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Working from home

Jonathan pointed out an interesting Radio 4 series on Working From Home:

The peculiar thing about working from home is that even people who do it are curious about it... Think of this series as a form of confessional for all of us.

"You get up in the morning, turn your computer and end up starting to work before you've put your socks on."

posted Wed 10 Jan 2007 in /business | link

Utterly obvious recruitment tips, #1

To get hired for a good job you should think of things from your would-be employer's point of view — to start with, that means the recruiter or hiring manager.

Here I have dozens of file attachments called cv.pdf or cv_canonical.pdf, and a couple called cv__jane_doe__software_engineer.pdf. In a just-barely-significant way it does show who is trying to understand the other person's situation.

posted Thu 7 Sep 2006 in /business/hiring | link

How to exit gracefully

Good advice on how to leave a job with style. (From Don Marti, and no, it doesn't apply to me any time soon, but it's still good advice.)

And, from the same author, Nerd Attention Deficit Disorder.

posted Fri 11 Aug 2006 in /business | link

Funding open source projects

Mark Shuttleworth, founder/CEO of Canonical, has a blog entry about the difficulties of funding open source projects. My take is that, in some respects, open source projects are no different from any other software project: many of them fail. In particular, projects will fail if they do not clearly focus on (in Mark's words) solving the unique problems first. For example, a version-control tool ought to have a friendly web interface, but this is not an essential or urgent problem. Solving it will not tell you whether you're on the right track or not. For a new design it is good to first tackle the problems which have the potential to falsify your model.

posted Mon 31 Jan 2005 in /business | link

It doesn't matter what job you apply to and it never has

Interesting post from Heather Leigh at Microsoft on how recruiters try to find the right person from a stack of incoming resumes. She says that the particular position the person originally applied for is very unimportant compared to keyword matches, the general impression of their resume, etc.

Worth a read.

I guess the general lesson, as always, is to try to write in a way that will make sense to your audience.

posted Thu 6 Jan 2005 in /business | link

Sun Underpants

Nathan Thomas from redhat sinks the slipper into Sun's open source Solaris x86 idea.

posted Mon 27 Sep 2004 in /business/sun | link

Microsoft software implicated in LAX shutdown

ZDNet says

A three-hour system shutdown that affected South California's airports was reportedly caused by a technician who failed to reboot an MS-based system A bug in a Microsoft system compounded by human error was ultimately responsible for a three-hour radio breakdown that left hundreds of aircraft aloft without guidance on Tuesday, according to a report in the LA Times.

(The story is here, but it seems to screw up Firefox, so you might want to view it in Lynx or Dillo.)

posted Thu 23 Sep 2004 in /business/microsoft | link

MiniMSFT

Mini-Microsoft is the blog of a Microsoft employee who wants the company to shrink down to regain some more small-company aggression and agility. I think that not many companies manage to succeed in doing so, even if they want to.

This reminds me very much of Christensen's The Innovator's Dilemma. (Is that too obvious to even mention?) One of Christensen's points is that it is extremely difficult for established companies to cope with new disruptive technologies.

It's remarkable how much Linux fits the pattern of disruptive technologies. At first, it's just a toy, it's not very capable, it's missing lots of industrial-strength qualities, big companies and big customers laugh at it. However, it is cheap and flexible, and this attracts cheap-ass students, small companies, innovators. Eventually it grows up, but it's hard for the big companies of the previous generation to adapt.

You can make a similar argument about other technologies: web user interfaces were pretty clunky at first, but they've grown up so that as Tim O'Reilly says, the most interesting applications never get installed on your PC.

Of course this is not to say that every small/cheap new technology is destined to disrupt the big players.

Death is a part of the life of companies. Possibly the best fix for Microsoft shareholders is to start a new business nearby, put money into that, and poach their best people before someone else does.

posted Tue 21 Sep 2004 in /business/microsoft | link

from the archives

Don Marti on Solaris x86:

For a little background on Sun's situation, have a look at this: "Harris Corporation Announces Release Of Linux-compatible OS/COMET Satellite Network Control Software"

That makes the second OS on which the software will run — Solaris was the first.

Harris is an ISV whose customers are putting big rockets into space and running 24/7 satellite network control centers. The cost of a Solaris box and license versus an x86 box and a copy of Linux isn't even noise to these people. But if you're putting in a new installation, you want to go with the OS platform that has a future, not the one that has been steadily getting its lunch eaten for seven years.

Consensus reality check, via Google:
"solaris to linux migration" 3030.
"to solaris migration" 424.

Jonathan Schwartz may not be a "visionary" but he's at least not an idiot. Linux beat UnixWare faster than anyone thought it would: and nobody has a good reason why it won't do the same to Solaris.

posted Mon 6 Sep 2004 in /business/sun | link

Negative externalities of Google

Google is on the whole an enormous and wonderful public good.

However, it has at least one bad side effect: it's strongly encouraging spammers to try anything to get well-respected sites to link to their viagra web sites. Therefore: blog comment spam, referer spam, wiki spam, ...

Prior to Google, those links would only help criminals if people clicked on them, which requires a certain amount of thought to make them look relevant. Because googlebot is not quite so clever yet, even stupid links can get some marginal gain for spammers.

I can imagine an optimal algorithm might disregard those links. But until spammers really believed that the links weren't helping, we'd still see lots of web spam.

posted Fri 3 Sep 2004 in /business/google | link

This week it's Solaris

Johnathan Schwartz writes that

[Sun] is committed to making Solaris the volume leader on all systems.

Good luck with that.

posted Fri 3 Sep 2004 in /business/sun | link

What's he building in there?

(Cue Tom Waits)

More on vmunix.com

posted Thu 26 Aug 2004 in /business/google | link

That interview

Jason Kottke has the notorious Google/Playboy interview. I don't know if much of the content will be new to people who have been following Google, but the very fact that these questions are asked by Playboy demonstrates some kind of success.

Ultimately you want to have the entire world's knowledge connected directly to your mind. — Sergey Brin.

posted Sun 15 Aug 2004 in /business/google | link

Copyright (C) 1999-2007 Martin Pool.