Well I’m as unreliable, lazy, and entitled as the next guy, but that’s not why I’ve hopped jobs in the past. People in my generation have a very low tolerance for bullshit, and software engineering, in general, is a very high bullshit career. If you couple that with the standard load of bullshit you would get from a non-technical Harvard MBA type boss — like many CEOs that you find trying to get rich in Silicon Valley by hiring some engineers to “code up this idea real quick” — it’s no wonder that a good engineer will walk off the job after his one year cliff vesting.

As an engineer, you are told that you’re “lucky to have a job”, because there are “a hundred people lined up outside, ready to take it”. (As chance would have it, there are at least a thousand lined up to take the job of rich prick who tells people what to do). This backlash is the product of diseased thinking. A CEO who makes an engineer work 80 hours a week is a driven entrepreneur, but an engineer asking for a comfy chair is a prima donna. So, when we are up to our knees in golf-course, martini-lunch bullshit, don’t be surprised when we jump ship for a higher salary.

via Why Engineers Hop Jobs.

Was listening to this episode of This American Life and what hit me was how much these autoworkers were proud of their work. I hope we can all have this attitude towards what we do.

A car plant in Fremont California that might have saved the U.S. car industry. In 1984, General Motors and Toyota opened NUMMI as a joint venture. Toyota showed GM the secrets of its production system: how it made cars of much higher quality and much lower cost than GM achieved. Frank Langfitt explains why GM didn't learn the lessons – until it was too late.

via NUMMI | This American Life.

Postscript: This is a little unfair. Normal people with lives in the neighborhood, aren’t doing this every day or even most days. And in fact the volume of really-late and really-early messaging is less than at other jobs I’ve had. But, if you like your work, it’s sure easy to get through a whole lot each day.

via ongoing by Tim Bray · Life at Google.

soo true.

It’s time to finally put the performance review out of its misery.

This corporate sham is one of the most insidious, most damaging, and yet most ubiquitous of corporate activities. Everybody does it, and almost everyone who’s evaluated hates it. It’s a pretentious, bogus practice that produces absolutely nothing that any thinking executive should call a corporate plus.

And yet few people do anything to kill it. Well, it’s time they did.

Don’t get me wrong: Reviewing performance is good; it should happen every day. But employees need evaluations they can believe, not the fraudulent ones they receive. They need evaluations that are dictated by need, not a date on the calendar. They need evaluations that make them strive to improve, not pretend they are perfect.

via Yes, Everyone Really Does Hate Performance Reviews – WSJ.com.

Want to be a person? Remember: Managers tell employees what to do and make sure they do it.

With people, they have conversations about things that matter to them.

via The importance of being a person | IS Survivor Publishing.

Come on if you haven’t had a failed venture when your nearing 30, when you haven’t worked for or been part of a startup, if you haven’t failed at a micro enterprise, you are probably risk averse and would only start a business if it was a sure thing (and the sad thing is nothing is “a sure thing”).

If you’ve worked for the same company since graduating from college and haven’t left

PLEASE READ THE WHOLE THING on the linked blog!!!

In just about every business, there’s a club. To become a member, you have to be a person, and not just an interchangeable, faceless, member-of-the-great-unwashed, one-of-the-troops sack o’ skills.

Companies treat members of the club differently than non-members. They pay members more. They give members more interesting assignments. Members receive the promotions, and their names aren’t on the Reduction In Force rosters.

If you value your career, believe me: You want to be a person.

Selling on price doesn’t achieve that. Neither does selling solely on work products. Both proclaim kinship with cinder blocks and lentils as interchangeable commodities.

via The importance of being a person | IS Survivor Publishing.

I was interviewing for a job in a startup last year. The interview was going well then I was asked what have you launched. I wasn’t able to say anything and that was the end of what could have been a partnership.  I have to remind myself that good enough is good enough and that making complicated things are hard and thus strive for simplicity. For a lot of programmers simplicity is harder than complexity. Here are a few advice on getting to completion, advice I extremely need to become a success.

4 Simple Principles of Getting to Completion

Simplify to get it done.

“If your mind isn’t clouded by unnecessary things, then this is the best season of your life.” ~Wu-Men

Post written by Leo Babauta. Follow me on Twitter.

When I hear about a great idea that a friend has, I get excited. I can’t wait to see that idea become reality.

Then I ask about the idea a few months later, and it often is not one bit closer to completion.

Ideas stop short of becoming reality, and projects seem to drag on endlessly, because of one thing: complexity.

via 4 Simple Principles of Getting to Completion | Zen Habits.

Wow we are being penalized for our reliability.  I have a strange feeling that data analyst / programmer / consultant would be closer to doctors/lawyers than engineers.

The newly organizing groups could call themselves professions, and not simply resurrected medieval guilds, because their members’ mastery of a new body of knowledge gave them claims to a competence beyond the amateur’s reach. Doctors could take advantage of the new breakthroughs in germ theory and anesthesia, engineers of refinements in industrial technology. “A strong profession requires a real technical skill that produces demonstrable results and can be taught,” a sociologist named Randall Collins wrote in a history of educational credentials. “the skill must be difficult enough to require training and reliable enough to produce results. But it cannot be too reliable enough to produce results. But it cannot be too reliable, for then outsiders can judge work by its results.” Indeed, when historians try to explain why engineers have never become as pretigious and independent as doctors or lawyers, one of their answers is that the engineer’s competence is too clearly on display. (When a patient dies, the doctor might not to be blame, but if a bridge, falls down, the engineer is.)

via The Case Against Credentialism – James Fallows.

I’m officially scared!

The persistent devaluation of experience and skills. Any developer can tell you that not all C or PHP or Java programmers are created equal; some are vastly more productive or creative. However, unless or until there is a way to explicitly demonstrate the productivity differential between a good programmer and a mediocre one, inexperienced or nontechnical hiring managers tend to look at resumes with an eye for youth, under the “more bang for the buck” theory. Cheaper young 'uns will work longer hours and produce more code. The very concept of viewing experience as an asset for raising productivity is a nonfactor — much to the detriment of the developer workplace.

According to one 20-year telecommunications veteran who asked to remain anonymous, when high-tech companies began incorporating more business-oriented managers into their upper tiers, these managers were not able to accurately assess the merits of developers with know-how: “It is nearly impossible to judge quality work if you never did it yourself,” he says. “The latest fad was the idiotic belief that management was generic, a skill that could be taught at school and could then be sent anywhere to do any management job.”

Another way in which experience is actually seen as a flaw rather than a virtue: Hiring managers are unable to map how 10 years of experience in one programming language can inform or enhance a programmer's months of experience with a newer technology. Instead, they dismiss the decade of experience as a sign of inflexibility or being unable to keep up — an assumption that penalizes IT pros for being present during the last 10 years of their jobs.

As former Intel CEO Craig Barrett once said, “The half-life of an engineer, software or hardware, is only a few years.” With this kind of attitude at the top, there's no cultural incentive to foster a hiring strategy that rewards experience or longevity.

via The painful truth about age discrimination in tech.

I got terminated as a tester on my first job out of college. I was out of work for 3 months. Although 3 months was a relatively short time compared to other people’s experience it was too long for me. Nobody can really get you out of that funk your in, the feeling of uselessness , incompetence. After a month I was beginning to have serious thoughts of questioning how good I really was at anything. I don’t know but I believe if it stretched to 6 months I may have accepted jobs I wouldn’t have considered a couple of weeks before. This is why the reluctance of Barack Obama to help the unemployed of his country in the scale that FDR did is really heartless and gutless of him.  I could go on and on but this would just be an angst , sorrowful filled post. Suffice to say whenever I can’t get myself to work harder I just remember my last evaluation and a fire lights within me. To end in a lighter note after that job I was able to get a job as a programmer again and I can say that I did well. In  a lot of ways I shined. So have faith that God has better plans for you.

Strong evidence suggests that people who don’t find solid roots in the job market within a year or two have a particularly hard time righting themselves. In part, that’s because many of them become different–and damaged–people. Krysia Mossakowski, a sociologist at the University of Miami, has found that in young adults, long bouts of unemployment provoke long-lasting changes in behavior and mental health. “Some people say, ‘Oh, well, they’re young, they’re in and out of the workforce, so unemployment shouldn’t matter much psychologically,’” Mossakowski told me. “But that isn’t true.”

via The Recession is Dead, Long Live the Recession: Life Without Jobs : Casaubon’s Book.