Jean-Louis Gassée’s critique of Microsoft CEO’s latest is really an excellent primer on how to communicate about strategy. It also includes the shortest useful guide to how to identify a platitude that you’ll ever read. Great stuff.
Jean-Louis Gassée’s critique of Microsoft CEO’s latest is really an excellent primer on how to communicate about strategy. It also includes the shortest useful guide to how to identify a platitude that you’ll ever read. Great stuff.
The degree to which open source software has reduced time to market for web companies and saved them money in operational costs over time cannot be overstated. Indeed, open source is so crucial that in most cases we simply take it for granted. I don’t think people who have joined the industry in the past 10 years or so can really imagine what it was like. We used to pay for everything — databases, Web servers, application servers, version control software, compilers, and everything in between.
Now, you can build a massive business without spending any money at all on software, thanks to people sharing their work. People who are willing to give away their work created the foundation upon which this industry rests.
Stripe is doing an awesome thing to give back to the open source community — providing grants and office space to programmers so that they can work on their open source projects. It’s an interesting addition to the usual options of hiring open source developers and letting them spend some or all of their time on their open source work, or contributing patches back to open source software.
Andrey Petrov wrote a first-hand report on the two weeks he spent at Stripe working on his project, Urllib3. More companies should follow Stripe’s lead on this.
Danah Boyd thinks deeply about Facebook emotion experiment: What does the Facebook experiment teach us? Here’s a bit of it:
Somehow, shrugging our shoulders and saying that we promoted content because it was popular is acceptable because those actors don’t voice that their intention is to manipulate your emotions so that you keep viewing their reporting and advertisements. And it’s also acceptable to manipulate people for advertising because that’s just business. But when researchers admit that they’re trying to learn if they can manipulate people’s emotions, they’re shunned. What this suggests is that the practice is acceptable, but admitting the intention and being transparent about the process is not.
There’s even better stuff further on, and you should read the post.
I really enjoyed Camille Fournier’s post about the implications of exercising authority as a manager. In short, being told you screwed up by somebody who can fire you can lead to pretty serious anxiety. She nails it when she says this about her role has the head of engineering:
In fact, it is important that I’m seen as an inspirational figure to my team, someone they look up to and look forward to interacting with, and not vice-versa.
Her post also reminded me of a powerful lesson in management I learned awhile back. I heard a story about why a developer really didn’t like our head of engineering. One time, the executive was approving expense reports, noticed an odd $30 line item on this person’s expense report, and rejected it asking for an explanation. The oddness was easy to explain, and the expense report was ultimately approved, but the fact that the executive had rejected the report rather than giving this person the benefit of the doubt permanently set in their mind that the executive was a jerk.
I took a few things away from this incident. First, you can run into problems doing the right thing. The executive was being a good steward of the company’s money, and questioning the expense wasn’t wrong. Perception was the problem, as it so often is. Secondly, this person had very few interactions with the executive, and so there was no established expectation of trust that may have made this OK. If I’m only going to talk to someone a few times a year at most, I don’t want one of those interactions to be negative, especially with so little at stake.
The third was that people should be mindful of what’s expected of people with their job. Had the executive in question forwarded the expense report to accounting and had them send it back, feelings would not have been hurt. People expect accounting to carefully review expense reports. When an executive does it, it can seem petty or vindictive.
This is one of the toughest aspects of a manager’s job. You have limited chances to communicate with people, and what matters most is the outcome of those communications. Everything you do when managing people ideally helps to do their best work, whether it’s getting them the right keyboard, insuring that they’re fairly compensated, or giving them advice on how to get unblocked when they’re trying to solve a tough technical problem.
If it seems like I’m saying that as a manager, it’s important to be almost painfully deliberate in how you approach communicating, I am.
My colleague Melissa Santos and I wrote a piece for Model View Culture about perks and how they can be divisive, in spite of the best intentions of the people offering them. The article really cautions companies about building their culture or even their recruiting pitch around perks, it’s a dangerous shortcut to take.
Melissa has a blog, Allowed to Apply, which encourages people to just apply for things that interest them. It’s a great message. She’s @ansate on Twitter.
Illustrated piece by Susie Cagle on the effect that the “sharing economy” (think Uber, Lyft, AirBnb, etc) is having on the overall economy. Here’s the bottom line:
The sharing economy has painfully noble goals. But a society and an economics that truly values civic engagement, the commons, and trust between people is one that invests in the protection of those people so they can really prosper, even when something goes wrong.
I would agree that in the presence of a strong social safety net, the sharing economy would look very different. As it is, it looks like a way for rich people to exchange the opportunity for workers to steal some crumbs from other workers in service of shrinking the overall pie.
Alexis Madrigal has written an interesting look at how Google’s self-driving car really works. Google has figured out that rather than building a really smart car, they could instead build a really rich digital representation of the roads on which the car will drive. Obviously there are big questions about whether this approach can be scaled to work for a larger geographic area than Mountain View, California, but I love this approach, which only software engineer would come up with. I agree with the article that collecting and storing large amounts of this kind of data is a problem we understand better than the problem of building really intelligent machines. If this approach to controlling self-driving cars takes off, it also puts Google in a great position to make money licensing data to any company that wants to build them, rather than building cars itself.
Brent Simmons posted a really nice recollection of his days at UserLand back in the late nineties. I was a Mac user at the time, and I was building sites using Frontier. It really was something completely new. The idea of having “Edit This Page” buttons on sites was pretty radical at the time, and eventually became a compulsory part of any decent content management system.
One slight correction — I think amphetaDesk was the first desktop RSS aggregator. Its creator, Morbus Iff, is still around, tweeting.
Search engine analyst Danny Sullivan applies his expertise to analyzing the penalties MetaFilter that might have cost the site a huge chunk of its Google search traffic. It’s a really interesting look at how Google penalizes sites that try to game the system.
The section on how Google penalizes publishers for inbound “unnatural links” is really interesting:
It’s insane because it has allowed the same sites that charged people to get links to now charge for them to be removed. Or for the rise of an entire link debuilding industry. Or for publishers who have long suffered terrible link requests to now get messages from people asking for links to be removed.
The article has some really good advice for Google in how it manages its relationship with publishers. I also liked this bit:
Earn respect. That’s your best defense if things go south with Google. It’s also your best offense for doing well in Google.
As Sullivan points out, people cheered when Google lit Demand Media on fire and set them adrift.
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Soccer doesn’t explain globalization
In a fit of World Cup enthusiasm, I bought Franklin Foer’s book How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization. The book is roughly 10 years old, and ages less well as you progress through it. The initial chapters on soccer history and racism in soccer feel fresh and are really interesting. Foer says in the introduction that the book progresses from bad news to good news, and unfortunately gets gets worse as you make your way through it.
Foer’s argument that soccer will provide the organizing force that disrupts Islamic fundamentalism in Iran seems particularly regrettable with the benefit of hindsight. The good news for wannabe soccer fans is that the book argues effectively that Barcelona is a perfectly good fan for a dilettante to support. The team is owned by its supporters, serves as a foil for fascist Real Madrid, and plays an exciting style. If you want to cultivate a soccer rooting interest and are afraid of unwittingly making common cause with white nationalists, Barcelona is there to offer safe harbor.