Came across the Heinlein quote again today: http://personalmba.com/core-human-skills this time in the context of a “Business” professional. There is another point made in the blog post about how to be successful. You can either be an expert in a narrow field (top 1%) or be very good (top 25%) in multiple fields. The author calls these “Core Human Skills” This is worth a read, and I will definitely abstract these concepts out in my interview process. ...
This about this: If you have a project with an estimated cost of $1MM and you expect a return of $1.1MM then strict governance and process controls are critical to success. A variance of 10% will take you from profitability to a loss. If you have a project with the same estimated $1MM cost but an expected return of $50MM then project management is less critical. a 10% variance will not really matter in the big picture. Given my fictional example even a 100% to 500% cost overrun could happen and keep the “success” label. ...
Because I happen to be both buying a new car and deploying new infrastructure the realization dawned upon me about how similar these two activities are. You start the investigation with some preconceived “gut-level” notions. code: Multiprocess distributed job engine is what I need car : I want a Mazda 3 with “Zoom Zoom” Everybody has a story about why your choice is bad code: “In my last job I used a python-C++ wrapper from vcron” car : My cousin"s friends brother had a mazda and the engine fell out on 95 ...
I love to rant over how bad HOAs are. There are so many case studies in my life where otherwise happy friendly people become tyrants when given a bit of power. From the band leader that threatened my wedding would be a failure to the people that run the Home Owners Associations. It takes a certain type of fellow to run an HOA. My buck’s county HOA is much better then the one in Manalanapan. They forced me to keep human feces in my garage, (more about dirty diapers and not allowing a gargage can to be on the side of the house) and would not let a neighbor keep a boat in the lot because it was not a car. ...
The google blog recently put up a remarkably content-free post on their product blog about how they use iterative design and usability studies to develop enhancements to their core search offering. Official Google Blog: Behind the scenes of the Search Options panel. We do similar testing for our search product (http://search.comcast.net) and we actually run 8-12 live tests at any given time. The real users using the product in the wild give us fantastic insight that is combined with the more traditional studies in order to guide us. ...