Friday, November 28, 2003
Bruce Eckel on Thinking about Programming:
I often wonder what the world would be like if everyone followed their hearts and ended up doing what they loved, instead of listening to people who told them to get real and take on a practical career
There's something banal-but-not-quite-so-banal about this. I work for an aspirational (for want of a better word) company that believes in itself and believes that it's doing something right and different. And yet probably the majority of people don't want all that much responsibility, they just want to get on with their jobs and go home so they can spend time and effort on what they really want to do. Given that we (kind of) all started together, really wanting to do this, I don't know how this happenned. I run the company, and I feel like this a lot of the time!
The mysterious dynamics of successful organisations, that allow freedom and unlock creativity, continue to elude.
Bruce goes onto to talk about people who are unwilling to take the time to learn to improve how they do what they do - citing an essay talking about perfection oriented versus performance oriented people.
The basic idea is that the former (learners) are always looking for a better way, knowing that perfection can't be found but delighting in the path. The latter are only concerned with what works now, using the tools they already know. We know from usability studies that most web surfers and users (at least) fall into the latter category - they'll do the thing that they know how to do, not learning the short cuts or advanced tricks. Even if it takes longer, they'll do whatever they've learnt rather than learning a new way.
This all comes down to time and time management I think. So much of business now revolves around deadlines and time management. I have to complete two proposals by the end of this weekend, or I'll lose out on the chance of winning UKP 30,000 of business. I'd like to learn much more about the areas I'm pitching in, but I won't be able to. In pitching, I'll need to give an estimate of how long it will take to do the work. We essentially sell bits of our time for money, and if I underestimate the amount of time something will take, we'll lose money. Also I'm in a competitive environment, so I'm not going to build in time for meandering and wandering and serendipitously coming across new ways of doing things. I'd like to, but I can't.
I was reading a Fortune article about Google yesterday which said that all Google employees are supposed to spend 20 per cent of their time on self-directed projects (and another 20 per cent interviewing outside job candidates. Wow) so maybe that's the answer. But a) you can only do that if you've got the revenues (and my experience is you can only get the revenues if you're performance oriented) and b) Google employees work an average 12 hour day it seems.
Did we take a wrong turn in trying to combine commerce with creativity? Is Jared Diamond right - we shouldn't have given up hunter gathering for agriculture (hunter gatherers don't work so hard and have more leisure time and a better diet)? Why am I sitting here at 20 past 11 on a Friday writing this (instead of working on my proposals)? How do you create a successful organisation where everyone loves what they do and can make enough money to live on?
I often wonder what the world would be like if everyone followed their hearts and ended up doing what they loved, instead of listening to people who told them to get real and take on a practical career
There's something banal-but-not-quite-so-banal about this. I work for an aspirational (for want of a better word) company that believes in itself and believes that it's doing something right and different. And yet probably the majority of people don't want all that much responsibility, they just want to get on with their jobs and go home so they can spend time and effort on what they really want to do. Given that we (kind of) all started together, really wanting to do this, I don't know how this happenned. I run the company, and I feel like this a lot of the time!
The mysterious dynamics of successful organisations, that allow freedom and unlock creativity, continue to elude.
Bruce goes onto to talk about people who are unwilling to take the time to learn to improve how they do what they do - citing an essay talking about perfection oriented versus performance oriented people.
The basic idea is that the former (learners) are always looking for a better way, knowing that perfection can't be found but delighting in the path. The latter are only concerned with what works now, using the tools they already know. We know from usability studies that most web surfers and users (at least) fall into the latter category - they'll do the thing that they know how to do, not learning the short cuts or advanced tricks. Even if it takes longer, they'll do whatever they've learnt rather than learning a new way.
This all comes down to time and time management I think. So much of business now revolves around deadlines and time management. I have to complete two proposals by the end of this weekend, or I'll lose out on the chance of winning UKP 30,000 of business. I'd like to learn much more about the areas I'm pitching in, but I won't be able to. In pitching, I'll need to give an estimate of how long it will take to do the work. We essentially sell bits of our time for money, and if I underestimate the amount of time something will take, we'll lose money. Also I'm in a competitive environment, so I'm not going to build in time for meandering and wandering and serendipitously coming across new ways of doing things. I'd like to, but I can't.
I was reading a Fortune article about Google yesterday which said that all Google employees are supposed to spend 20 per cent of their time on self-directed projects (and another 20 per cent interviewing outside job candidates. Wow) so maybe that's the answer. But a) you can only do that if you've got the revenues (and my experience is you can only get the revenues if you're performance oriented) and b) Google employees work an average 12 hour day it seems.
Did we take a wrong turn in trying to combine commerce with creativity? Is Jared Diamond right - we shouldn't have given up hunter gathering for agriculture (hunter gatherers don't work so hard and have more leisure time and a better diet)? Why am I sitting here at 20 past 11 on a Friday writing this (instead of working on my proposals)? How do you create a successful organisation where everyone loves what they do and can make enough money to live on?
Want to use RSS syndication even on sites with no RSS feed?
http://myrss.com/
It gets cooler the more you look at it. It includes a Javascript version that means you just have to drop one line of javascript into your page to add a feed to it. The basics scraping is based on a heuristic algorithm that works without manual intervention - but you can 'sponsor' a feed in which case someone will set up the scraping in the first place in a way that's appropriate for the site, and will periodically go back to check the layout hasn't changed too much.
I love scraping.
http://myrss.com/
It gets cooler the more you look at it. It includes a Javascript version that means you just have to drop one line of javascript into your page to add a feed to it. The basics scraping is based on a heuristic algorithm that works without manual intervention - but you can 'sponsor' a feed in which case someone will set up the scraping in the first place in a way that's appropriate for the site, and will periodically go back to check the layout hasn't changed too much.
I love scraping.
