158 karma · joined June 8, 2012
Of course, Borders went on to screw the pooch all by itself later, but that's a different story.
I have seen that.
On the other hand, he described an army of job-hungry young people striving to get the right education for entry level work... but missing the boat on just the right tech -- again for overly-constrained hiring processes. That does not match my experience: I see students coming out of the educational system -- reputable universities -- with a huge gap in fundamental knowledge.
I fear that universities, colleges, and vocational schools, in their effort to deliver workers with fashionable resumes, are failing to deliver the fundamentals.
Yes, you can teach yourself the fundamentals if you know you need them. But if you've gone through 4-6 years of university under the theory that they are teaching you what you need to know, it may be harder to realize that, in fact, you have learned how to look good, but not how to be good.
The other path here is starting your own company, owning your own product. But if what you love about the freelance life is bountiful free time, that is not the path for you!
Beyond that, probably the biggest single evolution was in my relationship to the work itself. In the early months and years I loved being able to go heads down on a project without ever worrying about the politics of the project or the organization: I was there to get the thing done. However, I am the kind of guy who cares about his work. Eventually I found this same experience to be dissatisfying. I felt that I was abandoning my children into a hostile corporate world with no one to look after them.
Moreover, as a freelancer you have much less influence over the product and the process. You're a hired gun. Sure, you can do a great job and collect a good paycheck, but if you love what you do it can be frustrating to have extremely limited input into decisions outside the scope of your contract.
Back to the author's very excellent point, I also found the management of benefits and finances to go from a source of engagement to just another hassle. When you are setting up your system, it's fun. When you are executing it, and occasionally screwing it up (taxes!), it's just another headache.
The reality of any game design, Zynga's in particular, is far richer and more nuanced than this meme credits. Specifically, the author makes two sloppy errors:
1. Gamification is used to make something addictive. -- It is a game, it is not gamification. And the goal is to make it fun. Sure, you can call fun addictive if you want to make it sound less... fun. (Now if you applied game mechanics to things that were not games, that would be gamification.)
2. And in turn to part people with their money. Actually, most of any social game's "tricks" are intended to increase the popularity of the game. To spread that game to as many players as possible. Giving people a way to spend money on what is otherwise a completely free game is a separate enterprise entirely.
You can call any of these things immoral, I suppose, but it's not the easy conversation the author wants to have in support of "ennobling", "enriching", and "advancing."
We have introduced specialists of various sorts, with varying titles: project manager, program manager, product manager, technical project manager. The introduction of non-managerial technical-track engineering leadership roles for those smart engineers who either can't or won't be good managers has further splintered off the value-add of the engineering manager.
In between team leads and C-staff there are N levels of people who's job has been highly eroded and who struggle hard to add value to their teams.
I am really interested to see where this is going.
'Today they’re surrounded a vast army of scrum-masters and evangelists, recycling (competently, mostly) the same insights, and an even larger crowd performing half-assed renditions of steps learned by rote: “Yeah, we do agile. We have a standup every day.” Many of these renditions have the professionalism, but not the passion, of a small-town talent show.'
Which may be my favorite bit in the article.
I suppose the Singapore test will be interesting as it is some homosexual acts are technically illegal but not generally enforced. Sounds like a good candidate for an easy win... but if it's ineffective there it will presumably be ineffective everywhere.
The less happy side of the symbol: that amazon really didn't care about employees was reinforced in other ways as well. A common refrain from Jeff: if you're not happy here, leave. Life is too short to be unhappy.
In some senses that's a bold answer, and an honest one. But note that the answer was very, very rarely: what can we do to make life better here?
The door desks were also a symbol to us all that if you wanted to work at a place that cared about your health, well-being, and happiness, you might very well want to move on.
But, to be fair, three counterbalancing factors held people there: hard engineering problems, the very real prospect of wealth, and working on a product that was very, very successful. I never heard Bezos give anyone the sugar water speech: he didn't have to. It was obvious that Amazon was changing the world.
That doesn't ring true to me. Professional software development is inherently a collaborative process. Yes, there are portion of the day or week when the primary interaction is the human struggling with the computer to bend the machine to the human will, but the process of defining the product, the architecture, and the implementation -- even in a small company -- is work that involves interpersonal interaction.
I don't know any software developer who doesn't need to -- and benefit from -- talking to real people on a daily basis. The successful programmers are the ones who can actually do this without burning bridges and making enemies.
So: I'd love to hear more about your experience, because it's a pretty far cry from anything I've seen.
This discussion becomes one of predator and prey, and can women ever be safe in a world or a profession where men have enough power for the predators to proceed unfettered.
To my original point, it is certainly possible that by virtue of the dynamic that the profession is already dominated by men, women stay out of it purely for concern of their own safety, and the rise of 'brogrammer' culture certainly reinforces this ( see http://www.cnn.com/2012/05/07/tech/web/brogrammers/index.htm... ), but I'm not persuaded that's actually the necessary-and-sufficient condition. I think the brogrammer culture is overstated, and women have taken down many male-dominated fields, opening them (and public opinion) to a better way.
Personally, I hope progamming is next in that queue, because I, for one, am tired of working with all white (and indian, and chinese) guys.
That's not male or female developers, that's all developers. However, I am interested in the "Fire and Forget" meme applied to software management. I'm going to noodle on that some more.