The Mismatch Problem

I was watching this video of Malcolm Gladwell’s talk over the weekend and enjoyed every minute of it.  Malcolm has the uncanny ability to look at problems in new ways. He was talking about the challenges in finding the right people to hire in various professions. He calls it the “mismatch problem”   According to Malcolm, the problem exists because:

1. Our desire for certainty in a world where uncertainty is the norm
2. The growing complexity of every profession increases mismatch

He points out, how, in various fields from sports to teaching, metrics used to select candidates do not really reflect the reality of the changing requirements of the job.

In software we do the same. We try to measure some of the basic skills like knowledge of software development including programming, conceptual understanding, ability to solve simple problems. The true attributes, however, are more complex and are not easy to measure in a test or in a few interviews. These include the ability to work in a team, ability to learn and communicate, a healthy curiosity and a certain amount of pride in work. Our challenge is to figure out how to train our employees in these  new skills.

Steven Pinker: Human Intelligence

In this TED Talk,  Steven Pinker talks about the way we use words, how we learn, and how we relate to others.

Human Intelligence consists of:

• A repertoire of concepts (objects, space, time, causation, intention) useful in social, knowledge intensive species
• A process of metaphorical abstraction: conceptual structure bleached of its content, applied to new abstract domains

Engineers Don’t Start Like Business Folk

I am reading a series of blogs about HP Pheonomenon by Chuck House ,thanks to a note sent by a friend, Bill (Mr. Human Glue) Daul of NextNow.

I paused when I came this line:

Engineers don’t start out thinking like, or looking like, business folk.

How true. There is a lot of difference between the companies started and run by Engineers vs Business People. Both seem to be successful in their own way. You need a combination of both to build a successful company. Marketing/Sales/Technology is a key combination. Having said that, look at companies built by engineers and business folk. There is a distinct difference in the culture.

This is an illuminating blog. It takes you back more than 50 years and tells the story of a great company. Chuck says that it is just a few front-end loaded with about 12 small items.

Here is a little snippet of the story on the first laser printer HP produced and the marketing.

We had a poll in marketing on how many we’d sell the first month. The forecast was 75. Actual sales were zero. We also sold zero in January and February. Finally in March, Dan Schwartz sold our first trade unit to AAMC in Washington D.C.

But read this. It will blow your mind.

After the failures, the Boise, Idaho management team had lost enthusiasm for this sector, reducing the development team to five engineers for the third try – which yielded a product called the HP 2686A, later retitled as the HP LaserJet. It was a stunning, and unexpected, success, turning into a product bigger by a factor of five than anything else in HP’s 90 division line-up.

Each post has a telling story. They fill you with wonder and some times make you think, “I know how that feels”. I just can’t wait for the book to appear. Meanwhile, I am going to keep track of this blog.

What Happens When You Discover a Cool Blogger?

What happens when you discover a cool blogger? In his/her blogroll, you are guaranteed to find several other cool bloggers too.

This is what happened when a friend sent me a link to this one which led me to this and this. One of life’s pleasures - finding people with a sense of humor and passion.

LinkLog: TED: Ideas Worth Spreading

I have been a regular watcher of videos on TED Talks.  It is one of the most inspiring channels of information.  If you like the talks, you can help them spread.

Winners in Tech

From Bill Gates on Innovation:

Bill does make the good argument that the winners in tech are rarely the ones who come up with the new idea, but rather the ones who bring it to market properly.

Apple didn’t invent the MP3 player, it just brought it mainstream. Microsoft didn’t invent the graphical OS, it just brought forward the first one compatible with everyone’s old software. YouTube didn’t invent internet video, it was just the first one to package it with an easy embeddable player and a great community. The winners aren’t the ones who do something first, but the ones who did it right for the market and the users.

We can go on with these examples. Google did not invent the Search Engine. They just did a better job of ranking results, scaling the service, providing great response and finally innovating on a business model to make tons of money. These are innovations too. Different kind of innovations than technical innovations.

The full transcript (an entertaining and informative read) is here.

Blogging Has Changed My Life

 From Vaibhav of Technofriends in a Blogr Tools interview.

Definitely blogging has changed my life a lot. My blog is like a baby to me. After starting this blog, I have kind of started being more research oriented. The vital questions which I ask myself have made me become more focused in my approach. It clearly helps. Apart from all this, its also about a brand image called YOU. I have also got more focus/attention from open communities / individuals because of my blog.

I connected with Vaibhav only a few months ago when I saw a link to my blog from Technofriends. Nice to see that his efforts getting some visibility.

Blogging has changed my life too.

• It gave me a way to share what I know
• It got me an anchor on the web where I can point other people to when they ask me what I do
• It let me keep track of topics I learn and am interested in
• It got me lots of friends around the world
• It made me introspect a lot more than I used to

Simple Innovations: Personal Unit Tests

For those of you who are not into software, unit tests are small test scripts/programs to check the health of software development. Unit tests are used to make sure that the code runs as expected and when you make changes you do not break anything that is already working. During development unit tests are regularly or whenever you change something.

This blog post from Edward O’Connor is an interesting twist on using the concept of unit testing to your daily life. There are a good way to make sure that you have a quick check on your progress in your personal development.

The way I see it, there are certain things I ought to be doing to be productive and effective no matter what my goals are. These are things that are relatively easy to set up, but take discipline and awareness to maintain. I really think that if I focus on maintaining these habits or processes, then the goals will take care of themselves.

Basically, I’ve made a list of personal unit tests: assertions about myself that I’d like to be true.

Your unit tests may vary.  I think it is a great idea.  Other related ideas triggered by this one:

• Version control of your goals (Edward already has done this for his Personal Unit Tests). Our goals change and it will be good to have a change log what changed and why. This is inspired by version control in software where you log the changes with a description on what and why you changed something.

• Tagging Personal Tests (some of them may be generic, applicable to a larger variety of people and some may be specific)

I enjoy reusing concepts across multiple domains and this is a great example.

Some of the Most Influential Bloggers

Interesting List from Digg. A few of my favorites are there. But the bulk of them, I never heard about. Time to update my knowledge about bloggers.

This is a test post from Digg. I was trying to use Digg to digg a story and blog about it.

digg story

Links: Interaction Design Patterns

Interaction Design Patterns for web development is probably one of the most useful resources for application developers. We already see many of these patterns in applications today. I am really thankful to Martijn van Welie, for taking the effort to list these patterns and document them in such a high quality blog list.

This is such a wonderful effort to take each pattern, describe it and identify implementations and usability information. For example, look at Accordion Pattern which includes very useful notes on Thoughts on Usability. In addition to a nice categorization list, there are good links to resources and code for implementation. Found the following links to interaction design patterns from this site.

• Interaction Design Patterns for Games
  
• User Interface Design Patterns - Course Notes
• Ubicomp Design Patterns from Berkeley
  

The overall goal of this work is to aid practice by speeding up the diffusion of new interaction techniques and evaluation results from researchers, presenting the information in a form more palatable and usable to practicing designers. Towards this end, we have developed an initial and emerging pattern language for ubiquitous computing, consisting of 45 pre-patterns describing application genres, physical-virtual spaces, interaction and systems techniques for managing privacy, and techniques for fluid interactions.

It will be nice to see the following additions. This can be actually built from inputs by the community.

• A tag map based on interaction-idioms
• A tag map or feature-matrix (like the mashup matrix) based on products where these patterns are used.