Simon Sinek’s TEDx talk on “How great leaders inspire action”
“People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it.”
A good article from the Harvard Business Review blog. I definitely agree.
On the face of it, my zero tolerance approach to grammar errors might seem a little unfair. After all, grammar has nothing to do with job performance, or creativity, or intelligence, right?
Wrong. If it takes someone more than 20 years to notice how to properly use "it’s," then that’s not a learning curve I’m comfortable with. So, even in this hyper-competitive market, I will pass on a great programmer who cannot write.
Grammar signifies more than just a person’s ability to remember high school English. I’ve found that people who make fewer mistakes on a grammar test also make fewer mistakes when they are doing something completely unrelated to writing — like stocking shelves or labeling parts.
In the same vein, programmers who pay attention to how they construct written language also tend to pay a lot more attention to how they code. You see, at its core, code is prose. Great programmers are more than just code monkeys; according to Stanford programming legend Donald Knuth they are "essayists who work with traditional aesthetic and literary forms." The point: programming should be easily understood by real human beings — not just computers.
via I Won't Hire People Who Use Poor Grammar. Here's Why. – Kyle Wiens – Harvard Business Review.
Great article on how Microsoft’s corporate culture under CEO Steve Ballmer has led to its decline:
At the center of the cultural problems was a management system called “stack ranking.” Every current and former Microsoft employee I interviewed—every one—cited stack ranking as the most destructive process inside of Microsoft, something that drove out untold numbers of employees. The system—also referred to as “the performance model,” “the bell curve,” or just “the employee review”—has, with certain variations over the years, worked like this: every unit was forced to declare a certain percentage of employees as top performers, then good performers, then average, then below average, then poor.
“If you were on a team of 10 people, you walked in the first day knowing that, no matter how good everyone was, two people were going to get a great review, seven were going to get mediocre reviews, and one was going to get a terrible review,” said a former software developer. “It leads to employees focusing on competing with each other rather than competing with other companies.”
Supposing Microsoft had managed to hire technology’s top players into a single unit before they made their names elsewhere—Steve Jobs of Apple, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, Larry Page of Google, Larry Ellison of Oracle, and Jeff Bezos of Amazon—regardless of performance, under one of the iterations of stack ranking, two of them would have to be rated as below average, with one deemed disastrous.
For that reason, executives said, a lot of Microsoft superstars did everything they could to avoid working alongside other top-notch developers, out of fear that they would be hurt in the rankings. And the reviews had real-world consequences: those at the top received bonuses and promotions; those at the bottom usually received no cash or were shown the door.”
I just discovered this article, as well as an earlier article on Coding Horror, and can’t help but agree – the majority of programming/software engineering candidates out there looking for jobs are not qualified to be programmers. They do not have the skills and cannot write anything beyond simple programs.
From the article:
“…I am stunned, but not entirely surprised, to hear that three years later “the vast majority” of so-called programmers who apply for a programming job interview are unable to write the smallest of programs. To be clear, hard is a relative term — we’re not talking about complicated, Google-style graduate computer science interview problems. This is extremely simple stuff we’re asking candidates to do. And they can’t. It’s the equivalent of attempting to hire a truck driver and finding out that 90 percent of the job applicants can’t find the gas pedal or the gear shift.
I agree, it’s insane. But it happens every day, and is (apparently) an epidemic hiring problem in our industry. “
Joel Spolsky from Joel on Software had also written about this problem back in 2005, positing a hypothetical 200 resumes received for a job posting:
Now, when you get those 200 resumes, and hire the best person from the top 200, does that mean you’re hiring the top 0.5%?
No. You’re not. Think about what happens to the other 199 that you didn’t hire.
They go look for another job.
That means, in this horribly simplified universe, that the entire world could consist of 1,000,000 programmers, of whom the worst 199 keep applying for every job and never getting them, but the best 999,801 always get jobs as soon as they apply for one. So every time a job is listed the 199 losers apply, as usual, and one guy from the pool of 999,801 applies, and he gets the job, of course, because he’s the best, and now, in this contrived example, every employer thinks they’re getting the top 0.5% when they’re actually getting the top 99.9801%.
Interesting insight, and I think very close to reality.
Recruiters are of little help, as they 1) are not technical enough to weed out the weenies, and 2) in some instances they lie and maneuver to get these weak candidates past your screening process.
The importance of the screening process cannot be overstated. There’s no reason why you should have to perform in-person interviews on anyone that can’t do the job.
[I didn’t write this – author is unknown]
Dear Mr. Architect:
Please design and build me a house. I am not quite sure of what I need, so you should use your discretion. My house should have somewhere between two and forty-five bedrooms. Just make sure the plans are such that the bedrooms can be easily added or deleted. When you bring the blueprints to me, I will make the final decision of what I want. Also, bring me the cost breakdown for each configuration so that I can arbitrarily pick one.
Keep in mind that the house I ultimately choose must cost less than the one I am currently living in. Make sure, however, that you correct all the deficiencies that exist in my current house (the floor of my kitchen vibrates when I walk across it, and the walls don’t have nearly enough insulation in them).
As you design, also keep in mind that I want to keep yearly maintenance costs as low as possible. This should mean the incorporation of extra-cost features like aluminum, vinyl, or composite siding. (If you choose not to specify aluminum, be prepared to explain your decision in detail.)
Please take care that modern design practices and the latest materials are used in construction of the house, as I want it to be a showplace for the most up-to-date ideas and methods. Be alerted, however, that kitchen should be designed to accommodate, among other things, my 1952 Gibson refrigerator.
To insure that you are building the correct house for our entire family, make certain that you contact each of our children, and also our in-laws. My mother-in-law will have very strong feelings about how the house should be designed, since she visits us at least once a year. Make sure that you weigh all of these options carefully and come to the right decision. I, however, retain the right to overrule any choices that you make.
Please don’t bother me with small details right now. Your job is to develop the overall plans for the house: get the big picture. At this time, for example, it is not appropriate to be choosing the color of the carpet.
However, keep in mind that my wife likes blue.
Also, do not worry at this time about acquiring the resources to build the house itself. Your first priority is to develop detailed plans and specifications. Once I approve these plans, however, I would expect the house to be under roof within 48 hours.
While you are designing this house specifically for me, keep in mind that sooner or later I will have to sell it to someone else. It therefore should have appeal to a wide variety of potential buyers. Please make sure before you finalize the plans that there is a consensus of the population in my area that they like the features this house has. I advise you to run up and look at my neighbor’s house he constructed last year. We like it a great deal. It has many features that we would also like in our new home, particularly the 75-foot swimming pool. With careful engineering, I believe that you can design this into our new house without impacting the final cost.
Please prepare a complete set of blueprints. It is not necessary at this time to do the real design, since they will be used only for construction bids. Be advised, however, that you will be held accountable for any increase of construction costs as a result of later design changes.
You must be thrilled to be working on as an interesting project as this! To be able to use the latest techniques and materials and to be given such freedom in your designs is something that can’t happen very often. Contact me as soon as possible with your complete ideas and plans.
P.S. My wife has just told me that she disagrees with many of the instructions I’ve given you in this letter. As architect, it is your responsibility to resolve these differences. I have tried in the past and have been unable to accomplish this. If you can’t handle this responsibility, I will have to find another architect.
P.P.S. Perhaps what I need is not a house at all, but an RV. Please advise me as soon as possible if this is the case.
Interesting article in Business Week:
BusinessWeek research has found that fewer than one out of three executives who reach those lofty heights do so with the help of an MBA. And if you think a sheepskin from a top school is a necessity, think again. Only half of the executives with MBAs went to the top 10 schools in the 2004 BusinessWeek ranking.
Only 146 of the 500 executives reported having MBAs, a surprising number considering the hundreds of thousands of B-school alumni with enough experience to qualify them for top jobs. What’s more, only 71 received MBAs from the top 10 B-schools, and two-thirds of those executives have degrees from just three institutions: Harvard Business School, Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business, and the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School.
To hear B-schools tell it, an MBA is the price of admission to the ranks of senior managers. While it may or may not improve the odds of landing such a job, it is not, strictly speaking, a requirement. Timing plays a big role. Most of the MBAs in the study — including such high-profile CEOs as General Electric Co.’s (GE ) Jeffrey R. Immelt, from HBS class of 1982 — graduated more than 20 years ago. Back then, B-school admissions were determined almost entirely on the basis of test scores, and many students lacked the people skills now recognized as critical to managerial success. So MBAs from that generation might be underrepresented in the executive suite today. This was also the era before the B-school rankings. At the time, MBAs — even those from highly respected schools like Harvard, Stanford, and Wharton — didn’t have the marquee status they possess today.
Just saw an interesting quote on /. from a user named plopez:
Herding cats is hard because you are using the wrong management technique. You herd cattle (and sheep and goats and pigs etc.), you do *not* herd cats. Cats, you put them in the general area of the mice and let them do what they are good at. Micromanagement of cats is a losing proposition.
CIO Insight has an interesting article discussing eBay’s move to a new open architecture allowing 3rd-party integration via web APIs.
Infopia is not just another software vendor. It’s part of a growing community of some 40,000 independent developers, all building products using eBay’s own application programming
interfaces, or APIs—the connection points that let a program share data and respond to requests from other software. These applications are tailor-made to work seamlessly with eBay’s core computing platform. eBay provides its APIs to the developers for free; its cost is limited to maintaining the code and providing some support resources for the developers.The payoff: a network of companies creating applications that help make eBay work better, grow faster and reach a broader customer base. (eBay’s other business units, Skype and PayPal, also have open APIs and developer programs.) eBay says that software created by its developer network—there are more than 3,000 actively used applications, including a configurator that allows high-volume sellers to list items more efficiently, and a program that notifies buyers of auction status via mobile phone—plays a role in 25 percent of listings on the U.S. eBay site. The company has about 105 million listed items at any given time; roughly half of its sales come from within the United States.
Sharing APIs is common practice for software companies, but eBay, along with its fellow online-retail pioneer, Amazon.com, is breaking new ground in its industry by establishing a large community of outside developers. And the implications of this strategy go much further than the world of auctions and electronic storefronts.
“It’s about allowing people outside your company to write services that communicate with you-—it could be companies in your supply chain, sharing information about inventories or billing,” says Adam Trachtenberg, senior manager of platform evangelism at eBay (i.e., the guy responsible for the care and feeding of the developer program).
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