Performance v. Effort Revisited, ceteris paribus

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After speaking with Mark Turansky about the original Performance v. Effort post and he gave his impression that my post is confusing because it delivers arbitrary numbers with no explanation of how I arrive at those numbers or what they mean.

Ultimately the post is saying this:
You can’t expect to hire based upon an industry or market standard and end up with a solid company. You must understand your needs (weights) and the abilities (ranks) of candidates in order to find individuals who are a proper fit for your company at any given time.

The numbers are arbitrary because… (Read full post)

When the rabbit hole is a dead end

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I have had many friends that were musicians, some of which are good enough to make a living doing nothing else. Despite the style, personality, and trend differences of each they all share the same message with regards to song writing: sometimes you write ten songs just to find one that is a keeper. The song writer can perform the ten songs leading up to the one keeper all they want however diluting their musical offering with sub-par works is likely to reduce the overall attraction of the artist. Only by playing the best of their offerings can they hope to attract the largest audience and following.

Software is no different.

Software, like music, is a creative process. Any creative process will produce failures at one point or another but will hopefully… (Read full post)

Willie Jay McDonald (2/11/1918 – 1/10/2008)

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People do not die for us immediately, but remain bathed in a sort of aura of life which bears no relation to true immortality but through which they continue to occupy our thoughts in the same way as when they were alive. It is as though they were traveling abroad. ~Marcel Proust

Rest in peace.

Performance v. Effort

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There is a fine line between performance and effort. While effort is great it doesn’t make money. I recently watched the movie Knocked Up, which has a perfect example of this. A group of guys are creating “the next big thing” website and have spent years working on it. However, the years they have spent have been unfruitful because while they exerted large amounts of effort they didn’t actually produce anything.

People all have an intrinsic value, whether we choose to realize it or not. This value is made up of many things… (Read full post)

Blog moved

I have the new site up now.

Please update your readers/links/etc. to mcdonaldland.info. This will be the last real post here – I may post every so often just to keep this blog alive for a bit until people get their links updated.

Announcements

Two things:

1. I just noticed that there is no RSS feed showing up. I turned it on but it evidently doesn’t work in this skin. Here is the link for anyone interested: http://mcdonaldland.wordpress.com/feed

2. I just purchased a domain name, mcdonaldland.info. I will be transferring this site to my own domain once I get everything set up and ready to go. Stay tuned…

Leadership v. Management

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I’ve met many people that are great managers but far fewer that are good leaders. The difference is not just the matter of text books but is a real, if not tangible, aspect of life. Both semantically, logically, and theoretically the leader is distinguished from the manager by function.

The manager is set to manage a given set of tasks to ensure a specific and quantifiable outcome. Whether this set of tasks involves people, processes, or both is irrelevant as the only change is in the style of management, not the… (Read full post)

Design Patterns Quick Reference

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So every time I am designing something new I find myself either searching Google or opening up a gang of four (GoF) book to aid me. I searched for a bit trying to find a handy-dandy flash card showing class diagrams and purposes for the basic GoF patterns but was unable to locate a good one (for free). So I made my own.

WordPress won’t let me upload anything but images, so that is what is available here. If you want the Visio version post here and I will email it to you.

If you see any mistakes or improvements please post here and I will update the docs.

To download the print quality images, right click… (Read full post)

If you can’t trust your employees, let them go.

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It is highly unlikely that you will find secretaries using typewriters in any modern successful business. So why is it that companies feel that they can maintain a mindset that is equally as old as much of the technology they have long since sloughed off? While it is important to have a handle on what is going on within your company employers can do so without being overly invasive or restrictive.

I was recently speaking with someone I know that does software development for a very large company and was astounded to find that the company severely limits the access their employees have to almost all content. If employees navigate to restricted sites a network administrator is notified and promptly forwards an infraction notice to the employee’s manager. I was especially taken aback to find that… (Read full post)

Outsourcing and the economy

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I watched a prior employer systematically send software engineering jobs to India, giving all domestic software engineers the option of becoming software analysts or showing themselves the door. Despite this, I like to think that I have a fairly open view of offshoring, globalization, and our place in the economy. While at first I was very angry with the decision and spent a good bit of time vehemently discounting offshoring, I have relatively recently come full circle to the view that offshoring is good as long as it is in the right context.

Cheap labor is nothing new. People have long complained about losing jobs to workers willing to do the same job for less money but the problem typically reaches a boil when the invading workforce is nomadic or the employer seeks foreign… (Read full post)

On Hubris

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Pride has its place. You should take pride in your work, your family, and things that you do. It is when this pride becomes excessive that there are problems. The right amount of pride will ensure that the highest level of quality is achieved in everything we do because we will check and check again to make sure that the work we do is up to par with what we consider correct. However, slightly too much pride can tip the scales and usher in carelessness. When we think we know it all we let down our guards and have a tendency to stop second guessing ourselves, which increases the probability for mistakes.

Programmers, for the most part, are a pretty positive bunch. We tend to think we can solve the problems of the world through a couple well constructed key strokes. While we often have the best of intentions we are also fallible and find ourselves backtracking… (Read full post)

Teach Yourself Software Engineering in 15 Minutes (or not…)

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As professionals we should, for the most part, find ourselves in a perpetual state of learning. It is when this trend of a ferocity for consuming knowledge subsides that we find ourselves bordering on mediocrity and threatening to fade away into the abyss of the typical. As a junior, mid and senior level developer I was constantly reading. Looking back I now wish that I had, at times, chosen different content, however I still give myself kudos for reading something.

As part of the shift from a mid level engineer to a senior one I began taking part in interviews, a process that has left me confounded at the masses of software engineers that consider themselves to be senior level but are… (Read full post)