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"Generally itchy feet" Is why I'm moving away right now (slowly; I still have bills n' stuff). There are a lot of reasons for this for most people, but it's har
by eksith 14y ago
"Generally itchy feet" Is why I'm moving away right now (slowly; I still have bills n' stuff). There are a lot of reasons for this for most people, but it's hard to pinpoint common aspects for all. For some it may be burnout as mentioned, but the solution there is fairly simple: fire the drama queens.
There's a give and take tradeoff for hiring people with an ego as big as their skill-set (often, they're not proportional) and if you insist on keeping people who act like asses because they're skilled, you kill productivity regardless. And for avoiding tedium, let the devs choose their own tools if possible. Unless there's heavy collaborative editing or strongly connected analytics, there's no need to force people to use identical tools.
That doesn't mean let them do whatever they please willy-nilly, just keep things consistent up to a sane degree.
"Most users are idiots": A less mean way to say that would be, "most users don't perceive what you perceive" and that's for the very simple reason that you look at your product through the filter of a creator. Sometimes you really do need to step outside of yourself to get the perspective of someone who wasn't involved in its creation.
Features should be only those that make sense, obviously, or you'll never bloody get done.
Interesting reasons for sticking around should be the people, and by extension, the chat. The End. Everything else is fluff easily blown away at the first sign of friction.
Don't hire A-Players... whatever that means. Hire people who know how to learn and don't have an ego that will make a newt look like Godzilla. Hire hackers; you can ask for samples of their work or just talk to them about how they see certain problems.
There's an old trick carpenters/model-builders use to see if someone's a qualified candidate. They ask the person to drill a hole in a piece of wood. Most people fail it on the first try.
+1 For "Hire Slowly". They don't fail as fast.
(Correct answer is a question: "Where on the piece do you want me to drill?")
- reledi 14y agoI don't understand the carpenters' trick. Why is asking where to drill the correct answer?
- notJim 14y agoI think the wrong answer would be to drill a hole in the piece of wood. Personally, I think trick questions like that are kind of a waste of everyone's time.
- noonespecial 14y agoI'd hate the guy who spent 20 minutes asking about where, how deep, what bit size, how fast etc to drill his hole. Sometimes you just want to tell someone to go do something and trust them to muddle through the details without burdening you with all of them. The kind of worker that needs every detail specified is powered by servos and trained with a pendant.
- wging 14y agoThe point is, though, that you never just want a piece of wood with a hole in it. You want a piece of wood that has a hole in the middle so you can put a rope through the hole, tie a knot, and make a swing. Or you want a piece of wood that has a hole at the end so you can drive a post through it and have some sort of horizontal-piece-of-wood-sticking-out-from-a-post deal. I don't know. I'm not a wood expert. The point is that you have to think about what you're really doing, and that carpentry is about way more than the manual skill of working with wood. The parallel with software engineering is pretty clear when phrased this way, yes? Maybe it's part of a table. The piece of wood, not software engineering. The hole is where the table's leg will attach. If you just up and drill where you please, you'll probably not end up with a useful table.
- reledi 14y agoIn that case, I think a better question to ask would be along the lines of "What function does this piece of wood serve?". Once you know what it'll be used for, you can demonstrate that you know where to drill the hole without having to ask where.
- derefr 14y ago> A less mean way to say that would be, "most users don't perceive what you perceive" and that's for the very simple reason that you look at your product through the filter of a creator. That's really not what that part of the slides was about. It's more about the common adage, "users don't really [consciously] know what they want." A customer might not be happy even when you give them exactly what they asked for; and a customer might be ecstatic when you give them something they didn't mention wanting at all. Don't listen to requests; just iterate and observe the real reaction of the market.