Tuesday, December 23, 2008
I have a friend named Sam, and she is working herself to the bone. She works for an Acme Corp in the financial sector, and through a cascading series of managerial failures, she is now saddled with a crushing workload meant for four people, on a project for which she’s had no training. She’s smart [...]
I talked before about discipline. I’ve fallen back into the habit of reloading my reader if there is a moment of down time. Here’s what I did to fix that:
I dusted off an old computer that wasn’t being used, and I installed Ubuntu on it. I placed this old computer on a book shelf across [...]
Wednesday, November 5, 2008
Update on my life. I’ve been doing many things I had on my back burner for the past 3 weeks, and it’s been really great. I’ve set up the Linux e-mail and document station in my office that I’ve been meaning to build. I’ve cleaned out my 100-year-old detached garage that was literally full, floor [...]
Wednesday, October 22, 2008
Last we spoke, David had been fired, I was developing a goal map and polishing my resume. I said I would ask Jesper for a budget and a raise, but it turns out he had other plans.
The Lead Up
Jesper never liked David. He agreed to take David on board in order to get the cash [...]
Wednesday, October 8, 2008
This is perhaps the culmination of my drivel: many close friends have told me that this writing is odd because it doesn’t sound like me as I am in life. It has a certain preachy quality to it that I haven’t settled into, so the voice sounds inauthentic to me.
It’s been clear to me [...]
Wednesday, October 1, 2008
My original exit strategy for my employment at Ideal had three basic phases:
Kick ass at my job by designing superior products, and organizing my team to be efficient and productive
Use the momentum of my success to simultaneously negotiate for options, and a larger, more visible role in the company.
Use my role in the company to [...]
Wednesday, September 24, 2008
This post is the first of at least two about Goal Mapping. It’s a technique that I invented, but it’s painfully obvious, so I doubt I’m the first. I’ll explain the simple (but still wildly useful) version of the goal map in this one, then the next article will cover the more advanced mappings you [...]
Saturday, August 16, 2008
The major project that Walter dragged his ass on for six weeks is not yet complete. There was a brief and uninteresting delay in the middle that was Ideal’s fault — some logistical issues with getting the infrastructure ready — but unfortunately that has not been the only problem.
I went into work recently feeling really [...]
I’d like to relay a conversation I had with a poster on the Joel on Software forum, and someone who has commented here as well. He goes by the handle “InWritingPlease,” and on July 29th, he said this:
“Ken has some good writing, but it’s WAY too general to be very practical. Enough to get [...]
There’s a guy who stumbled into a lumberjack in the mountains. The man stops to observe the lumberjack, watching him feverishly sawing at this very large tree. He noticed that the lumberjack was working up a sweat, sawing and sawing, yet going nowhere. The bystander noticed that the saw the lumberjack was using was about [...]
