J. Timothy King’s Blog

Is Consulting More Stable Than Employment?

It occurred to me several weeks ago that consulting could be more stable than employment. So I asked someone who’s had much more first-hand exposure to the subject than me. I asked consultant Pam Slim, author of Escape From Cubicle Nation and the Get a Life eZine, what makes a consultancy stable.

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Dead Fish and Other Things People Wear

Lidor Wyssocky at The Mindset writes about “The Emperor’s New Clothes Syndrome.” This reminded me of a talk Tim Lister gave earlier this year at the Boston SPIN. “The problem is that although we know exactly what doesn’t work right and how it should be fixed, most of us will never say anything,” Lidor writes.

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How Many New Businesses Fail Their Way to Success?

In a recent thread on the Extreme Programming email list on Yahoo! Groups, someone pointed out that XP projects sometimes fail, in that they are canceled. But they don’t go on for a long time, all lights green, and then fail to deliver.

That got me to thinking about the oft-cited myth that 80% of new businesses fail.

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Please Don’t Share Your Bodily Fluids With the Rest of the System

Have you ever been here? Refactoring old code, seeing new code that partially de-factors it, and taking out my frustrations in code comments.

The old comment for a struct declaration:

// This structure will be generated
// and stay with each connection

The new comment:

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Top Eight Reasons to Abandon SourceSafe

How many of us work in Microsoft shops? I’m ashamed to admit that I do. When I took the job, I thought the benefits of working in a new domain with new technologies would outweigh the fact that I had to use Microsoft tools and program for Windows. Well, the benefits are real. The costs are also real. And one of these costs is SourceSafe.

The worst part about it is that there’s no particularly good reason why we have to use SourceSafe. (Read more…)

Wage Slave or Crazy Entrepreneur?

Eric Allam of 52 Reviews posted an interesting comment on my post “Top Ten Reasons to Remain a Wage Slave,” which is a spoof off of a couple of Steve Pavlina’s “list of 10″ posts. Eric linked to a post on his blog, “BusinessPundit lays out 10 misconceptions of entrepreneurship, reveals his hypocrisy,” in which he rebutted criticisms Robert May of BusinessPundit.com had leveled at Steve Pavlina’s post. (Whew! I’m outta breath!)

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Overcoming Your Fear of Poverty

Pam Slim, author of the excellent Escape from Cubicle Nation blog and founder of Ganas Consulting, also publishes a free eZine called “Get a Life!” And in the latest issue, she discusses fear about money.

Fear about money creates stress, disturbs focus, saps innovation and productivity, and makes work miserable. The answer, says Pam, is to change the way you treat money, emotionally and spiritually. She gives examples of how she and Darryl (her husband) achieve this. The specific religious symbols and rituals will be different for each of us. But the bottom line is the same.

In U.S. spiritual culture, we don’t talk about money until we’re desperate. If you lose your job and you’re at the end of rope, you can find lots of people to pray for you and even to donate money to you. (Read more…)

Selling to Big Companies Podcast Interview

It’s Jill Konrath, author of Selling To Big Companies, which I recently wrote about, in the context of narrowing your niche and target market. Jill Konrath gave an interview on The Innovative Marketer podcast.

As in the book, in the interview she talks about more. Much more. It’s impressive how much there is to take away in this short interview. As Jill wrote on her blog:

[Steve Gershik] got me talking about things I’m pretty passionate about:

• The biggest mistakes salespeople make.
• What marketing/sales need to know from each other.
• Creating strong value propositions.
• Leveraging triggering events to crack into accounts.
• Launching new products into the market.

Listen to the Innovative Marketer Podcast - it’s a power-packed 20 minutes. I’m listening to it right now and I can’t believe how much I covered in this short time.

I’ll echo that sentiment. I’m listening to it now, and I’m really impressed. And I’ve already read the book! Listen to Jill Konrath’s interview, episode 8 of The Innovative Marketer podcast.

-TimK

When the Best Tool Isn’t, and Why a Growing Team Doesn’t Care

Kathy Sierra excellent post on When the “best tool for the job”… isn’t misses an important point. It’s not that she missed the point so much as she just didn’t go into it. But I think it deserves going into.

Many software developers become very attached to their favorite programming languages, methodologies, practices, and so forth. Checking the link-backs for my post “Twelve Benefits of Writing Unit Tests First” demonstrates this. One commenter on another blog even said he saw no value in reading the whole post, since it was specious and had no redeeming value. I took great joy in that comment, because it means I must be doing something right to push someone’s righteous buttons so accurately. Regardless, would test-first be the right tool for that programmer?

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Why Geeks Should Care About Fashion

As a thirty-something male software engineer, one of the best things about looking for a new job is that I get to go shopping for interview clothes. And that’s what I did this weekend.

If you’ve not appreciated the joy of shopping for interview clothes, you’re missing out. And if you think that this joy is just for women… Well, you unfortunately may be right. Women have so many more clothing options. Not only can they wear anything a man can wear, they get to wear skirts, capris, dresses, and even stirrup pants. (But please, ladies, don’t do that.) And accessories! As a man, I can wear a ring and watch. If I want to be bad, I can wear a crucifix around my neck, or maybe a stud earring. If I want to be formal, I can wear a tie. But the girls get to play with jewelry, scarves, handbags, shoes, and just about everything else. And women can get away with colors and patterns that would just make us guys look gay. Yes, women get to have all the fun and creativity.

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