A piece in Newsweek by Google’s Schmidt and Varian discusses ten guidelines to hiring and maintaining good knowledge workers. Several guidelines, such as catering to the every need of knowledge workers, are feasible only in thriving companies, but there are a couple of points in the article that are applicable to all companies and have been continually iterated in project management literature. Some of these points are reiterated here.
One of the guidelines discusses the acceptance of a potential knowledge worker into a development team. It seems that Schmidt and Varian promote a series of interviews between a candidate and different members of a team. Interviewers that represent the company should include management, project managers, and potential team members. I have had excellent interview experiences with both Heavy Iron Studios and Amazon.com. I met with project managers and the people with whom I would be working closely. At Amazon, I was able to meet software developers with varying levels of tenure at the company. Allowing a candidate to meet with several people of a company provides more information that a candidate can use to evaluate the company, and it gives the company more opportunities to market itself to the candidate. It is important to remember that job interviews are intended not only for the company to evaluate a candidate, but for a candidate to evaluate the potential employer. More interviews between a candidate and company provide more information that can be useful for both parties in reaching an employment decision.
Another point worthy of mention is the advice to “pack them in.†Effective use of office space is the underlying principle that this guideline promotes. Many people of the traditional mindset are well aware that assigning an office to an individual is a way to grant elevated status to the individual. It makes the company’s appreciation for a worker more visible, and due to its effect on the worker’s morale, it has the potential of increasing the worker’s productivity.
In opposition to traditional office arrangements, Schmidt and Varian suggest that a team work closely together instead of separating team members with office walls. This increases productivity for the entire team by minimizing the cost of communication. This worked pretty well for the quality assurance teams at THQ. QA teams worked in a small area and were able to communicate effectively with each other. This reduced the amount of duplicated work, and it fostered team identity. Office spaces and partitions are most effective when they are used to group people with a common objective and separate groups of people who are working on different projects.
I strongly believe that development team leaders should share the same office space as the rest of the team. There are some gains to such an arrangement as long as it does not degenerate into command style management, where the team leaders are constantly monitoring the activity of each team member. The team will recognize the team leaders more as a member of the team and less of a disconnected authoritative figure. It encourages team members to communicate with their team leads. It also allows team leads to passively monitor their team’s progress. Physical placement of exceptional team leaders within the team will bolster respect from the team members for the leads, and under the direction of respected team leaders as “aggregator of viewpoints,†the team will excel.
As software projects scale to meet growing business needs, the unit of production changes from individual software developers to software development teams. Consideration in forming and utilizing development teams is important to companies, particularly to those that develop applications that are used by people outside of these companies.
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As much as the software industry overdog and the its representatives are disfavored, I do find Bill Gates very respectable. The scholarship program for law students that was formed in honor of his father is a great gift. I, as a juror, have seen young public defenders and prosecutors at work. I am fairly certain that these people do not receive the same amount of monetary pay that private firms offer, and it is great for Bill Gates to create a scholarship that can bring fresh, enthusiastic lawyers into public service.
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There is no reason for ISPs to block certain ports, but according to this blog entry, it seems that some still do. SBC Yahoo! DSL blocks outgoing connections on port 25 (SMTP) by default, however, they allow their clients to request the port to be opened. Whether or not SBC Yahoo! DSL unblocks outgoing connections to port 25 for only a particular destination is uncertain. Blocking ports is essentially restricting access to the whole Internet, and I would have sought another ISP if my provider was very strict about accessing third-party SMTP servers or operating servers from my home.
ISPs know which client’s credentials are used to connect to their service. They also have the means of determining which account is abusing their service. ISPs do throttle their clients’ bandwidth already, and they can further diminish the connection quality of abusing, jabbering, or compromised clients. They do not need to block these ports by default. Blocking popular ports, such as HTTP, evidences their lack of enthusiasm to take advantage of the networking tools they have as Internet service providers. It is an indication that the ISP is not strongly motivated to provide unobstructed Internet service to its clients.
I have been running an old computer with OpenBSD as a NAT router since the first day with my ISP. SBC Yahoo! DSL does not support it, but they also do not prevent it. I have also operated a webserver after the first week. Although they have been targetted by lawsuits demanding more protection mechanisms from the Internet, they have been a great ISP. I have been experiencing a lot of dropped connections lately, but I am happy overall for their unobtrusiveness while providing a generally reliable connection to the Internet. I have been an SBC Yahoo! DSL customer for approximately three years.
If an ISP is uncooperative about port unblock requests from hobbyists that are interested in gaining experience in IT administration, then three good solutions are very feasible: sign up for a dedicated hosting plan, experiment with network configuration in a private network, or simply look for another ISP and inform the restrictive ISP on the reason for abandoning them. It is very important that dissatisfied customers discontinue financially supporting restrictive ISPs. There are many ISPs available, and some of them are operated by professional computing hobbyists that simply love what they do and will not prevent their customers from experiencing the pride and joy of running legitimate servers at home.
Wired magazine’s Robert Andrews claims that Digg Just Might Bury Slashdot. Digg’s interface is more sleek than that of Slashdot. For example, links to the items under discussion are easily found as the title of each Digg. More items are presented on Digg’s homepage along with concise descriptions. Stories that are presented on Digg’s homepage are also determined by the Digg community. Digg is definitely a welcomed source of additional reading material.
An IT article is publicizing a remote hole in Microsoft Internet Explorer that can be allegedly used to execute arbitrary code. The latest virus definition update for McAfee VirusScan prevents the proof of concept page at computerterrorism.com from executing the payload right after Internet Explorer crashes, but systems without third-party security products may be vulnerable. I applaud Pearson of computerterrorism.com for recognizing the memory location of code that Internet Exporer fails to execute and its potential for exploitation.