August 31, 2006 – 6:24 pm
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.
August 27, 2006 – 4:49 pm
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.
August 24, 2006 – 4:04 pm
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 [...]
August 11, 2006 – 10:59 am
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:
August 9, 2006 – 12:03 pm
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 [...]
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 [...]
August 4, 2006 – 12:23 pm
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 [...]
August 3, 2006 – 11:53 pm
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 [...]
August 2, 2006 – 12:00 pm
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. [...]
August 1, 2006 – 12:00 pm
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 [...]