My generation was born with the Internet, we've been online before they even noticed their stupid minitel was gone. And now those old fucks are trying to harm the damn thing because they're scared of it!? “OMG people are talking and exchanging information we can't control right under our nose.” I wonder if they'll find slaves stupid enough to twist our network into a shopping mall, because that's what “regulation” means. Let's hope they do not.
It's that time of the year again where I'm reminded by some good fellas that “hey you've got a blog, remember?”. Well yeah I guess I do. I just don't feel like sharing much of my recent musings with the rest of the world, so bear with me, and meditate while I'm not boring you with my life. *hugs*
My roomba apparently loves Apple products entirely too much... :)
Here's the problem that ends up killing company after company. All successful software companies had, as their dominant personality, a leader who nurtured programmers. But no company can keep such a leader forever. Either he cashes out, or he brings in management types who end up driving him out, or he changes and becomes a management type himself. One way or another, marketers get control. But...control of what? Instead of finding assembly lines of productive workers, they quickly discover that their product is produced by utterly unpredictable, uncooperative, disobedient, and worst of all, unattractive people who resist all attempts at management. Put them on a time clock, dress them in suits, and they become sullen and start sabotaging the product. Worst of all, you can sense that they are making fun of you with every word they say.
I found some of this to be true which is a little odd for a "humorous" rant written 15 years ago. And about that Windows thing, in march 1995 a huge part of the programming work happened on Microsoft's OS-es. At least, we changed that. :)
This reminds me of a rather recent conversation I had with a co-worker at af83.
If you want a happy productive team, I would say at all costs. As with most things awareness and professionalism is the main key. Listening to individuals who are working at the coal face and in the fire line of production.
An great example being that when they complain about other employees work and behaviour, explore it, don't fail over to the easy position of favouritism and write it off to a "personality clash" as you obviously have one individual not functioning (the one who is vocalising the issue) and very likely there is something wrong with the one they are pointing to.
Ignore this at your peril. Unfortunately most do, or allow their reactions to be directed by personal bias, i.e. attacking the individual who is trying to explain the issue.
In situations like this there is a Tesa coil of a bolt building up.
Professional and unbiased personnel management is key, though usually absent unfortunately. Recent surveys have indicated that around 50% of individuals have let or want to leave their employment due to poor management.(complete article at Lifehacker)
This reminded of a decision I took a few weeks ago to basically "work less", and take more time for whatever else (running, reading, naked sky-diving, ball shaving, you name it). Since it is easy to overwork oneself in a exciting start-up environment, and quite enjoy it, the solution was not so obvious at first. Some people are having a rather hard time figuring out that they're not their job.
I came up with a pretty stupid solution, that mostly involves a timer (and some graphs, 'cause you know I'm collecting data and... that's what you do with data), and then a "stress margin" to leave some room for exceptions... Again, as we are often saying : "works for me".
I don't watch french TV at home, for a few reasons ranging from lack of interest to lack of time ; and I'd rather listen to some music from somafm, or a carefully crafted playlist than put on the radio.
The only TV that I care about gets on my screen through the Internet... and - how shameful - that's mostly US TV shows that aired one or two days ago on the other side of the ocean. 99.99% of the time, I won't even look for subtitles if that can yield a shorter delivery time (not because it's faster, because it bothers me to look for them). Wether or not this is entirely legal is not really the point: I'm not willing to wait one or two years until a show that sound great is imported, translated, or adapted in the some cases. You could relate all of that to movies too.
If you haven't figured it out already, my point is that I'd rather pay those TV studios, and radio stations, than the ones I do not care about. I'd be willing to pay an "internet tax" rather than the global french-tv-tax, which is unfair for the use I have of our national media networks.
So... when is that happening? Oh wait, no we have a shitload of laws to protect our “undisputed” cultural superiority. I guess I'm screwed.
The french OSDC is happening next week-end in Paris. If you're around and interested in a little chat about your favorite technology/programming language, come and meet us. As for myself, I'll be giving a little introduction and overview of node.js, which has considerably contributed to making “server-side javascript” mainstream again.
Maybe you don't care about all that javascript stuff as much as I do. On the other hand, the schedule includes talks about Perl and Perl 6, Dancer, Smalltalk, PHP (which should contrast against last year “light” contribution of the PHP community) ; and some lightning talks on a few ruby gems... Did I mention there will be talks on postgresql, and even some nosql-related on riak, redis?
Well, I did my part of buzzing... Oh, and there'll most probably be an after-event with beer, geeks, and no trolls about The One True Language. See you around. :)