Via the New York Times, the money quote:
The key psychological insight here is that people have no trouble turning any information into a coherent narrative. This is true when, as in the case of my friend, the information (i.e., her tardiness) is incorrect. And this is true, as in our experiments, when the information is random. People can’t help seeing signals, even in noise.
Says a lot about a recent election, too.
From a recruiting perspective, the best engineering manager I’ve worked with established her reputation with two hires. It went like this: ME: “We need to build an iOS team, and while we have talented engineers, we don’t have time to train the current team on iOS, it’ll be faster to hire.” HER: “Great, who should… more
Those candidates got a study guide, free books, and an open invitation to proceed with the process whenever they were ready. The $80 in books we sent candidates had one of the best ROIs of any investment we made anywhere in the business. Some of our best hires couldn’t have happened without us bringing the candidate up to speed, first.
(By Thomas H. Ptacek via Quartz)
Laurie Voss via Quartz:
You are looking for grasp of complex topics and the ability to clearly communicate about them, which are the two jobs of the working engineer.
My introduction to Scott Berkun was his amazing talk at Webstock 2008 on the Myths of Innovation, based on one of the three books he’s published in the last decade. I remember his talk not only because of the compelling content, but because he eschewed the traditional get-to-know-you slides in his presentation – he jumped… more
On my list of horrendously bungled acquisitions, I put Delicious near the top. Since its acquisition by Yahoo in 2005, the biggest user-facing change to the site was a visual refresh in 2008. Even with this rampant feature stagnation, I’d stuck with the site because it solved a daily need for me — bookmarks anywhere.… more
Jesse walked. Monday is the day we set aside for new hires. All the new hires spend the morning learning about the company, figuring out how to create accounts, and becoming indoctrinated in company culture. When lunch time arrives, managers pick up their new employees and take them to lunch. Their morning starts at 9am,… more
This article was written over a decade ago, and business has changed. You can read a much-updated version of this article here. You’ve had a small number of career-defining moments. These are the select few moments in time when the trajectory of your career changed instantly and drastically. I have two buckets of these: ones… more
If you’re wondering about your next job, there are a series of Rands articles that might make the transition easier. First off, there’s A Glimpse and a Hook, which will describe how managers read your resume. Then we’ve got The Sanity Check, which will prepare you for the phone screen. And finally, there’s Ninety Days,… more
As we discovered in A Glimpse and a Hook, it’s almost a miracle when the phone rings and a recruiter wants to set up a phone screen. The fact is, someone, somewhere in the organization has successfully mapped you to an open position. This is a really big deal because, in my experience, the chance… more
