Category: work/career

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rePost::12 Reasons You Shouldn’t Freelance | FreelanceFolder

When you work in IT you hear this a lot, hell I’ve said this a lot of times years ago. Then you realize that being an introvert is not the best thing for someone who wants to freelance. This is a nice point by point takedown of the most common reasons people want to freelance. Interesting read.

Freelancing Is the Best Job Ever
But, it’s also the hardest and most demanding job ever. It can be frustrating because you have no one else to share the business duties with. People, including clients, misunderstand what you do and may not think you’re a real business who charges real rates for real work.
That being said, I do believe it’s the best job ever. Really, I wouldn’t go back to a full-time job, even if they offered me a six figure salary. Like everything else, it has it’s drawbacks but it also has lots of good perks.
The important thing is to make sure you really like working independently and you have the drive to do this all by yourself. The freedom and satisfaction from being able to control your own career is reward in itself.
via 12 Reasons You Shouldn’t Freelance | FreelanceFolder.

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rePost::Red Squirrel's Nuts – 50% Time

The problem is really to work an extra 20 hours per week on self improvements means you have enough energy to to expend in self improvement. This is why I am limiting myself to jobs within 30 minutes from my house optimistically and within 1.5 hours with traffic. If the commute is too long I’m too tired to study/self improve. Life is too short to waste on a commute.

At the time I was finishing Malcom Gladwell’s Outliers, a book that digs deep into the stories and counter-cultural explanations of successful people. Having someone so close to my context tweeting about a topic related to the book I was reading helped me see something I hadn’t noticed before. I’ve spent years trying to make sense of how a person evolves from a novice programmer to an accomplished software developer. And up until now I haven’t paid enough attention to the raw number of hours spent deliberately working to improve oneself. Uncle Bob calls us to work a sustainable pace in our day jobs (40 hours), so we have time (20 hours) to improve ourselves in the off-hours. Most people don’t do that, though. It’s not considered normal. People who spend time doing more of what appears to be their job in the off-hours are seen as obsessed or workaholics. Maybe we are, there is some grey area there, and I know I’ve taken it too far before. One of the ingredients to being an outlier, though, is an opportunity to work hard. Sure, many outliers have had some good breaks, like being born in the right decade (American entrepreneurs in the 1830’s) or even the right month (Canadian junior hockey players in January), but that luck only provided them with an opportunity to work hard at something that they wanted to do.
via Red Squirrel’s Nuts – 50% Time.

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rePost::The Grandmaster in the Corner Office: What the Study of Chess Experts Teaches Us about Building a Remarkable Life

I’m in IT and this is so fucking true. It’s the Usual Suspects, a small group of people who frequent the message boards, go in study groups for the newest technologies, the same people who go to meetups and technology sharing. This is why although I think highly my skills when compared to most people in my field, I am humbled whenever I am with people of this small group; Compared to them I’m such a n00b.

Deliberate Practice for the Rest of Us
Colvin, being a business reporter, points out that this sophisticated understanding of performance is lacking in the workplace.
“At most companies,” he argues, “the fundamentals of fostering great performance are mainly unrecognized or ignored.”
He then adds the obvious corollary: “Of course that means the opportunities for achieving advantage by adopting the principles of great performance are huge.”
It’s this advantage that intrigues me.  To become a grandmaster requires 5000 hours of DP. But to become a highly sought-after CRM database whiz, or to run a money-making blog, or to grow a campus organization into national recognition, would probably require much, much less.
Why? Because when it comes to DP in these latter field, your competition is sorely lacking.
Unless you’re a professional athlete or musician, your peers are likely spending zero hours on DP. Instead, they’re putting in their time, trying to accomplish the tasks handed to them in a competent and efficient fashion. Perhaps if they’re ambitious, they’ll try to come in earlier and leave later in a bid to outwork their peers.
via Study Hacks » Blog Archive » The Grandmaster in the Corner Office: What the Study of Chess Experts Teaches Us about Building a Remarkable Life.

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rePost::3M, and Google, and Unity! Oh my! | themadpeacock

3M call it the 15 percent rule, Google call it 20% time and now Unity has adopted what they call FAFF (Fridays Are For Fun).
“I think there are a lot of low hanging fruits in Unity where somebody with drive can just do something cool that pushes us forward. Things that are hard to put in words, but just make sense when you see it done.
So every Friday, developers can work on something cool, something they have been craving to do for a long time.”
Joachim Ante, Unity CTO, via Unity Blog.
This idea of giving employees company time to pursue their ideas is powerful. It acknowledges that everyone in the company has great ideas worthy of investment.
via 3M, and Google, and Unity! Oh my! | themadpeacock.

Heart this, hope more company follow thier lead!!!
fridays are for fun!

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Sentences To Ponder: Some new happiness research

There is, I suspect, a common theme here – that people don’t predict what will make them happy at all well. Having children and investing in careers rather than in social networks doesn’t make us happy, and yet we do it in our 20s and 30s, only to be miserable later.
via Stumbling and Mumbling: Some new happiness research.

That was one loaded sentence. Thinking about my life, I am solidly in Team Social Network and Not the  TEAM Children/Career that a lot of my generation are slowly (fast?)  going into. I don’t know, maybe in our 40’s we would know.
PS 01: I’m not anti kids. Simply put I see myself as a big kidI sometimes can’t be trusted with myself, why the hell would I trust myself with the responsibility for another human being.
PS 02: I’m not strictly anti-career, It’s just that I believe that our society/backgrounds do not allow us the leeway to really find our passions. If we dive head on to our “careers” when will we ever find our passions. 2 things.
One, I’m lucky to have my mom and dad as my parents.  This for me means that I have a personal responsibility to be the best that I can be, whatever that means.
Two, I saw a friend from high school/college in the elevator yesterday, we decided to catch up a little. During our conversation he told me something. He has found his passion, He said in a way Pisay and UP wasn’t such a good fit for him, what he wanted to do was for from what he learned from these great learning institutions. This is the third time (That I remember vividly but probably more than 10 or even more) that I have heard this from a friend from Philippine Science/University of the Philippines. In a way it made me happy. Not that my friends wasted a lot of their time, rather they do not see the other side of the coin, I prefer to think of their predicaments more in the light of; I am lucky to have found my passion, it is probably because of the different things that I went through in life, of which going to PSHS/UP was a part of.
Read the original post to get to the research to justify the claims.

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rePost: My Business Magazines Lied to Me

Excellent Article,
We succumb to the startup itch because of the promise of getting rich but most of the time we fail to understand that (I got this from a Paul Graham essay) people who succeeded from their startups were paid on account of their productivity and output. I distinctly remember my aha moment when I read in the footnotes that “what you do in a startup is compress a lifetime’s worth of work into a few years. .”
I think that the problem is you seldom know who would be extremely successful in a startup environment. You can see who would be successful but not who might be (explanation: If you knew Steve Jobs or Bill Gates before their success you would probably say they had a high chance of succeeding whilst the majority of people are like millionaire’s next door types you wouldn’t know they are successful if they didn’t tell you!).
And I believe their (magazines/bloggers/tech-evangelist) skewed views are somewhat sound because some people need to get started at doing before they get their groove and find that they were meant to do great/amazing things.
all in all read the whole thing!
from here:
Telling Us What We Want To Hear
Have you ever had a close friend whose engagement isn’t working out, and now they wonder if they should be concerned about getting married? Sometimes there are signs it isn’t going to last, but they don’t want you to tell them that. They are scared to leave the relationship, scared of failing, scared of being alone, and so they don’t want to you help them go down that path. They want you to tell them it will all be ok. They want to hear that he/she will probably change.
Likewise, people don’t want to read that hard work and discipline are the path to success. They don’t want to have to analyze numbers, because it isn’t as fun as going with the gut feeling. They don’t want to be told that the latest trend is just a fad, even though it almost certainly is. Business magazines that don’t cater to what people want will go out of business. The result then, is that business magazines (and books and blogs) tell us what we want to hear. Then we go off and implement that bad advice, and when it doesn’t work, we make up some other excuse. Or, if we come to realize the advice was wrong, but it is still popular, we keep it to ourselves, because speaking out about it is a quick way to get chastised and be labeled (negative, luddite, sour grapes, etc). People want to believe what they want to believe, and if you try to show them a truth that conflicts with that, you will most likely fail.

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Interactional Expertise

More evidence of how crucial a choice our friends/seat mates/acquittance’s are to the decisions we can make. If this is true and my gut points me to the truth of this, we may be fast entering an age of great decision making. Why because usenet/googlegroups/yahoogroups or other conversational/ web 2.0 social interactivity interconnection technology is allowing us to be in the loop with the world’s foremost experts in the hard and social sciences. We (the early adopters) may be the first wave of people blessed with an Interactional Expertise spanning a large part of human knowledge.
the interview is from here:
How do you distinguish the people who can and can’t contribute to a specialized field?
 The key to the whole thing is whether people have had access to the tacit knowledge of an esoteric area—tacit knowledge is know-how that you can’t express in words. The standard example is knowing how to ride a bike. My view as a sociologist is that expertise is located in more or less specialized social groups. If you want to know what counts as secure knowledge in a field like gravitational wave detection, you have to become part of the social group. Being immersed in the discourse of the specialists is the only way to keep up with what is at the cutting edge.
Is this where interactional expertise comes into play?
 Interactional expertise is one of the things that broadens the scope of who can contribute. It’s a little bit wider than the old “people in the white coats” of the 1950s, but what it’s not is everybody. (Within science, lots of people have interactional expertise, because science wouldn’t run without it.)
You did experiments to test your theory of expertise. What did you find?
The original version we did was with color-blind people. What we were attempting to demonstrate is something we call the strong interactional hypothesis: If you have deeply immersed yourself in the talk of an esoteric group—but not immersed yourself in any way in the practices of that group—you will be indistinguishable from somebody who has immersed themself [sic] in both the talk and the practice, in a test which just involves talk.
If that’s the case, then you’re going to speak as fluently as someone who has been engaged in the practices. And if you can speak as fluently, then you’re indistinguishable from an expert. It’s what I like to call “walking the talk”. You still can’t do the stuff, but you can make judgments, inferences and so on, which are on a par.
We picked color-blind people because they’ve spent their whole lives immersed in a community talking about color. So we thought color-blind people should be indistinguishable from color-perceivers when asked questions by a color-perceiver who knew what was going on. And we demonstrated that that was in fact the case. Now we’re planning to do another imitation test on the congenitally blind to see if they can perform as well as the color-blind.