whether good or bad leadership, it is a matter of taste. Also, the final results may be questionable, but I can not be without considering all the things to be accomplished if the Finnish company in the world would be a similar leadership posture movement.

    Too often overlooked by lead firms. Everyday life being overwhelmed by a tidal wave on the way, and imagined that securing the smooth running of everyday life is good management. Decisions are made only painful things that rubs your everyday life like a stone in the shoe. Sink into the leadership to hibernate.

    However, the management of everyday life can be found in the smooth running of their own officers, managers. Managers role is to ensure the company is led towards the vision and, of course, to do it profitably. The strategy is not written in books and covers a five-year plan, but at best it is agile and flexible, about 200 strategic decision making in everyday life, annually.

    Even the fact that the stop in the middle of tsunamis and focus on leadership, great things can be achieved. Yet there is only of leadership at zero, because the stagnation of leadership begins to lift the level of the journey.

    Vision must be clear and marks a step towards the vision clear. Rima is kept high at all times: aim big and important steps, but at the same time it is accepted that all the objectives may not be achieved during 120 days. The most important thing is that the measures have been initiated and the train is proceeding full steam. Where is achieved miracles.

    Critical management is the ability to communicate a vision and a step marks a clear, since strategic decisions are made in different sizes, in different levels of the organization, every day.

    Genuine leadership also requires bold decisions and the ability to react to changes quickly. It requires a management system and sometimes even organizational re-design.

    Source: http://www.tivi.fi/Kumppanit/Sofigate/johtajuuden-talvihorros-6064947

    Reply
  11. Tomi Engdahl says:

    One limiting factor is the senior management of organizations.

    - Rainmaker study, good, profitable new ideas to recognize people not on the basis of personality progression as managers. CEOs typically are able to keep the plates spinning and organization greased, but for some reason they do not have the ability to imagine a world that does not yet exist; it is not part of the typical CEO’s strengths.

    Strengths can always be improved.
    - See more at: https://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_c?depth=1&hl=fi&ie=UTF8&prev=_t&rurl=translate.google.fi&sl=fi&tl=en&u=http://www.aaltopro.fi/blog/tehokkaasti-luova-ymmartaa-yritysstrategian-pelisaannot&usg=ALkJrhiugmBbnAeGNrPxlCw2_ZZRWKQK3w#sthash.8BqEsSLZ.dpuf

    Reply
  12. Tomi Engdahl says:

    The hidden pitfalls of going freelance in IT
    http://www.infoworld.com/article/3007722/it-careers/the-hidden-pitfalls-of-going-freelance-in-it.html

    Independence has its upsides and downsides. IT pros lend firsthand advice on the challenges of going solo

    The life of an independent IT contractor sounds attractive enough: the freedom to choose clients, the freedom to set your schedule, and the freedom to set your pay rate while banging out code on the beach.
    windows 10 laptop
    Review: The best 13-inch laptops for Windows 10

    Laptops and convertibles from Acer, Asus, Dell, HP, Lenovo, and Microsoft square off in our
    Read Now

    But all of this freedom comes at a cost. Sure, heady times for some skill sets may make IT freelancing a seller’s market, but striking out on your own comes with hurdles. The more you’re aware of the challenges and what you need to do to address them, the better your chance of success as an IT freelancer.

    Selling yourself from afar

    You can’t get a gig without the client signing off, and often getting key stakeholders to accept you as a valued partner can be challenging — especially when the work is remote.

    “In order for a project to be successful, the client has to buy into you and the vision for the project,” says Nick Brattoli, founder and lead consultant at Byrdttoli Enterprise Consulting.

    “This is exacerbated in the IT world, because more often than not, you are going to be working remotely,”

    In addition, at many companies the tech-savvy people running a project will know what needs to be done to meet the desired outcomes. “But once that’s all figured out, it is very hard to convince the people above them to go through with it,” Brattoli says. “Where technology is concerned, people who are less tech-savvy are going to be wary of any new changes to infrastructure.”

    To get around these challenges, Brattoli recommends onsite travel to help generate buy-in; proposing various solutions of varying costs for a project; and constant communications after getting initial buy-in to manage expectations as much as possible.

    Navigating non-negotiable agreements

    Most companies have standard agreements in place to protect confidentiality and restrict competition. Such forms are usually non-negotiable, even for full-time employees

    “A freelancer will usually have no leverage to negotiate the restrictive covenants, or the scope of confidentiality,” Jaskiewicz says. This creates several risks, he says. For one, a signed form might prevent a freelancer from being able to make good on future job opportunities or require the freelancer to give ownership of a work product to the employer, without commensurate compensation for what the freelancer gives up.

    Furthermore, such restrictions can accumulate rapidly over a career, making it hard to keep track of what you can or can’t do when presented with future job opportunities.

    “The freelancer must keep careful records — and constantly update one’s own knowledge — of the restrictions to which he or she is subject,” Jaskiewicz says.

    The alternative is to pay a lawyer to check each new job against all prior agreements, which is an economically unrealistic proposition for most freelancers.

    A practical alternative (on the confidentiality side, at least) is to request the “standard” exceptions to confidentiality, Jaskiewicz says. These include prior knowledge, public knowledge, independent development without use of confidential information, receipt of information from a third party not bound by confidentiality with the disclosing party, and compelled disclosure (that is, in response to a subpoena or deposition).

    Dealing with anti-IT sentiments

    Many people “just don’t get or trust IT,” says Marc Weaver, an IT
 consultant who recently formed his own company to provide cloud
 database solutions.

    Even within IT departments there can be issues with your presence as a freelancer.

    “When a consultant is placed in a team of permanent employees, there is sometimes some resentment toward the consultant, as they are usually earning more,” Weaver says.

    This mistrust is even more pronounced when you want to change the way things are done — even if it’s part of your contract.

    “People immediately start panicking,” Weaver says. “They would rather have the painfully slow manual process that needs intervention on a daily basis than one that runs automatically and rarely breaks.”

    Riding out harsh realities and drumming up new business

    Providing IT expertise, as with other types of freelancing, can be feast or famine. “At the first scent of an economic downturn, projects get canceled or postponed and IT consultants are either let go or not hired,” Weaver says.

    Keeping up with technology changes

    As anyone in IT knows, technology and how it’s used are constantly shifting. Freelancers especially are challenged when it comes to staying current with the ever-changing technology landscape.

    “The resources available to a freelancer may not be sufficient to get trained on new technology, nor put that training into practice in a business environment to engrain the skills,”

    Reconciling agile development with fixed-bid contracts

    Many companies have adopted agile development methodologies to iterate their projects faster in hopes of gaining a competitive edge.

    “This has been a boon for software developers — both for full-time and freelancers,” says Damien Filiatrault, CEO and founder of Scalable Path, a network of more than 1,000 freelance developers. “Demand is high, supply is tight, and projects are numerous.”

    But for freelancers, there remains a major disconnect between traditional fixed-bid contracting and agile software development projects, Filiatrault says. “Lots of time needs to be spent up front specifying functionality and scope before work even begins on a fixed-bid project,” he says.

    Working in agile, where the client’s objectives evolve over time, is hamstrung by the fixed-bid contract.

    Coping with communications gaps

    Even within the same company, IT and non-IT people often don’t communicate well with each other. This can be an issue for freelancers as they try to stay in sync with clients.

    “It is very true that engineers and non-engineers speak pretty much different languages,” Akhtar says. “The way an engineer looks at a problem and how a nontechnical person may look at a problem is very different.”

    Managing your time

    While time management is a challenge that applies to almost any profession, IT freelancers are in a unique position because they might be called in to address issues when they least expect it — throwing schedules into turmoil.

    “Once you start to grow your business, time management becomes pivotal,” Brattoli says. “In order to grow, you need to manage your full-time job, your current freelancing projects, growing your business, training, and your personal life.”

    Those working solo especially need to use their time wisely.

    “A lot of tasks in the IT world involve doing a couple things, waiting a while, then doing some more things,” Brattoli says. “Rather than browsing the Internet without purpose every time you get these blocks of time, do some studying, read some blogs. Train yourself. On those days where you have nothing to do, bid on some jobs online, expand your LinkedIn network, plan out your dinner. Using your time wisely can alleviate a lot of stress.”

    Reply
  13. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Bringing discipline to development, without causing pain
    What happens when young developers meet old business
    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/12/01/discipline_pain_devlopment_and_git/

    There’s that question you’ve always wanted to ask in an interview when the dialogue has gone really well and you know you’re about to get offered the job, but you don’t want it anyway.

    Interviewer: “Great, so do you have any questions that you would like to ask me?” Candidate: “Well, if I’m traveling in a car at the speed of light and I turn the headlights on, does anything happen?” Interviewer: “Gosh, I’m not sure.” Candidate: “Okay thanks, you can keep your job in that case.”

    The point is that the workforce is starting to dictate the way it wants to work on its own terms. From the undeniable rise of millennials and their preferred methods for hot desking and so on, to the ‘phenomenon’ of Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) and all the infrastructural changes it has necessitated… the users, increasingly, get to call the shots.

    Systems of meritocracy rule

    What this means in practice is a new set of defining principles upon which the software application developer builds his or her system faith. Systems of meritocracy that hinge around the community contribution model of open source are blowing old school thinking out of the water. Seniority and company rank comes from what you have achieved and what value you have added, not from who you know and where you went to school.

    Stung by GitSwarm, in a good way

    Looking at contemporary approaches in this space, Perforce’s work to partner with GitLab as a web-based Git repository manager and produce the GitSwarm ecosystem is a case in point. Perforce’s Helix is said to give developers the pure Git-based workflow they love, while making projects ‘easy-to-manage’. A team’s work is automatically synchronised to the Helix mainline repository as GitSwarm provides a platform for code reviews, comments and tracking issues.

    Technical breakdown

    Let’s break this down technically to examine the root of the issue. In doing so we may well find that the bridge between freedom and control tells us more about the shape of enterprise software application development than we first thought.

    We can say with some certainty that developers like using Git as a repository manager. They like it because they are attracted to its distributed workflow capabilities, which allow them to frequently switch ‘contexts’ and development code streams. They like this lightweight approach to local branching because it allows them to progress different application elements independently, but still, in unison with (and close proximity to) the main code base in development.

    So far then, what’s not to like? We’ve got control, flexibility, and management in a lightweight wrapper that says ‘user friendly’ right there up on the front.

    Who cares? DevOps can fix it, right?

    You might be wondering at this point, why does all this matter anyway?

    We live in a world of DevOps where, even if we end up with large binary assets outside the repository or divided among multiple repositories, we can still coalesce and unify these elements through DevOps magic for builds, testing and onward to releases. Opponents of Distributed Version Control Systems (DVCS) would argue that this is a Band Aid over a bigger problem and that keeping all the assets in one single store is a more prudent method overall.

    The truth is (and don’t shout it out too loud), that source code is often a tiny drop in the binary bucket compared to documents, images, models, audio, video, even entire virtual-machine (VM) environments for the sake of testing and deployment.

    Where do we go from here?

    Unfortunately there are more challenges ahead. If we get past some basic resolution on our approach to cloning and branch management, then have we provisioned for disaster recovery and high availability in the longer term? If we’re going back to the individual developer level (remember where this argument first started?) then the answer is probably going to be no, isn’t it? But we’re here to discuss the technical bridging challenge between developer freedom and enterprise requirements, so disaster recovery and availability does have to be tabled.

    Should the development shop employ standby Virtual Machines (VMs) as a means of mirroring changes between file systems so that storage can be swopped out as needed to provide that disaster recovery backbone? The individual developer doesn’t care so much, so the enterprise had better make sure that it does. What about dashboard controls for higher level project management? What about authentication and security concerns. We haven’t even gone there yet.

    The realities we can surmise from this discussion are that developers left in the wild will obviously work differently to the way they will work inside more regimented enterprise development shop systems.

    Reply
  14. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Three ways of Innovation:
    New
    Saving money
    Maintaining existing

    Transparency brings lots of good

    Data brings changes to busines

    Sales: From devices to selling of results
    CMR: Supplier understands customer business better than customer itself
    Sales: From selling products to partner
    Marketing: Segmenting
    R&D: From quessing to knowing
    R&D: Software business clock frequency

    Most valuable companies look like this:

    Asset builders: build, develop and lease physical assets to make, distribute and sell physical things
    Service providers: hire employees who provide services to customer or produce billable hours
    Technology creators: develop and sell intellectual property such as software, analytics, pharmaceuticals, and biotechnology
    Network orchestors: create network of peers which the participants interact and share in the value creation; sell products or services, build relationships, share advice, give reviews, collaborate, co-create and more

    New innovation is HARD:
    1. Customer forecasting
    2. Market timing
    3. How to make accurate ROI and other calculations
    4. Often start looks small
    5. New offer cannibalizes the current busines
    6. (Too) many have opinion
    7. Getting things forward quickly
    8. HR and other processes do not support
    9. It is stressful to be unsure
    10…

    “Predication is very difficult, especially if it’s about the future.” –Niels Bohr

    Right kinf of enviroment:
    1. Dedicated, committed and all-around team
    2. Autonomity to make decisions
    3. Leadership through visions and not by details
    4. Funding – make it venture and not project
    5. 3-5 years time frame
    6. Small steps and quickly
    7. Culture that supports experimenting
    8. Patience
    9…

    Best approach from three schools:
    Lean Startup
    Agile Development
    Design Thinking

    Get out of the building
    Find a problem worth solving
    Build measure learn, buld measure learn, build measure learn

    It is not reality until it is shared

    Source: http://ties.fi/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/Tuomas_Syrj%C3%A4nen_ECT-Forum-20151008.pdf

    Reply
  15. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Scoping out your résumé
    http://www.edn.com/electronics-blogs/benchtalk/4441004/Scoping-out-your-r-sum-?_mc=NL_EDN_EDT_pcbdesigncenter_20151214&cid=NL_EDN_EDT_pcbdesigncenter_20151214&elq=44347227743c45eba368726bfcf91d10&elqCampaignId=26136&elqaid=29891&elqat=1&elqTrackId=d641ed24708948dc86ee04e3d8295d64

    Unless you’ve always worked for yourself, you’ve likely written a résumé. The longer you’ve been around, the more versions you have.

    There are countless books out there that tell you how to write one, how to interview, and how to talk and dress, so it’s about time I got in on the act.

    What should be in your résumé? The word “résumé”? Not in mine, but if you want it in yours, please spell it correctly. There’s a major online job site that doesn’t, believe it or not. I title mine with just my name.

    Don’t waste space putting in a full address or myriad contact details. A phone number and email address suffice, along with a city/state/province, if you like.

    The first real item in my résumé is what I label “Profile”. I added this a couple of years ago, and it serves as a mini-cover letter. It’s a few lines long and gives a “big picture” overview of what I’m about. Give it a try. Show it to someone. If that person doesn’t laugh, leave it in.

    Next up is a point-form list I’ve labelled “Areas of Expertise.” There are 15 points quickly summarizing technologies and industries in which I’m quite an expert, or at least a semi-expert. You can deposit some keywords here

    We finally get to the jobs section (presented in reverse order, of course). A few revisions ago, I retitled mine “Industry Experience.” I think it sounds more professional, no?

    Next comes education. This section should shrink over the years. Ten years into your career, no one really cares about schooling.

    Next, I have a “Memberships/Qualifications” section, where I list things like my ham license and a few societies to which I belong. The jury is out on whether to include a section for “Other Interests”.

    Most sources recommend you keep your résumé to two pages, and I tend to agree. Lopping off your earliest jobs is preferable to covering your pages with 8pt type.

    Try to make the overall look of your pages inviting.

    I’ve seen résumés on those small “business card” CDs and (in one case) on a tiny PIC board that plugs into a USB port and “types” out the text into an open editor window!

    If you hate those “touchy-feely” questions as much as I do (e.g., “What is your worst quality? Your proudest achievement? How would you deal with ____?”), you could try being honest, and just say you’re no good answering those kinds of questions, but then continue to tell them what soft skills you are good at. Hopefully, that will make a stronger impression than attempting to stumble through some pat answers.

    Reply
  16. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Strange job interview questions from Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Intel, Cisco
    http://www.cablinginstall.com/articles/2015/11/strange-questions-blog.html?cmpid=EnlCIMCablingNewsDecember142015&eid=289644432&bid=1255259

    17 bizarre job interview questions Facebook, Google and other top companies have asked candidates
    Top companies love to throw the type of question that you simply can’t revise for to candidates to test their mental agility
    http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/17-bizarre-job-interview-questions-facebook-google-and-other-top-companies-have-asked-a6745161.html

    Reply
  17. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Wall Street Journal:
    Under Jeff Bezos, the Washington Post is focusing on what made Amazon successful: customer service, a long-term vision

    Bezos Takes Hands-On Role at Washington Post
    Amazon founder increasingly is making his mark, with a focus on customer experience
    http://www.wsj.com/article_email/bezos-takes-hands-on-role-at-washington-post-1450658089-lMyQjAxMTE1NTI4MTYyNTE3Wj

    When Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos received an email from a reader complaining about the time it took for the mobile app to load, he immediately fired off a note to the newspaper’s chief information officer. The message was simple: fix it.

    “We looked at the problem and I told Jeff I thought we could improve the load time to maybe two seconds. He wrote back and said, ‘It needs to be milliseconds,’” said Shailesh Prakash, who heads the Post’s technology team as chief information officer. “He has become our ultimate beta tester.”

    Mr. Bezos helped solve the problem by suggesting loading low-resolution images onto the app first, allowing the page to load on readers’ screens more quickly.

    In the more than two years since Mr. Bezos bought the Post from the Graham family for $250 million, the billionaire Amazon.com Inc. founder has increasingly made his mark on how the paper is run. His focus on customer experience has become a near mandate within the news operation.

    “Jeff has told us repeatedly that we have a long runway, but we are trying to make prudent business decisions,” Publisher Fred Ryan said. “We are looking at the long term and not just for quick and temporary gains.”

    Mr. Bezos has been willing to invest in the paper’s transformation, although executives say they aren’t working with a blank check.

    “He does not get involved in the journalism except to encourage us to hire the best journalists that we can,” Mr. Ryan said. “He has really focused on the technology and customer side, which has been one of the hallmarks of Amazon. Our engineers have an open line to him and he has made his expertise available to us anytime.”

    Reply
  18. Tomi Engdahl says:

    How do we remove the future urgency working life?

    I ran into a good day as always at a conference. I asked the news. He replied:

    “Oh, rush is. One flight. These peak years. Barely remember what I did yesterday. What to you? ”

    I mumbled something similar. The debate was so normal that it is difficult to imagine a different kind

    Work and rush are many synonymous. Work need to be fast-paced and do have to be a little too much. It forces to enhance and prioritize. The body has learned to miss the stress hormones, such as adrenaline and cortisol secretion. Work must feel like work, or else it will not have a job. Efforts requires a physical response, even if it is knowledge work.

    We are experiencing urgency given circumstance, we are not a result of poorly organized human cooperation. We believe that the global market economy must be subordinate to run more and louder, and when the pace will fade, the Chinese are robots and algorithms Americans willing to do the work more cheaply. When we hear the latest worm national figures, we do not leave the possibility of the use of self-flagellation.

    Hurry is a macro problem that individual solutions are being sought. So treat the symptoms of the disease without improving.

    Hurry has reached a point where speed is an intrinsic value that no longer produce the desired result. So that things would happen de facto faster. Hasty preparation of the matter is repeated the hectic pace of decision, followed by a busy executive. There will be mess up spiral, where the volume of work is increasing due to frequent corrective moves. The outcome of the work is pressed taxi backseat emergency crap that goes through the customer only shown Cheek-level of self-confidence charlatanism.

    “When did you last time you were at work in a situation where you got together to try to learn, play and informally, to test something new without someone already had one foot in the air running to the next place or a meeting? What about when you got the first place in peace to do what is actual primary source of income? ”

    Busy people often affects the most advanced. He desired to meet and job’ll. However, the weak immune makes busy signals, which is shown for renewing needs. Busy does not have time to try alternative paths.

    Urgency ultimate reason is not necessarily success, but, for example poor contribution work, bureaucracy and poor organization matters.

    What do we do when we are busy?

    drone clubs paraphrase: busy is interested in everything, but does not care about anything.

    The system does not support the unhurried life. Therefore, it is encouraging to see that about two-thirds of Finnish supports the basic income of the Social Insurance Institution to a recent study.

    While waiting for a better system of an individual may engage in radicalism in their own lives. One just retired, and a long working life the person worked in management positions reported that his career really take off until the point when he decided to make only 60 per cent of the expected things from him. The revolution begins when you learn how to say sincerely: “I have no sense of urgency.”

    Source: http://paulikomonen.com/2015/12/22/miten-poistamme-kiireen-tulevaisuuden-tyoelamasta/

    Reply
  19. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Work-life balance: flexible working can make you ill, experts say
    http://www.theguardian.com/money/2016/jan/02/work-life-balance-flexible-working-can-make-you-ill-experts-say

    Practices such as working from home could do more harm than good, research finds, as many employees never ‘switch off’

    Flexible working practices can do more harm than good to workers because they encourage an “always on” culture that can have a heavy psychological toll, experts have warned.

    Working away from the office or part-time can isolate employees from social networks and career opportunities while fostering a “grazing” instinct that keeps dangerous stress hormones at persistently high levels, they said.

    “If you keep picking at work, worrying about it, your systems never really go down to baseline so you don’t recover properly,” said Kinman. “You might sleep, but you don’t sleep properly, the effectiveness of your immune system reduces.

    “There are [also] studies that suggest people want a quick way to relax, which is when they tend to drink alcohol and might turn to comfort food.” Time for personal hobbies, exercise and healthy cooking and eating are squeezed out by work, too.

    Reply
  20. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Hacks rebel after bosses secretly install motion sensors under desks
    Well done, thanks for giving PHBs everywhere a great idea for 2016
    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/01/12/bosses_install_motion_sensors/

    Staff at one of Britain’s oldest national newspapers got a shock on Monday morning when they found monitoring sensors installed under their desks.

    The boxes, sold by OccupEye as a way to monitor how long staff are at their desks without relying “on coffee cups and coats on chairs,” were installed in the offices of The Daily Telegraph. Staff weren’t told anything about the installation and soon kicked up a storm of protest.

    The devices were installed under the desks of journalism, advertising, and other commercial departments. There’s no word if HR got them too.

    In response, some staff removed the batteries from the devices, while others called their colleagues in rival press organizations to leak the news. In the wave of this public backlash, management said the boxes were there to monitor building heating systems and agreed to remove them.

    OccupEye sells itself as a company that can give building managers a good idea how long their desk space is being used. The sensor boxes contain motion and temperature sensors that link back wirelessly to central network points and let HR know who is, or isn’t, at their desks.

    The firm extols the virtues of hot desking as a money-saving tip for companies. Hot desking eliminates personal desks and just sets up a central pool of furniture that people use on a first-come, first-serve basis.

    While beloved of accountants, hot desks are usually very unpopular with staff, who face the breakup of team structures and an extra layer of uncertainty when coming in to work in the morning.

    But the OccupEye system is just one of an increasing number of staff monitoring systems that companies are introducing in the name of efficiency. These are all totally legal, so long as employees are informed.

    Take, for example, Boston startup Sociometric Solutions, which builds personnel smartbadges that come equipped with sensors to track an employee’s movements and location and a microphone for checking how long they talk to fellow workers.

    HR departments who institute these types of monitoring products are going to have to be increasingly careful about how they are used, or risk losing more money than they save

    How it works
    http://www.occupeye.com/how-it-works/

    A fully-deployed OccupEye installation would typically comprise a large number of wireless utilisation sensors (transmitters) linked to small number of network receivers, the system controlled and monitored via data logging and analytical reporting software. For example, an office block with 3 floors might deploy 100 sensors per floor and 3 receivers (1 per floor).

    Sensors are most commonly mounted under desks or on a ceiling or wall using hook & loop pads, for easy fixing and removal. Receivers are networked and deliver utilisation logs to a standard PC acting as a data logging server, from where the information is automatically transmitted to the OccupEye analytical software (usually in the cloud). Authorised users can access the secure OccupEye analytics dashboard through a web browser to view a variety of flexible space utilisation reports.

    Reply
  21. Tomi Engdahl says:

    4 reasons Fitbit is being sued for inaccurate heart-rate monitors
    http://www.edn.com/electronics-blogs/sensor-ee-perception/4441200/4-reasons-Fitbit-is-being-sued-for-inaccurate-heart-rate-monitors?_mc=NL_EDN_EDT_EDN_weekly_20160114&cid=NL_EDN_EDT_EDN_weekly_20160114&elq=a12e63c660c348d3be9ba85524867603&elqCampaignId=26520&elqaid=30326&elqat=1&elqTrackId=d9ae4f5135f94cc4abc4fb352677ff57

    There are at least four reasons Fitbit was just hit with a class-action lawsuit over the inaccuracy of its $150 Charge HR and $250 Surge heart-rate monitors. Oddly, it has almost nothing to do with engineering, design, or software.

    The first two have to do with questionable tort laws, and consumer and lawyer greed (combined with a little anger). Third is tied to a bad marketing mistake by Fitbit, while the fourth is more interesting, having to do with the difficulty of accurate heart-rate (HR) monitoring on a consistent basis.

    To eliminate frivolous lawsuits should we adopt a “loser pays” system where the winner’s legal fees are paid by the loser, like in Europe?

    Consumers don’t like to feel deceived. A company usually gets one chance to make it right: when the customer calls to complain. In this case, Fitbit blew it on both levels. When the users called to gripe about the HR accuracy, they should have accepted the complaint, also known as “free customer survey response” and offered a refund.

    Instead, Fitbit chose to stand behind their product, the engineering of which was completely undermined by an awful marketing mistake: they should never have said “every beat counts.” Once that statement got out, even if Fitbit isn’t claiming to be able to measure every beat, the consumers are led to the assumption that the device can measure every heart beat, and anything short of that is a “bad” product. Ooops!

    That simple tagline, combined with poor customer service, opened the door to a class action lawsuit that may well be settled before it ever gets to court, but the damage is done. This is one reason it’s hard to be an engineer. Not because the job is hard, that’s a given, but because really good work can easily get undermined by something as inane as a marketing tagline.

    Companies like Polar have been doing accurate HR monitoring for eons using sensors on a chest strap. Serious athletes don’t mind the hassle. Casual exercisers are a different story: it’s awkward and uncomfortable, so wrist-based monitoring is the technique of choice for Fitbit, and for many other consumer HR monitoring OEMs, including Apple for its watch.

    Odland made a good point: Fitbit was using photoplethysmography (PPG). This technique measures light absorption through blood and correlates that with the heartbeat as blood volume increases and decreases. Green light (530 nm) is typically used, as that wavelength has been shown to give the most accurate results when compared to an electrocardiogram (ECG), the gold standard.

    Odland’s point was that while PPG is good in a steady state, it’s at the end of an arm, which moves up and down as we walk, like a big, honking pendulum. This causes large variations in blood volume due to centrifugal force, so it becomes increasingly difficult to separate out high volume in a blood vessel due to systolic pressure versus centrifugal force acting on the blood.

    For now, PPG isn’t perfect, but highly motivated engineers and software developers are “on the case” so it will improve. In the meantime, let’s not let marketing get ahead of us again. Gotta manage those expectations a bit more carefully

    Reply
  22. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Full of fear at work: Blame the boss, or yourself?
    Fear inhibits change, but it’s also a great motivator
    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/01/15/fear_inhibits_change_fear_is_the_great_motivator/

    Fear is a great motivator. Fear pushes adrenaline. It primes our “fight or flight” response. It primes us for a confrontation. Fear shuts down our higher cognitive functions, priming us for a visceral response, on top of which we layer rationalisation.

    Fear ensures continued survival of our species in times of dire straits. When we are afraid, we have only our intuition and built-in responses to draw on. When we are afraid, we can’t accept feedback, respond to things which run counter to our expectations, or learn. And so, a culture in which fear operates is one in which no learning takes place. Fear inhibits change.

    In the last 200 years, work has changed significantly. Most of us do not face daily threats to our continued existence. But our fear response remains. We still respond with adrenaline when threatened, or embarrassed; we still shut down; we still lose our capacity for higher reasoning and openness. And it kills improvement at work. It kills creativity. And it’s common.

    Needless to say, fear response is a response borne of perception, not reality.

    In a world where we are taught to define ourselves by how successful we are at work, how much money we make, how influential we are, and how people see us, threats to our continued existence do not have to be life or death.

    Job loss, income loss, prestige loss, or promotion loss all generate a similar response. And the idea that trying something, but not succeeding at it, is frequently tied to more than one of those losses, making us risk averse, and afraid of experimentation.

    “The ability to learn faster than your competitors may be the only sustainable competitive advantage.” – Arie de Geus

    Knowledge-heavy roles (such as IT or management) require learning in order to be effective, or help the company succeed. Learning through experience and mistakes is necessary in any role that brings about change, whether the goal is figuring out how to convert page views into sales, or transforming your business into a leaner, more effective organisation. Knowledge economies are driven by learning – the converting of information into knowledge and understanding.

    Without learning, we cannot progress; without learning, our companies can’t adapt; without learning, we are doomed to eventual replacement by companies with newer ideas that we couldn’t test

    Agile, Lean, Kanban, and DevOps all attempt to remove this fear by explicitly creating conditions where experimentation and learning are encouraged. All too often, however, the adoption of these processes fail, not due to failures in the processes, but due to their incompleteness.

    The value of mistakes

    Mistakes are inevitable. By punishing mistakes a company (explicitly with firing, or implicitly through reduced career or salary progression) doesn’t eliminate them, it merely ensures that nobody will talk about them. And nobody will talk about the fact that nobody is talking about them.

    The entire organisation will collude in hiding mistakes in order to avoid feelings of embarrassment or threats (Argyris, Knowledge for Action). Any company in which failures are not openly discussed, in order to be learned from (without any sense of blame or shame), is not learning effectively.

    Companies rarely explicitly punish failure. Instead, there are unspoken rules about the acceptability and impact of failure – fewer promotions, reduced raises, fewer hours, worse reviews.

    Admitting failure requires vulnerability, so creating a culture that learns from failure also requires vulnerability, usually in the form of managers making their own failures, and learnings, more visible.

    Conclusion

    Admitting failure isn’t easy. It can make us feel vulnerable. The alternative is worse. The alternative is not admitting failure, not admitting mistakes, not learning from things we know are, or were, wrong. Companies which can’t learn from mistakes stagnate, and eventually fail.

    Reply
  23. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Google Has Toughest Interview Process For Developers, But Not the Worst
    http://tech.slashdot.org/story/16/01/15/025258/google-has-toughest-interview-process-for-developers-but-not-the-worst

    A casual survey of candidates’ reactions to the interview processes of the biggest tech companies in the world shows Google as having one of the most grueling hiring gauntlets in the sector — but Twitter’s is perceived as the worst.

    Which Tech Companies Have the Worst Interview Process?
    https://getvoip.com/blog/2016/01/13/tech-interview-process/

    Searching for a job can be a long and daunting task. You have to research companies, edit your resume, and carefully craft cover letters. Even then, according to Interview Success Formula’s 2013 study, you only have a 20% chance of actually getting an interview. And once you get an interview, the hiring process is much longer than in the past. The job interview process has increased nearly 17% since 2010 according to Glassdoor. On average, it now takes 22.9 days, up from 19.6.

    After reading these studies, we wanted to learn how the job hiring processes of major companies stacked up.

    In addition to analyzing the hiring process, we also looked at the interviewees experience. Was it positive or negative? Hard or easy?

    It turns out, an easy interview process did not always correlate to a positive interview experience, and a difficult interview process didn’t always correlate to a negative experience.

    The interview process itself, on average, ranged from two weeks to four weeks. Surprisingly, the length of time the process took did not seem to influence an interviewee’s experience. While Cisco, Yahoo, and Uber had the shortest interview process of two weeks, only interviewees at Cisco had an overwhelmingly positive interview experience.

    Although this data is specific to software engineers, we believe that it still exemplifies how the hiring process in many industries goes beyond just the traditional phone call and in-person interview. Today, there are multiple rounds of phone/Skype screenings and test projects before you even qualify for an onsite interview.

    Though the job hiring process may seem intimidating, there are plenty of resources available that can help you ace an interview.

    Reply
  24. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Engineer: Promote Thyself!
    http://www.eetimes.com/author.asp?section_id=36&doc_id=1328826&

    Engineers need to learn that it’s not what you know, it’s who you know — network, network, network!

    “I do wonder if marketing/PR principles can be applied within an engineering team itself, or between engineering teams, since engineers often have to ‘sell’ ideas or approaches or make the case for getting the resources they need to see a feature idea through to a finished product. In my experience, engineers could sometimes use a little PR to achieve their ends rather than trying to dictate to people who don’t necessarily have to follow along.”

    Good question. Marketing and PR principles could be applied to an individual or an engineering team as well. Clive (Max) Maxfield is a terrific example of an engineer who has used successfully a few marketing approaches.

    When we talked, he offered several examples of how he promoted himself and built a high profile prior to becoming an even higher profile editor at EETimes.com and Embedded.com. He had been a regular blogger and wrote technical articles, both of which led to speaking opportunities. Max has written a few books as well. All helped position him as an expert.

    If you are interested in blogging in the context of promoting yourself as an engineer, Max strongly advises writing blogs about something of interest to other engineers

    Marketing for Engineers: Making Use of Pre-Event Announcements
    http://www.eetimes.com/author.asp?section_id=36&doc_id=1326793

    Nanette Collins continues on her quest to educate engineers about the value of good PR and marketing.

    As these three exhibitors will attest, pre-event announcements, especially product news, should be part of every event plan. They build awareness and visibility, and can help drive attendees to the company’s booth to watch a demo and to generate leads. News releases go out on one of the wire services — Businesswire, Marketwired and PRnewswire (owned by UBM) are the three most popular in our industry — and should get posted on Yahoo Finance! and other online databases.

    They’re also multi-purpose. A tradeshow or industry event serves as an immovable deadline for a new product or product upgrade. After all, the show must go on, and it is one of the best opportunities for the company to “strut its stuff” to a large community of potential users in a personalized manner. It’s also the place to reinforce any new features and capabilities of the company’s software or hardware to existing customers.

    Reply
  25. Tomi Engdahl says:

    NOTHING trumps extra pizza on IT projects. Not even more people
    Why Jeff Bezos laughs at your ‘big’ team
    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/02/03/mythical_man_month/

    Dilbert might mock the mythical man month, Fred Brooks’ argument that “adding manpower to a late software project makes it later,” but most enterprises still think they can hit their deadlines by hiring more people, feeding ever larger teams, rather than by embracing DevOps-friendly practices that favor small teams and high communication between developers and operations.

    How much is “most”? Well, according to 451 Research survey data, 60.4 per cent of enterprises address rising release demands by “adding staff to our team.”

    Why won’t we learn?

    It turns out to be really hard to change organisations and many, like insurer Hiscox, are set up in uber-large teams that serve as functional silos. Hence, companies end up with development, operations, support, and more, each with its own agenda.

    These atomised teams have all the functions necessary to making decisions and putting out product. According to Fletcher, moving to this DevOps approach resulted in a reduction in its cost per release on one application by 97 per cent, driven by a reduction in time per release by 89 per cent and a reduction in staff needed to release by 75 per cent.

    DevOps is not for me

    According to Nigel Kersten, chief information officer for Puppet Labs, a number of factors hold enterprises back from the DevOps dream.

    In an interview, Kersten acknowledged “a host of myths surrounding DevOps applicability in enterprise environments that block adoption in many organizations,” but as he pointed out, these myths tend to be held most firmly by those least qualified to comment.

    According to Kersten: “These are often views held by technical managers and executives rather than the grassroots practitioners,” which “makes sense for what has been largely a grassroots-driven collection of practices.”

    Speaking specifically of those that use regulatory compliance requirements as a reason to eschew DevOps, Kersten called out the following:

    DevOps is more than just development and operations, and should be inclusive of all entities required to deliver business value, including the audit and compliance teams
    IT automation removes much of the human intervention and manual manipulation that slows and pains the audit and compliance processes
    Automated, repeatable processes are easier to audit, easier to understand, and easier to secure, which enables the shift from merely passing the test, to securing the business

    In short, the reasons many enterprises cite for avoiding DevOps are often the very reasons they should embrace it.

    According to Gartner survey data, 25 per cent of Global 2000 enterprises will embrace DevOps this year. That’s a clear indication that DevOps has moved beyond a niche cultural phenomenon into a real force for change within the enterprise.

    Reply
  26. Tomi Engdahl says:

    How to Market to Young Engineers
    http://www.eetimes.com/author.asp?section_id=36&doc_id=1328839&

    Today’s young engineers consume information differently than their elders. Learn how to reach the millennials.

    Engineers strive to solve problems by innovating beyond our imagination to create solutions. They wield a unique set of skills, with deliberate precision, an obsessive focus, and often a playful intuition, as they make one generation’s impossible the next generation’s ordinary.

    Part of what makes engineers who they are is their stubbornness as they plow forward towards their goals in spite of what others say. The other side of this coin, however, means that engineers may not fall in line with the accepted standards of the day. In an ever-changing world, this makes it quite a challenge for businesses to constantly adapt their marketing strategies as they cater to today’s engineers.

    At Analog Arts, we are still learning about marketing strategies, especially to younger engineers. We’d like to share some of what we’ve learned, which could only be the tip of the iceberg.

    Understand the Digital World
    Engineers in their twenties and thirties grew up in a digital generation. There are more than three billion internet users in the world, which will further grow by an additional billion in just five years. Millennial engineers are a vibrant part of this community, relying on it as their primary source of information. A survey of engineers reveals that this group is constantly connected, whether it is on their computer during the day or on their phone while on the move.

    To reach these young engineers, you must maintain a strong online presence. Updating your web site regularly, making it mobile friendly, applying SEO tactics, strategizing images, choosing an appealing title, and researching key words are absolute musts for any online presence. It is also vital to get the point to this group fast. An average internet user spends only 15 seconds before they x-out of a page.

    Harness social media

    Thirty years ago, engineers had to read hundreds of paper articles, go through tons of vendors’ data books, and collect shelves of technical texts to stay at the forefront of the field. Today, all these information is only one click away. Sifting through a sea of web pages to find the right article or product now becomes the main challenge for the young engineer. Instead, many turn to social media where they develop communities of experts.

    today’s generation relies on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and hundreds of other platforms to exchange ideas.

    Maintaining an active presence at these podiums is quite time consuming. Larger companies often devote a whole department to social media.

    Shifting Paradigms: Read and talk vs. watch and blog The previous generation of engineers was used to “read and talk.” They would read articles or newsletters on their own, and then gather together to discuss key ideas. The younger generation has started to find an alternative, “watch and blog.”

    For example, a technical video on the internet could easily get tens of thousands of views in a short period of time. Making an appealing technical or demo video has become an art in itself.

    Think Outside the Box
    Finding distinctive means to attract customers may sound like a cliché, but the age-old advice remains true with today’s engineers. It requires understanding your target demographic well and finding ways uncommon to the market that could work well for you. Giving incentives to special groups, learning about your customers’ needs by analyzing their inquiries, educating your audience with data and information that is relevant to them, taking a proactive response to their problems, and using visual language to communicate with engineers (graphs, charts, tables, etc.) often appeal to the young engineer. At the same time, the young engineer doesn’t like to be approached like his predecessors with simple slick advertisements. He is much more resistant to traditional tactics. Don’t be afraid to think outside of the box as you develop your marketing strategy.

    Young engineers are a subset of college-educated personas. To market to them, you must have a clear view of the demographic.

    Reply
  27. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Why Winners Become Cheaters
    http://science.slashdot.org/story/16/02/11/0328247/why-winners-become-cheaters

    A new study from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem reveals a paradoxical aspect of human behavior — people who win in competitive situations are more likely to cheat in the future.

    The experiments further demonstrated that subsequent cheating was more likely in situations where the outcome of previous competitions was determined by merit rather than luck.

    Comments:

    That makes sense to me. If you win something based on merit it becomes part of your identity. “I’m a fast runner” or “I’m good at math.” That will put you under pressure (internal and external) to make sure it happens.

    If you get really good at something, or have a lot of success, you are proud of yourself and define yourself for it. When faced with losing, you’re much more motivated to cheat to win because it’s more important to you than it would be if you had lost and presumed that it’s not your thing, hence not caring nearly as much about it.

    Reply
  28. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Pitching yourself and presenting your ideas effectively
    Based upon a “classic” from the SWE Learning Center webinar series, timeless insights on how to effectively present oneself bear repeating.
    http://www.csemag.com/single-article/pitching-yourself-and-presenting-your-ideas-effectively/cfa405332c9ab9769771193ce27556a4.html

    From one perspective, every talk is a pitch. The words you use and the talks you give can be persuasive and stick in the minds of others, or they can scatter in the wind like packing peanuts in a hurricane. Your job with every talk is to connect with your audience and persuade people of something, not just to educate and give out information.

    Every speech, presentation, or business dialogue is a pitch, really. Whether it’s a new business pitch or a status update with your boss or your team, or an interview for a stretch assignment, each is an opportunity to connect and persuade.

    Adopting the model of an “entrepreneur,” you have got to be the persuader-in-chief. You’ll find, as people who have mastered pitching and selling know, that the best way to sell and connect with others is through the following four methods:

    Warmth
    Emotions
    Clicking
    Stories

    Keep in mind that every presentation, every pitch, every important talk should tell a story about your business or yourself that takes your listeners on a journey — a journey that persuades them to your way of thinking.

    Message or delivery?

    Of course, you want to have a strong message and a strong delivery, but most of us spend a lot of time on the message and very little time on how we’re going to say it. It takes less than a second for another person to take you in and decide whether they like you and want to listen to what you have to say. It’s all based on a visual impression — how you use your facial features, the way you stand, the way you look, even whether you project warmth or not.

    Emotions versus logic

    In the business world, we like to believe that logic and reason prevail. It’s a myth. Emotions prevail. Studies show that people use the emotional part of the brain to make business or other decisions.

    So get wise and don’t make your presentations, pitches, and talks about lots of facts, data, and analysis. Sure, make an argument for your product or service and include figures that will create interest and give reasons that tie in with your audience’s values and purpose. People need reasons to defend their decisions to others as well. But first consider what your audience wants emotionally, and reflect on how you can satisfy that need. Then tell stories and anecdotes that will connect with them emotionally about key points in your presentation. All of your stories, points, and reasons have to mean something to them on an emotional level.

    Reply
  29. Tomi Engdahl says:

    What we learned about engineering communication
    http://www.controleng.com/single-article/what-we-learned-about-engineering-communication/c7ceea0da46166146f04cf311e182f27.html

    Think again about engineering communication and advice: Listening attentively is a learned skill; key phrases such as “what we learned” provide clues about where special attention is needed. Heed this advice on knowledge creation, automation investments, and cyber security from automation and control experts.

    Sharing what we hear from others would be difficult without filtering and summarizing. When an engineering expert does that for you by saying, “Here’s what we learned” or “Key takeaways are … ” be sure to listen attentively, take careful notes, and underline key points.

    When data becomes information, ensure appropriate context and intelligence are included to create value.

    Invest in your future. The average age of U.S. industrial equipment is the highest it’s been since 1938, explained Raj Batra, president, digital factory division, Siemens Industry Inc., citing Morgan Stanley figures. “If you cannot keep an iPhone a year, why have automation on the plant floor for 40 years?”

    Protecting connections

    Protect your assets. While weaknesses will always exist, secure networking protocols are a key element of defense-in-depth strategy, explained David Doggett, on the ODVA Task Force for Cybersecurity. “All entities on a network should be considered untrusted until authenticated, access to devices should not be allowed until authorized by the device, and physical access to a device should be limited to trusted individuals,” Doggett noted at the ODVA annual conference, Frisco, Texas, in October 2015. Secure devices should reject altered data, reject messages sent by unknown or untrusted people or devices, and reject messages that request things not allowed by that source.

    Reply
  30. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Brian Armstrong:
    Coinbase CEO: Core team is a systemic risk that can lead to Bitcoin collapse this year; switch to Bitcoin Classic now, then look for more scalable solutions — What Happened At The Satoshi Roundtable — Last weekend I attended the Satoshi Roundtable conference along with Charlie Lee …

    What Happened At The Satoshi Roundtable
    https://medium.com/@barmstrong/what-happened-at-the-satoshi-roundtable-6c11a10d8cdf#.6qkxxidxz

    A number of meetings took place between core developers, miners, and CEOs of Bitcoin companies. As you’re aware, there is a large disagreement about how bitcoin should scale right now. On one side you have the core developers who have concerns about how on-chain scaling will impact decentralization. On the other side you have most bitcoin companies who want growth. The miners are sort of caught in between and are split.

    The core team contains some very high IQ people, but there are some things which I find very concerning about them as a team after spending some time with them last weekend.

    1. Some of them show very poor communication skills or a lack of maturity — this has hurt bitcoin’s ability to bring new protocol developers into the space.
    2. They prefer ‘perfect’ solutions to ‘good enough’. And if no perfect solution exists they seem ok with inaction, even if that puts bitcoin at risk.
    3. They seem to have a strong belief that bitcoin will not be able to scale long term, and any block size increase is a slippery slope to a future that they are unwilling to allow.

    Even though core says they are ok with a hard fork to 2MB (they have it on their own roadmap, just very far in the future), they refuse to prioritize it.

    Being high IQ is not enough for a team to succeed. You need to make reasonable trade offs, collaborate, be welcoming, communicate, and be easy to work with. Any team that doesn’t have this will be unable to attract top talent and will struggle long term. In my opinion, perhaps the biggest risk in bitcoin right now is, ironically, one of the things that has helped it the most in the past: the bitcoin core developers.

    Reply
  31. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Tyler Cowen / New York Times:
    New research shows slowdown in productivity growth since 2005 not the result of unmeasured gains from information technology

    Silicon Valley Has Not Saved Us From a Productivity Slowdown
    http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/06/upshot/silicon-valley-has-not-saved-us-from-a-productivity-slowdown.html

    American middle class wages haven’t been rising as rapidly as they once were, and a slowdown in productivity growth is probably an important cause.

    In mature economies, higher productivity typically is required for sustained increases in living standards, but the productivity numbers in the United States have been mediocre. Labor productivity has been growing at an average of only 1.3 percent annually since the start of 2005, compared with 2.8 percent annually in the preceding 10 years. Without somehow improving productivity growth, living standards will continue to lag, this widely held narrative concludes.

    Still, not everyone views the situation this way. For instance, Marc Andreessen, the Silicon Valley entrepreneur and venture capitalist, says information technology is providing significant benefits that just don’t show up in the standard measurements of wages and productivity.

    This notion — that life is getting better, often in ways we are barely measuring — is fairly common in tech circles.

    Until recently, this debate was inconclusive.

    But now Chad Syverson, a professor of economics at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, has looked more scientifically at the evidence and concluded that the productivity slowdown is all too real. These results are outlined in his recent National Bureau of Economic Research working paper “Challenges to Mismeasurement Explanations for the U.S. Productivity Slowdown.”

    Professor Syverson notes that a slowdown has come to dozens of advanced economies, more or less at the same time, which indicates it is a general phenomenon. Furthermore, the countries with smaller tech sectors still have comparably sized productivity slowdowns, and that is not what we would expect if a lot of unmeasured productivity were hiding in the tech industry.

    Challenges to Mismeasurement Explanations for the U.S. Productivity Slowdown
    http://www.nber.org/papers/w21974

    Reply
  32. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Nailing the On-site Interview
    http://blog.hired.com/nailing-the-on-site-interview/

    Under the old paradigm of interviewing, the onus of making a good impression was almost entirely on the candidate. Most companies put little thought or effort into their interview process or employer brand. Today, however, the skills gap and war for talent means that every company needs to focus on the impressions they’re giving candidates and treat their hiring process as an extension of their marketing efforts. One of the most important elements of this process is the on-site interview.

    Smart companies have a well thought-out strategy for on-site interviews and use them as an opportunity to impress candidates and showcase whatever it is that makes their organization unique. They know that on-sites can be a marketing tool that leave every candidate — regardless of whether they get an offer — with a favorable impression. Its worth looking to the tech industry for some ideas on how to make on-site interviews memorable and effective, as the war for talent in this arena has forced many companies to up their game and think outside the box. Read on for some of their best practices.

    Reply
  33. Tomi Engdahl says:

    RIP Good Times? Venture Capital Funding, Unicorn Births, And Mega-Deals Plummet in Q4’15
    https://www.cbinsights.com/blog/venture-capital-fall/

    2015 was a banner year for VC activity…until the end.

    Uh oh.

    In Q3’15, funding to VC-backed companies hit levels last seen during the dot com boom. There was a new unicorn birthed every 4th day. $100M+ financings were commonplace.

    Good times.

    2015 was shaping up to be a banner year for venture capital… and then Q4 happened.

    Today, we released an early snapshot of the KPMG International & CB Insights 2015 Venture Pulse Report, which highlights the drastic funding and deal shift we saw in Q4.

    For Silicon Valley, the Hangover Begins
    With venture-capital investors increasingly nervous, once-hot tech startups are retrenching
    http://www.wsj.com/articles/for-silicon-valley-the-hangover-begins-1455930769

    Reply
  34. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Six Stats Driving Technical Marketing in 2016
    http://www.eetimes.com/author.asp?section_id=36&doc_id=1328991&

    1. The number one place engineers go to find work-related information is Google.

    2. For information they deem valuable, over 80 percent of engineers say they will complete first name and last name lead form fields, and over 70 percent will complete lead form fields for work email address, company name, and job title. So for the naysayers out there who believe engineers won’t complete lead forms, I beg to differ. A critical phrase in this finding that can’t be overlooked is “For information they deem valuable….”

    3. Engineers rank the highest trust in content written by engineering experts at vendor companies. Engineers want to hear from other engineers. It’s critical today to get the company SMEs (subject matter experts) sharing their knowledge.

    4. Nearly 75 percent of engineers agreed or strongly agreed that they’re more likely to do business with a company that regularly produces new and current content. Engineers expect companies to provide content that informs, analyzes, explains, and persuade them throughout the buyer journey.

    5. 94 percent and over 80 percent of engineers, respectively, said detailed diagrams and images as well as technical accuracy are important to content.

    6. Over 75 percent of engineers said they are willing to go three pages or deeper in search before they find what they need or start their search over. While only 5 percent of engineers said they stop on page one

    To summarize, engineers trust content from expert engineers at vendor companies, they go to Google to find it, and they will search deeply to find what they need. Engineers are also more willing to do business with companies who regularly produce new and current content, primarily white papers, case studies, webcasts, and videos.

    Reply
  35. Tomi Engdahl says:

    TSA Paid $1.4 Million For Randomizer App That Chooses Left Or Right
    https://news.slashdot.org/story/16/04/04/2227200/tsa-paid-14-million-for-randomizer-app-that-chooses-left-or-right?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Slashdot%2Fslashdot%2Fto+%28%28Title%29Slashdot+%28rdf%29%29

    Transport Security Administration (TSA) use a Randomizer app to randomly search travelers in the Pre-Check lane. The app randomly chooses whether travelers go left or right

    The documents he received reveals the TSA purchased the Randomizer iPad app for $336,413.59.
    the contract for the TSA Randomizer app was won by IBM. The total amount paid for the project is actually $1.4 million

    Comment:
    Seriously, 80%-85% of the bid covers dealing with the US government. Multiple thousand-documents over the course of years, flying back and forth for pointless meetings, and maybe you eventually get paid.

    Here are my rates as a developer , for similar software delivered:
    Order online, by submitting my order form: $159
    Email me and discuss: $500
    Meetings to discuss, demo (local businesses): $1,500
    Local government bureaucracy: $8,000
    Federal government: $400,000

    Source: https://news.slashdot.org/story/16/04/04/2227200/tsa-paid-14-million-for-randomizer-app-that-chooses-left-or-right?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Slashdot%2Fslashdot%2Fto+%28%28Title%29Slashdot+%28rdf%29%29

    Reply
  36. Tomi Engdahl says:

    How does a business make decisions? How should a business make decisions?
    We’ll give you a clue: it rhymes with shmevidence
    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/04/22/how_does_a_business_make_decisions_how_should_a_business_make_decisions/

    As a business owner, I want to believe that I have what it takes to lead. I’m charismatic enough that I can usually convince people to do what I want them to do. I am good enough with Google that I can find out many things and I have the ability to learn a great deal about complex topics quickly. Surely I will thusly make good decisions and be a great CEO!

    Wrong. Like any other person, the scope of my experience is limited. My understanding of the world, of what is “normal” and not, is entirely coloured by my experiences, my culture and the group of individuals, organisations and events with which I choose to associate.

    Not so very long ago, none of this would have prevented me from running a business. All but a few businesses were limited in both scope and reach. You worked with locals to provide products and services to locals and the competition you had to deal with was also local. This just isn’t true in the western world anymore, even for the smallest businesses.

    Reply
  37. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Data is the key. In a perfect world, sales and marketing would work together through customer engagement, surveys and so forth to collect enough data to make decisions. In reality, this is no longer enough for many businesses to make investment choices on.

    However, running a business still requires common sense. Today’s CEOs still need to filter what the computer says against what the people say. If you rely only on machine-provided data, you end up building Windows 8.

    At the end of the day, however, evidence-based decision making is crucial for businesses that want to survive. And evidence-based decision making requires both having the right data and the right tools to provide appropriate evidence. Does your business have those tools?

    Source: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/04/22/how_does_a_business_make_decisions_how_should_a_business_make_decisions/

    Reply
  38. Tomi Engdahl says:

    You deleted the customer. What now? Human error – deal with it
    To err is human, to double err is career limiting
    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/05/30/best_practices_tech_processes/

    Everyone I speak to about system security seems to panic about malware, cloud failure system crashes and bad patches. But the biggest threat isn’t good or bad code, or systems that may or may not fail. It’s people. What we call Liveware errors range from the mundane to the catastrophic and they happen all the time at all levels of business.

    We have all had that pit-of-the-stomach feeling when we hit the wrong key or pull the wrong drive or cable. One of the more mundane examples I have experienced was a secretary trying to delete an old file but accidentally nuking the whole client folder.

    Catalogue of human error

    Unfortunately, human error scale ups. I have seen very large companies lose hundreds of machines due to a stupid file-deletion default of “*” within a maintenance application.

    The root cause of failure is often human mistakes. Even when human interaction is not the direct cause, it usually plays some role in the failure. The reasons behind human failure are also, contrary to popular belief, rarely based on malice or retribution for perceived slights, but are much more likely to come down to common or garden-variety human screw-ups.

    Unfortunately, as IT becomes more demanding, IT staff and budgets are shrinking, leaving more work to be done by fewer people. This unrelenting pressure of continually fixing systems as quickly as possible can lead to mistakes.

    It can happen all too easily. One quick click of a button and you can be in a situation that is incredibly hard to recover from. Thank goodness for confirmation dialogs!

    Document your best practices – properly

    Failure to document procedures is in itself a completely avoidable human error. All organisations should have a set of up-to-date, fully documented procedures and processes that are available and easy to implement.

    Reply
  39. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Andrew Marantz / New Yorker:
    How HBO’s “Silicon Valley” accurately portrays and satirizes Silicon Valley: extensive research and expert consultants

    How “Silicon Valley” Nails Silicon Valley
    http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/how-silicon-valley-nails-silicon-valley

    “People in the Valley—at least, the people I know—talk about the show all the time,” Costolo told me. “Most of them love it, oddly. I think there are a lot of people telling themselves, with varying levels of accuracy, ‘They’re satirizing those annoying tech people—not me.’”

    “Silicon Valley” is mostly filmed on multiple sets, inside a concrete Sony lot in Los Angeles—not in Silicon Valley, but in the same time zone.

    Monday and Tuesday in the writer’s room. Berg, Judge, and ten writers peppered him with questions, both narrow and existential. Where would the most powerful person in a boardroom sit? What would motivate an entrepreneur like Richard, and what would he find most demoralizing? “I would tell them a detail about something I’d observed or someone I’d met, and they would get this sparkle in their eye and go, ‘That really happens?’” Costolo said.

    Over time, Costolo grew comfortable enough to pitch jokes of his own. “They were generous about letting me down gently,” he told me. “It was interesting to go from the C.E.O. to the least experienced guy in the room.

    “Real startups go through all the shit you see on the show, as well as even crazier shit,” Roger McNamee, a venerable venture capitalist and a consultant to the show, told me. “If anything, the writers might have to leave out true things in order to seem more realistic.” Both Judge and Berg have an eye for authenticity. In Judge’s movie “Office Space,” from 1999, he enlivened his subject—white-collar drudgery—with details he had experienced or observed

    When you’re writing a show about nothing, or a movie about cubicle culture, it’s easy to collect realistic details. But if you want to know how a non-compete clause would be structured, or what kind of car a typical brogrammer would drive, or whether Richard’s firing would trigger an afternoon of malaise or a personal crisis, then you need to do your homework. TV writers have long consulted experts

    “Silicon Valley” is a reported sitcom. “We do plenty of silly jokes, but we also go to great lengths to make the world feel real,” Berg told me. “The hope is that someone in the Valley”—a scrawny coder, a billionaire, or someone who fits both descriptions—“will be able to watch it and go, ‘I might not like that they’re taking shots at us, but at least it’s grounded in truth.’”

    Berg and Judge have backgrounds that enable them to understand Silicon Valley culture better than most laypeople, and they tend to hire writers who are similarly equipped.

    Reply
  40. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Uncanny Silicon Valley
    https://backchannel.com/who-are-the-real-life-models-of-silicon-valley-characters-we-have-them-3507bc890d9a#.msyd7go8x

    The absolutely definitive, supremely authoritative, person-to-person mapping of “Silicon Valley” characters to real tech world personalities.

    Reply
  41. Tomi Engdahl says:

    How does multi-channel approach can be a barrier to purchase?

    Simple is beautiful

    When you take a diversified services online, simplicity is beautiful.

    figuring out the customer paths should be made carefully.
    If the services can not be combined smartly, they want to be kept separate until the services are truly integrated and trained staff.
    It would be great also one of the service number, which is enough staff to respond quickly to customer service offered by the phone calls with respect to any company.

    In this particular case, after buying my decision came eight phases in which I might have to cancel a purchase decision. Now the company has the ninth the chance to do business with me. How many other client is willing to give the company the possibility of an equal number?

    Source: http://www.tivi.fi/Kumppanit/Sofigate/Rekrytointi/miten-monikanavaisuus-voi-olla-oston-este-6551928

    Reply
  42. Tomi Engdahl says:

    CIO – these skills actually need

    TIVI interviewed in April 100 leading Finnish company CIOs. According to a Finnish study on the CIO has the educational background often makes technical information well in his possession.

    CIO of the Year nominees interviews have identified three common key features:

    1. Communication and interpersonal skills: CIO must be able to communicate and operational IT and business management with the business and bring continuous technological possibilities opened up. CIO’s role is described as “interpreter” IT between the EU and business.
    2. The ability to manage change. Success requires an understanding of people’s reactions to the different stages of change. Must know how to listen actively, to take forward effectively and to be able to consolidate the change in expected results and status.
    3. Startup spirituality brings the management of information management are elements which would allow the adoption of innovation. Information management startup-style management is not necessary, but IT management must lead like any other business. IT is a part of the business.

    interpersonal skills and self-knowledge

    Leadership skills such as communication and interpersonal skills and the ability to lead change, however, are in my opinion a prerequisite for a successful CIOs.

    Source: http://www.tivi.fi/Kumppanit/Sofigate/cio-naita-it-taitoja-todellisuudessa-tarvitset-6550336

    Reply
  43. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Naysayers Add Value, Too
    http://www.eetimes.com/author.asp?section_id=36&doc_id=1329924&

    Those who doubt the validity of an engineering project can make you think things through.

    One of my greatest joys in running a company for many years was directing the product direction and development of the company. Embarking on an important new project, getting all the participants involved and excited, was thrilling. It represented the future for all of us. Either we got it right or we’d have a lot of egg on our faces. My inner goal was to have all the engineers, marketers, and management as excited as I was.

    How could we use the Naysayers comments and get everyone onboard?

    Using Naysayer Comments to Get Others Involved
    In every meeting, there are those that feel free to express their opinions while others sit quietly and just absorb everything without commenting. My role was to get them involved. Essentially I would ask pointedly, “Bob, can you give us your viewpoint of Tim’s concerns.” This prompted everyone’s attention to one of the quieter attendees and expanded the discussion. I would continue around the room until there were comments from just about everyone. The result: a more well-rounded discussion.

    Valuing all Contributions
    Building a team to get projects done was my objective. Certainly great engineering is necessary, but all it takes is another member of the team to not do their part well, to sink a project, or at least set it back. By getting divergent team members in a room once per week and going through many of the thoughts, pro and con, getting out all the objections of the naysayer and the counterpoints to these thoughts, worked well. By completed development and full announcement time each was proud of their part in making a great product. The naysayer and his counterparts embraced what was accomplished – because each felt that it was theirs.

    My take is that the naysayer performed a valuable service.

    Reply
  44. Tomi Engdahl says:

    How Do You Know When an Engineer is Cooked?
    http://www.eetimes.com/author.asp?section_id=30&doc_id=1329667&

    How can you tell when an engineer is ready to leave the nest and soar wild and free through the engineering skies?

    I was just chatting with a friend as to how one knows when an engineer is cooked. No; sticking a fork in him or her is not the answer we’re looking for; by “cooked” we mean “matured” or “qualified” or “done” — that is, ready to leave the nest and soar wild and free through the engineering skies.

    John explained that he viewed each engineer as progressing through the following five stages:

    Stage 1:Having been assigned a project, the engineer would commence work. John would keep a watchful eye on the engineer’s progress and recognize when he had run into a problem. However, in Stage 1, the engineer wouldn’t actually recognize that there even was a problem and would carry on regardless.

    Stage 2: With a little more experience, the engineer would recognize when he ran into a problem, at which point he would approach John who would guide him to a solution.

    Stage 3: In addition to recognizing that there was a problem, the engineer would come up with a number of solutions to present to John

    Stage 4: Having determined that there was a problem and evaluated a number of solutions, the engineer would approach John and present his recommended course of action.

    Stage 5: The engineer would recognize that there was a problem and evaluate a number of solutions, then select the best approach and implement it without talking to John at all (the engineer would, of course, have maintained a record of all problems and decisions in his engineering log book; also John always kept an eagle eye on what was going on around him).

    Actually, now that I come to think about it, the steps described above are applicable to just about any profession.

    Reply
  45. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Algorithm can spot lies in emails and dating sites
    http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2016/07/05/algorithm-can-spot-lies-in-emails-and-dating-sites/

    Researchers have created a computer program that can detect lies, be it an email, dating profile or visa application.

    The algorithm created at City University London can tell if a person is lying just by analysing their word use, structure and context, according to the researchers.

    To create the algorithm, researchers compared text in tens of thousands of emails that contained lies and truthful contents.

    The comparison revealed that people who are lying are less likely to use personal pronouns – such as “I”, “me”, “mine” – and tend to use more adjectives, such as “brilliant” and “sublime”

    The algorithm is better at detecting lies than the average human. People manage to spot a lie 54 per cent of the time, according to the researchers, whereas the computer lie detector detects it 70 per cent of the time.

    “Humans are startlingly bad at consciously detecting deception,”

    Untangling a Web of Lies: Exploring Automated Detection of Deception in Computer-Mediated Communication
    http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2576197

    Reply
  46. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Working For Elon Musk
    http://hackaday.com/2016/08/31/working-for-elon-musk/

    So what’s it like to work for Elon Musk at Tesla or SpaceX? Most of us have read articles about him, and much that he’s written himself, as well as watched some of his many interviews and talks. But to get some idea of what it’s like to work for him I greatly enjoyed the insight from Ashlee Vance’s biography Elon Musk – Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future. To write it Vance had many interviews with Musk as well as those who work with him or have in the past. Through this we get a fascinating look at a contemporary mogul of engineering.

    Reply
  47. Tomi Engdahl says:

    What if you could fire your CEO?
    http://www.cio.com/article/3114765/leadership-management/how-one-business-has-brought-democracy-to-the-workplace.html

    For the last four years, Haufe U.S. has functioned as a workplace democracy, where its executive leadership is elected by the employees annually. The craziest part? It’s working.

    At talent management and human resources company Haufe U.S., you can. CEO and co-founder Kelly Max — along with most of the other C-level and executive leadership — are elected, and each year employees vote on whether or not they stay or go.

    It sounds crazy, right? How could that possibly work? Wouldn’t it be chaos? Wouldn’t executives spend all their time campaigning and none of it actually running the company? These are all questions I had, too, but here’s the thing: They’ve made it work for three years. No, really!

    Reply
  48. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Life On Contract: Estimating Project Time
    http://hackaday.com/2016/09/09/life-on-contract-estimating-project-time/

    “How long will it take you to do this?” the manager asks.

    “A couple of days maybe?” You reply in turn. The manager nods and you take your escape. Little do you know that you have failed.

    The project swerves out of control. Two days on the dot the manager is there expecting results. How? How did this happen again? It felt right! Two days is all you’d need to do such a simple project. It ended up taking a week.

    The next meeting you say two weeks just to be sure. Everyone nods gravely, upset that something would take so long, but the work must be done. Two days later you sheepishly wander into the manager’s office with a completed project. He looks pleased but confused.

    I learned a lot from them and I ended up distilling it down into a few rules.

    1. There Is No Other Unit Than Hours
    2. Be honest.
    3. Get Granular.
    4. Promise a Range. Give a Deadline.

    When working on a contract job it often feels like sticking a foot in a trap when a time estimate is given. Are they going to hold me to this? What if it goes wrong? After all, we are not fortune tellers. Unless the manager is extremely bad or you show yourself to be extremely lax in your duties, it is unlikely that a time estimate will be used against you.

    At the end of the day the manager needs a time estimate because he needs to know when to move people and he needs to manage costs.

    Most importantly a time estimate is there to protect you. It’s likely that you have been asked to do a task because you are an expert. You’ve done this before. You know how long it’s going to take. There is no way that you can explain to your boss all the intricacies of your particular task. Nor is there any need to burden them with that information. If a proper time estimate is given and you are known to be a person who delivers within the range promised then it is rare that you will ever be questioned in a hostile way about your progress.

    Reply

Leave a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

*

*