Evgeny Morozov: The IGod: Steve Jobs’s Pursuit Of Perfection—and The Consequences. We spent some time in our family talking about what’s the trade-off we want to make. We ended up talking a lot about design, but also about the values of our family. Did we care most about getting our wash done in an hour versus an hour and a half? Or did we care most about our clothes feeling really soft and lasting longer? Did we care about using a quarter of the water? We spent about two weeks talking about this every night at the dinner table. Jobs’s meticulous unpacking of the values embedded in different washing machines, and his insistence on comparing them to the values he wanted to live by, would be applauded by moralistic philosophers of technology from Heidegger to Ellul, though it may be a rather arduous way of getting on with life.
Jobs himself was never shy about the value that Apple products were to embody: it was liberation—from manual work, from being limited to just a few dozen songs on your music player, from being unable to browse the Internet on your phone. Brain scan: Taking the long view. What Good Bosses Do With Bad Apples. This is the second in a series excerpted from a new chapter in the paperback version of Good Boss, Bad Boss, a New York Times bestseller by Robert Sutton.
Read the first installment, Are You A Power Poisoned Boss? Here. Making subtraction a way of life isn't a theme raised in Good Boss, Bad Boss, but as I began thinking about many of the main ideas, and Matthew May's great book In Pursuit of Elegance, I realized that great bosses have a "subtraction mind-set. " They are always looking to remove bad or necessary things. As we know, "bad is stronger than good.” When I speak to managers and executives, rotten apples provoke especially strong reactions. Another way some bosses deal with rotten apples--especially those with skills that are tough to replace or who have so much job security they are impossible to fire--is to "subtract them" physically, to isolate them so they don't infect others. Bad apples aren't the only thing that great bosses remove. [Image: Flickr user MrB-MMX] Every software project I’ve worked on has used the "Spanish Theory" of project management, and its likely yours have too.
The "Spanish Theory" says that management's job is to extract the maximum resources (= developer effort) from the smallest amount of money (= developer salary). In practice what this often means for the developer is unpaid overtime (also known as "crunch time"), something very familiar to game developers, and also common in traditional software development, as the project nears its deadline.
But those unpaid hours are actually costing you, the developer, because you can't get them back. You've sacrificed time in your personal life with your family and instead have chosen to work on the company's project - something of large value has been sacrificed for something of lesser value. If this imbalance continues past a reasonable level and unpaid overtime becomes the norm, then many developers will become dissatisfied and leave the company, increasing the company's staff turnover (churn) rate. The Spanish Theory of Value is alive and well among managers everywhere.
Follow @dodgy_coder. Lean Startup, Big Company: Challenges and Recommendations | You Can Change It Later. Posted on | February 9, 2012 | 7 Comments Over the last year or so I’ve worked with a few large organizations to solve product strategy issues. Typically, the organization is working to introduce a new product line or concept to the market, and sometimes they have already entered the market but don’t have a clear understanding of what stands between the product and financial success. My observation is that large corporations have a capable process for bringing incremental products to market, but there are many issues when they try to enter a new market or create a disruptive new product for their current markets.
Yet this kind of innovation is critical to the long term success of the organization. This isn’t a new problem nor is it poorly studied: corporations have always struggled with disruptive innovation. Challenges There are a few recurring challenges unique to large corporations when it comes to adopting lean, iterative product development techniques: Solutions Qualified yes! Comments. Our Emergent Digital Future. What will the digital world look like in ten years? The trends are already clear. Capacities in bandwidth and storage will continue on their exponential path. The explosion in the volume of information and number of devices will persist. Our data will be linked and most likely be processed in qubits rather than bits. However, trends tell us very little. It’s discontinuities that drive history. The Cloud We used to have massive mainframes, which were housed in a basement somewhere.
In those early days, the driving force was computing power. Notice the logarithmic scale. This represents a true paradigm shift. Meanwhile, On The Client Side… When Tim Berners-Lee created the Web back in 1989, it was mainly for the purpose of organizing documents. Utilizing a technique called client side scripting, they communicate with the server for you and do some of the work themselves, so you don’t have to wait for the screen to refresh to do simpler tasks. Linked Data Mobile Explosion Quaerendo Invenietis. On Business Madness. I am not intentionally a business person. Over the course of my career to date I’ve worked at companies of various sizes, and have been situated at commensurately varying distances from the concerns of running a business: funding, sales, forecasting and planning, marketing, payroll, legal matters, and so forth. In that time, I’ve developed an interest in the mechanics of business. It seemed prudent to know where my paycheck was coming from.
Still, I got to keep my distance from the “business stuff”. Being now a co-founder of a startup has made it difficult to stay impartial when considering how businesses work, how they succeed, and how they fail. I’ve made a couple of angel investments, and I advise a couple of other startups. It’s hard to spend one’s time and money this way and not develop an opinion about what is a “good business” or a “bad business” and the practices and decisions that support such outcomes. We mistake dumb luck for a machine that produces success. Pattern Matching. Walter Isaacson's 'Steve Jobs' Tuesday, 14 February 2012 What is Apple at heart: a software company, or a hardware company? This is a perennial question. The truth, of course, is that Apple is neither. Apple is an experience company. That they create both hardware and software is part of creating the entire product experience. But, as a thought experiment, which is more important to you?
What computer would you rather use? For me, the answers are easy. What do you think Steve Jobs would have chosen, facing the same choices? Truth is he probably would have smashed any of such hypothetical devices against the nearest wall in a fit of rage, but, if forced to choose, I believe Jobs would have gone with the software.1 The hardware and the software are both important; Jobs clearly cared deeply about both. They all have these keyboards that are there whether you need them or not to be there. A few minutes later, Jobs said: Design Is How It Works “Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like. The World’s 50 Most Innovative Companies 2012.
Bret Victor - Inventing on Principle. Viewpoint: Gartner on the changing nature of work. 10 February 2012Last updated at 00:04 By Tom Austin Vice president, Gartner Hive mind: Working around the clock in hyper-connected 'swarms' - is this the future of work?
As part of our Future of Work series running throughout February, we asked some experts to give us their take on how the way we work is going to change. Tom Austin, vice president at Gartner, has been a Gartner Fellow for a decade. He has also been chief of research at Gartner for social software, collaboration, communications, information management, business intelligence and the high-performance workplace, and is now leading an effort at defining "people-centred strategies". If you were to sit down today and create a company completely from scratch, would you copy the processes, practices and structures of today's organisations, or would you try to do something different?
Of course, I ask this knowing that the world of work has changed dramatically in the past 20 years. Spontaneity will trump reactivity. The Guts of a New Machine. So you can say that the iPod is innovative, but it's harder to nail down whether the key is what's inside it, the external appearance or even the way these work together. One approach is to peel your way through the thing, layer by layer. The Aura f you want to understand why a product has become an icon, you of course want to talk to the people who dreamed it up and made it.
And you want to talk to the design experts and the technology pros and the professors and the gurus. Among other things, they do some fashion design and they are DJ's who ''spin'' on iPods, setting up participatory events called iParties. Before you even get to the surface of the iPod, you encounter what could be called its aura. But the iPod is making an even bigger impression. Tuesday nights, Andrew Andrew's iParty happens at a club called APT on the spooky, far western end of 13th Street. Between songs at APT, each Andrew analyzed the iPod. The iPod's history is comparatively free of lightning-bolt moments. The Science of Serendipity. The Eight Pillars of Innovation. Desperately Seeking Simplicity - Chris Zook. By Chris Zook | 12:00 PM February 2, 2012 The softly drifting snowflakes that greeted me every morning at the World Economic Forum in Davos this year were an inadequate warm-up for the cold blast of reality I felt in session after session during this five day Congress on the “state of the world.”
As I participated, one theme seemed omnipresent — that while events are unfolding in the world at an accelerating pace, increasingly complex institutions are less and less able to deal with them. I heard it in the opening remarks of WEF founder Klaus Schwab who talked about a growing phenomenon of “burn-out” among world leaders with finite energy and time to put against seemingly bottomless complexity. An example was a discussion session of tired-looking European finance ministers, defensive and elusive about the speed of acting on the Euro crisis. Government is the most visible crucible for this clash of speed versus complexity, yet businesses are not far behind. When Truisms Are True. Innovation and the Bell Labs Miracle. Data Monday: Amazon Prime.
Another Myth Bites The Dust: How Apple Listens To Its Customers. IT Software Community - Jan Krueger - In Hiring Programmers, Style Trumps Language. Mobile Home Bloggers Messages Tw | Fb | In | Rss Operations Software Application Transformation Software Storage Essentials Jan Krueger In Hiring Programmers, Style Trumps Language , Software Developer , 2/21/2012 Bio Email This Print Comment 33 comments Perhaps it's time to adopt a different approach to hiring programmers -- namely, judging them according to their general understanding of and approach to programming.
Some time ago, I stumbled across a fascinating talk by Robert C. In computer science, of course, "notation" refers to programming languages. Martin's main point is that, despite personal tastes, programming languages are not really that different from one another. Yet most of the programming job advertisements that I come across are looking for people knowledgeable in a particular language, like C++ or Java.
This is wrong-headed, because it wastes programmers' potential and leads to less-than-optimal hiring decisions. This is not just my own belief. Email This Print Comment comments.