Thriving in the 21st century workplace

In place of actual content, I give you this.

It’s been a busy week; I celebrated my 40th birthday with a small vacation up to Portland, Maine, and came back to the kind of “Everyone Must Change” insanity that everyone at EMC is familiar with.  But, I didn’t forget you.  Links I stumbled on via RSS this week:

• There are reasons to like and dislike using external identity providers like Facebook, but recent changes in what apps must ask permission to do will help tip that balance.
• How to research your blog posts.  Nice breakdown!
• I can’t wait to get this into a Words With Friends game.
• Management issues for terrorist organizations.
• Sad report of an assassination in India.

Until next week….

Recently, I took the Certified Scrum Product Owner class with Angela Druckman.  Angela was an excellent teacher and brought some new perspectives to me, and everyone in the class.

My organization has been using Agile/Scrum in one way or another for several years now, and much of the class felt like a review.  But, as the class went on, I realized just how much we had modified “textbook” Scrum to fit our needs, and it gave me some interesting moments of introspection relating to what that tells me about our organization and the way we do business.  That may not be the value most people expect in taking a class, but I tend to find that the biggest wins from formal training aren’t usually in direct addition of knowledge (“I know Kung Fu“), but rather in being forced to think about things in new ways, or in the side conversations you have the luxury of having since you aren’t at your desk focusing on getting something done.

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Last week I took the Scrum Certified Product Owner course, and I’ve got some ideas of content to share here from that, but in the mean time, enjoy some information I’ve stolen from my RSS feeds….

• Is impactful business jargon … or something even weirder?  I love Language Log for posts like this.
• Want to raise prices?  Tell a story.  Does this factor in with salary negotiation, I wonder?
• This visualization of sorting algorithms put a smile on my inner CS geek’s face.
• Yes, there are fake likes on Facebook.  I didn’t quite picture it like this, though.
• What happens to your data validation code when employees have names like “Null”?  A real question or a thought experiment?

That’s all for now….

This year, I’ve had two different occasions where I had to work with team members who had invested significant amounts of time into developing features which ended up not being included in our shipping product.  This wasn’t prototype code, this was code we fully intended to ship while it was under development, but chose not to for business reasons.

As I got ready to break the news to the team, I remembered the first time that happened to me as a developer, and how frustrated I was.  You think back on the weekends you worked to hit deadlines, the hours you spent trying to find tricky bugs, the wars you went to over design philosophy, and you wonder if any of it was worth it.

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A bit less than I had hoped to share this week, but since it’s Friday I’ll widen my scope a bit and give some links which don’t directly map to the subject matter of my blog but which I think you might be interested in anyway…

• CNET offers a fairly low-content report on requests from the Federal Government for user passwords.
• Facebook wants to know why specifically people hide certain ads.  Isn’t the answer usually “because they’re ads”?
• Haliburton admits to destroying evidence in Gulf oil spill probe.  This isn’t interesting to me, but the question of what we’d all do if our managers said “Remember that test you ran?  Can you delete that from the results database?” is.

Enjoy your weekend….

After a weekend spend camping, I’m back and scouring my RSS feeds for links to share with you this morning.  Here’s what I’ve got:

I’m not sure what to make of the idea of Granny in the cloud helping with education, but I do find it interesting to keep an eye on what our technological innovations are leading to in this space.

I enjoyed reading Robin Hanson’s piece on questions being more important than answers.  This is going in my folder to review next time I’m dealing with the interview process.

I enjoy reading about how other people work.  I could never answer email just once a week, but it was an interesting read in any case.

The article quickly turns into talking about the specifics of Stack Overflow, but I like the push to really examine the re-usability of our code.   This is something I’ve been thinking about lately as a technical manager, about the obvious (and hidden) costs of doing something poorly because we know we should be doing it well but don’t really know how to.

Sorry not much for a Monday; I’ll be back later this week….

As I said, I’m trying to get back into the habit of providing content here on a regular basis, and starting by just presenting links I gather from my RSS subscriptions (in an attempt to prove to myself that I’m still getting value from those feeds).

Today’s links:

• Seth Godin asks “Not even once?” and reminds me of an old blog post I wrote about lessons from poker.
• Johanna Rothman talks about the kind of work managers do, and why it’s not as easy at it looks from the outside, in a post that would serve new managers well.
• Gina talks about using engineering development tools to manage other kinds of tasks.  I’m reminded of my iterative approach to writing performance reviews.
• AllFacebook summarizes a conversation about users’ visibility into who is reading their Facebook updates.  I found this quote interesting as relates to what users think they like and what they actually like: “We’ve run many tests showing that any time we stop ranking and show posts in chronological order, the number of stories people read decreases and the amount of likes and comments people produce decreases.”

Google is well known for starting up experimental services (Buzz, anyone?) and shutting them down.  After watching this cycle several times, you’d think the surprise would wear off, but I was genuinely shocked and disappointed when they finally pulled the plug on Google Reader earlier this summer.

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I’ve recently been doing a lot of interviewing — both of engineers and managers — to fill a couple open positions in our organization.  Let’s get this out of the way … if I’m interviewing you, I’m checking LinkedIn to see if we’re connected.  If you have a blog, I’m reading a couple posts in it.  I’m probably not bothering to do a full search on your name, but I’m definitely not going to go into our interview with just your resume as a start.  I fully expect you to do the same to me.

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