jib

Because often you are not hiring a team, you only have so much work/budget. And if you do, odds are you will need to break up the team a short while afterwards for some other needs. And you want to merge them into existing teams anyways, to not lose institutional knowledge.

I think almost all "hire a team" hirings happen as aquihires - if the team has proven that they can deliver something over time - great, buy their company.

I dont see how ability to organise as a team could be done in a short enough time that you could evaluate them on anything other than "is someone in the group good at organising a team". At which point I'd probably just want to hire that guy anyways, because I know I can split them off and have him organise another team too.

The government job agency is also a good place to check:

http://www.arbetsformedlingen.se/Globalmeny/Other-languages....

I think search is just in Swedish, but many jobs are listed in English:

http://www.arbetsformedlingen.se/4.38a41afd11d99fbdb65800016...

You pay a tiny amount of church tax if you are a member of the Swedish church.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_tax#Sweden

Yeah that's fair. It was sloppy language from me.

The point I wanted to make was that you play hands where your odds of winning is <50% a large amount of the time.

A good h2h limit strategy probably plays 95% of buttons and 70% of big blinds or so, so at least 30% of the hands you play are neutral EV at best (symmetrical game, so at most 50% are +EV preflop and you play at least 80% of all hands).

Only playing hands you are +EV against a full range would be exploitable as it is way too tight in heads up.

Limit means fixed size betting. Typically 1 big blinds preflop and flop, 2 big blinds on turn and river, with a max of 4 bets total on any street.

The algorithm sounds like it basically identifies the path with the least negative EV for any given action, which is essentially how humans play limit too. "If my opponent plays perfectly, what path will let me lose the least or break even"

Right up there with Picard's great theorem.

I use my email inbox. Many people will say that is wrong. :) I dont think it matters, as long as you have something that works for you. Paper, some app, email, whatever.

For me: Pick some system for dealing with stuff. I dont think it much matters which one you do as long as you have one and it isnt based on stuff actively being in your brain. Mine is inbox 0/4Ds whatever you want to call it, with me allowing myself to put tasks for me in there.

Most of those systems focus on aggressive prioritization and removing lists of tasks from your mind and moving them to paper.

Be aggressive about not storing stuff anywhere else. I used to have 10+ items that I semi-actively thought about - now I've reached a point where I have nothing at all loaded as "I must think about this/remember this/do this" - that stuff is all written down.

After that its just practice and repetition. Any time "I should do X" pops up, write it down in your system, or say "thats ok, I have it written down in the system" if you already have.

Doing this isnt all good - there are times that I miss having a long list spinning in the back of my head. It means you need to load the list actively if you're actually going to have discussions about what you are planning to do. Its weird in the start to go "Uh I have no idea, let me check" if you're asked what you're doing today/this week or asked if you have some great ideas about random topic X. But its overall a lot more effective to be focused on whatever you are actually doing rather than what you could be doing.

Probably because it is used in Ericson switches etc? A lot of stuff has been sold on the back of Erlang even though it is probably a niche language in terms of users/popularity.

There's not that many places where you end up biking through deep snow, on ice, in -20F for a long part of the season, right? Normally its one of the other (really cold, or ice) - if you have long periods of -20F then you have packed snow on roads, not ice, at least we do back home, and packed snow is fine to go on.

I'm from Sweden, and when I lived in Gothenburg I had no issues biking in -10 - -20C or so (which is what it maxes out at in that area, and even then only for a few weeks at most).

Snow is fine to go on - the worst is like 0C when its been melting and freezing so you get slippery ice, but even then you do fine most of the time as at least the car parts of the roads tend to be maintained with gravel. Assuming you live somewhere that regularly has cold weather your roads are most likely decently graveled too.

Of the classes I've taken, pure math classes are what have taught me the most about thinking. Physics a bit less, chemistry even a bit less. Chemical engineering less still.

Computer science varied depending on language - when it was Haskell the focus on thinking was a lot higher than when using Java or C, for me. The classes that used imperative languages tended to focus a lot more on nuts and bolts. Maybe that's just a preference of my uni though - they tended to teach algorithm classes etc in Haskell and database style classes in some imperative language, I think, so maybe the difference there is due to a choice from their side.

Organic chemistry, statistics, formal logic didnt evolve my thinking at all in my view.

I guess in short - the things that have developed my thinking the most are things that are about models and algorithms. You could probably run classes focusing on those, but Im not sure there is a big value in doing so compared to just teaching the subjects that are heavy in doing those tasks.

I would love some far east too - I have no experience with that though, so if someone has some advice I'd love to hear it too.

More notably to me they are all western.

There's a lot more diversity missed out on due to not having say Lem and the Strugasky brothers than on old and male imo.

Eastern European sci-fi is well worth spending some time on.

That is on about 3-4B revenue or so though, so its actually a pretty good profit margin.

Is that because of pricing or because of company structure/setup though? Ryanair is currently predicting 510M profit on 81M trips in Europe for 2014.

Not saying they are a model company in any way (the main thing I disagree with is some of their employee treatment), but they are certainly proving that it is possible to operate a profitable airline with low prices and high quality.

They're buying an IP for the future. Attached to that they also get a company with some staff (some of which are excellent at what they do).

If they have a solid idea of how they want to use the IP, it makes sense. It also comes with a massive risk though - it will be very easy for them to "be the guys who ruined Minecraft".

I imagine it will need to be something like "stay very hands-off for a significant amount of time to prove that they didnt in fact ruin it" followed by some way of turning it into a link in and value add for their existing products rather than something that they sell expansions/new stand-alones for.

Something like Minecraft being the Tetris/Solitaire of the 2010s or so? It comes pre-loaded with their OS's, create a great experience on surface tablets etc, trying to turn it into "the new Microsoft gives you cool stuff and makes it open for everyone" to position Microsoft as the open alternative to the more closed environments of Google and Apple?

I dont see how the purchase makes sense from a money-making point of view today - the Mojang crew hasn't proven they can do repeated success with new IPs, but I could totally see it making sense from a holistic point of view - successful integration of Minecraft in the Microsoft universe could add significant value to Microsoft as a whole.

I'll second that. College football (through whatever means I can get over here - i.e. most likely espn player this year) and twitch makes up 90% of the TV-style media I use.

This isnt a boss problem though, right? It's a problem of interaction between two people, where neither is expressing clearly what their real opinion is. There's a bit more responsibility on the person acting as boss to resolve it, as presumably he has a bit more experience with that kind of situation, but it's a two-way street.

As a manager, it is normal to be more directive with someone who is underperforming due to (perceived) lack of knowledge. You do need to be clear about you doing so though, and be clear about the path away from it.

I had a manager a long time ago who did it in a nice way. Our office was underperforming compared to the other offices he was managing, so he explained to everyone in an all hands meeting that he would be spending more time on control activities with the goal of getting back to not doing so once we were hitting delivery targets once more. No-one took offense to that, it was more "Ok, we are not performing at the level we need to be, and that means we will spend more time on control activities for a while, but to get out of that and back to our normal more laid back approach we need to do X, Y, Z."

The harmful situation is when you start spending more time on control activities without expressing why you are doing it and without explaining what the path out is. The responsibility for that is for sure on the boss, but also on the employee. If you are not asking "Ok, I have noticed this, why is that?" as an employee as well, then you are contributing to the situation and the downward spiral.

Im a project manager in customer support. I have a science (chemistry/physics/computer science) background, but I never worked with it professionally. The only programming I do is purely casual.

I enjoy reading about new tech and business - I like the mix of that and other general interest stories. Mostly I come here for the comments - I read comments before most articles, and I tend to only read the articles if there is a good discussion around them.

I love getting that stuff. For me, the fun in work is to work on stuff that is hard and fix it and/or make it easy.

I will work on easy stuff when it is necessary and stuff just needs to get done, and I recognise that a lot of work is about getting easy stuff done because value is often tied to tedium not to complexity, but to me the fun part is when value comes from making sense of the stuff that doesnt make sense currently.

I think we agree.

Thats the thing - the indicators when used right are used for science. Namely improvement of self or others. It gets harmful when they are solely used to determine if you should get a raise or get fired.

They can certainly be used to indicate problem areas i.e. "This guy is producing 50% less according to RANDOMKPI", does that make sense or do we need to fix something? But if they are used like "X is at 80% of RANDOMKPI, he will be fired if he is not at 90%" then they are harmful, obviously, because they dont take into account the much more important things like "X is at 80% of RANDOMKPI because he is unofficially the teacher of how to deal with anything in our payment systems, so he spends half his time helping out others, which adds way more value to us than if he was just implementing features" or whatever.

Once KPIs start to drive evaluations, you're down a slippery slope.

It is fine to have KPIs. When KPIs go out of control it is a sign of culture issues, or whatever you want to call it.

KPIs are just that. Indicators. Temperature is an indicator of good climate. If someone's answer to "it is cold in here" is to put a lighter under the thermometer then the problem isn't the thermometer, right? It is the people who are confusing indicators from goals. And that is a culture thing.

If that is your climate though you can still recover from it (I know we are doing way better than before at least:)).

First steps are to embrace ambiguity and uncertainty in evaluations. The culture twist (when I have seen it) comes from "Noone recognises my work" -> "Lets define KPIs for your work" -> "I am not evaluated fairly, look at how much work I do compared to guys that are evaluated better" -> "Lets define guidelines for evaluations based on our KPIs" -> "Everyone (except me) is cheating to score high on the KPIs to get better evaluations" -> "We need better KPIs that can't be cheated on" -> "We are doing a whole amount of stupid stuff because people worry about KPIs".

I think the first two steps are fine. There is direct business value in being able to compare how you are doing compared to the previous month, or some other department or whatever.

The problem comes in the third step - once the KPIs determine how someone is evaluated, then you are in a downwards spiral, because now you are saying that how you get there isn't as important as getting there. To get out of that you need to embrace the ambiguity that comes with letting evaluations happen, and maybe be "unfair".

Basically - uncertainty in evaluations is better than defining evaluations on KPIs. Solve the uncertainly by more discussions and reasoning, not by more rules.

Because it is hard and costly to have a system that does that effectively, and harder and more costly to actually maintain integrity in that system over time.

It IS impressive to be doing this, at least once you're past the stage of having a few guys doing customer support.

Building an integration between a CRM and a backlog/bug tracker has some complexity. Maintaining that over several years and proactively contacting requesters back is impressive. At least in my world. :)

Yep. Swedish post codes define mail delivery areas as well.

You can effectively sort on partials and get high accuracy.

For instance, the office I used to work in handled all of 421xx, 426xx and 436xx, as well as a few of the 430xx range.

Sorting was done by bucket sort (literally) on the top 3 digits in a central distribution location (all 5 for those like 430xx that was handled out of several offices), then distribution to each mail office, then another bucket sort on the full five digits, followed by another bucket sort on (roughly) street address, followed by a final sort on route.

This appears to lose all of that functionality.

Give the expansion a try. I am thoroughly enjoying it now, where I only played 2 characters to 60 and then stopped with the core game. Most of the things that put me off playing are now fixed.

I mispronounce my own name most of the time. When I'm speaking English (which is 99% of the time I guess) I just use the English pronounciation, because it is easier, and who cares, really?

The EU laws allows for data to leave assuming you follow guidelines that makes sure the EU laws around privacy are respected in the country the data is exported to.

That's the genius though. They are the ultimate Walmart, and that is one of the best things to be. Even better, they are Walmart with the option to expand into anything, because they don't have the stigma of being cheap. They can sell luxury goods (at small margins), highly complex technical solutions (at small margins) etc etc. What Amazon have managed to do is essentially to brand a bunch of things that were highly commoditized before. The potential in that is amazing, and almost scary.

By your reasoning Amazon are crazy for keeping as low margins as they are. They are leaving money on the table in the belief that as long as they stay somewhat profitable their future earnings will outweigh the short-term benefits from the money grab they certainly could make. They also have the added benefit of being hard to attack this way.

Fred Wilson is making a similar argument. By leaving some money on the table you increase your long term growth potential. People will be more likely to make deals with his funds if they know that he will make them a good deal rather than try to make the best deal for himself. His belief is that that strategy has a better chance of success, as he will get in on more good deals than someone who doesnt.

As long as he is open about that fact I see no problem. If you dont believe that is a good strategy you shouldnt invest with him. If you do, you should, in the same way that you should buy amazon stock if you believe in their strategy.