Why the Myers-Briggs test is totally meaningless. Why Nerds are Unpopular. February 2003 When we were in junior high school, my friend Rich and I made a map of the school lunch tables according to popularity.
This was easy to do, because kids only ate lunch with others of about the same popularity. We graded them from A to E. A tables were full of football players and cheerleaders and so on. The Expert (Short Comedy Sketch) Joke_19970213_01. ========================== How Software Companies Die ========================== - Orson Scott Card The environment that nurtures creative programmers kills management and marketing types - and vice versa.
Programming is the Great Game. It consumes you, body and soul. When you're caught up in it, nothing else matters. When you emerge into daylight, you might well discover that you're a hundred pounds overweight, your underwear is older than the average first grader, and judging from the number of pizza boxes lying around, it must be spring already. But you don't care, because your program runs, and the code is fast and clever and tight.
The Last Re-Org You’ll Ever Do. Here’s the problem.
The design of an organization with 10,000 people in it is an insurmountable intellectual puzzle. Whatever your mental model of the organization might be, it’s too simplistic. No human, and no current machine, can handle the complexity. It’s literally impossible. In Notes on The Synthesis of Form, author and polymath Christopher Alexander talks about the exponential nature of design challenges. The end of bosses « FullStart. 0inShare Published on October 14, 2013 in Knowledge by Walter Chen The most innovative tech companies today aren’t just inventing new technology, they’re also building totally new kinds of companies.
Mature startups like Valve and Github and smaller up-and-comers like Treehouse and Medium have done away with managers who boss people around and expect servile compliance. Instead, these companies have a flat organizational structure of makers without a middle-management layer. Individuals manage themselves and each other to build awesome things through peer management. On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs.
Ever had the feeling that your job might be made up?
That the world would keep on turning if you weren’t doing that thing you do 9-5? David Graeber explored the phenomenon of bullshit jobs for our recent summer issue – everyone who’s employed should read carefully… On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber. In the year 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that, by century’s end, technology would have advanced sufficiently that countries like Great Britain or the United States would have achieved a 15-hour work week. Nouvel onglet. James Somers – Web developer money. There’s this great moment in the documentary Jiro Dreams of Sushi (2011) when the world’s most celebrated sushi chef turns to his son, who is leaving to start his own restaurant, and says: ‘You have no home to come back to.’
Which, when you think about it, isn’t harsh or discouraging but is in fact the very best thing you could say to someone setting out on an adventure. Last October I quit my job to become a freelance journalist. I had only ever made about $900 from writing, but my latest project, a profile of Douglas Hofstadter, had attracted interest from a couple of big American magazines. I stood to make anywhere between $10,000 and $20,000 from the piece. My plan was to sell that profile and keep writing others like it. How to Win at Email : Nikil's Thoughts. I used to spend hours a day reading every single email that I got.
During my Freshman Activities Fair at Stanford, I got really excited and signed up for > 70 clubs – everything from windsurfing to Indian dance. The next morning, I began to understand exactly what I had done. I was added to all of the club mailing lists and started getting over a hundred emails per day. For the next couple of years I actually read every single email that I got – looking back now this seems pretty ridiculous. Over the following years, I started getting better and better and managing my email, learning a tip here and there and trying to see what worked for me.
With the strategies below, I can usually deal with the > 100 emails I get a day in under 20-30 minutes . 1. Innovation debt. By now, most people have heard of Technical Debt; the cost of messy code that grows over time, like interest on an overdue loan.
For the last couple of years I’ve been talking at No Fluff Just Stuff conferences about the concept of “Innovation Debt”. I’ve been planning to blog about this for a while. Inside GitHub's Super-Lean Management Strategy. Imagine you could run a company on autopilot: no tier of “managers,” just people creating value by doing what they love and letting the rest fall into place.
How much money would you save by eliminating all that bureaucracy? How much faster could you move? How much conflict could you erase? How much bigger could you grow? How much more creative would the culture be? There is at least one company that has been experimenting to get closer to the ideal: GitHub. If you’re not familiar with GitHub, ask a programmer. Hubspot Presentation On Company Culture. How To Recruit More Female Engineers (By Etsy)
We just set our salaries by... voting? The fun (and terrifying) thing about running a company is that you're allowed to do... anything.
Well, any legal thing. Within the boundaries of the law, every choice is yours to make, and every choice must be made — either by consideration or by default.