Posts filed under 'BizExecToBe'
Our company is organizing one of those grab-a-gift-from-the-table gift exchanges. My client’s office is arranging one, too. I’m not allowed, for ethics reasons, to give anyone a gift at my client’s office. But somehow swapping $20-limit goodies works, since I don’t know who specifically will get it? (Yep, I looked it up in my client’s online ethics manual: if I don’t know who I’m giving it to, it’s completely ethical.)
Seems like then I’m not giving to make someone’s day brighter, since I have no real idea who I’m gifting to or what they’d like. Forgive my Scrooge-i-ness, but it seems like then I’m giving so I can get something from the table. Something which someone else has no idea whether I’d like.
I can’t help but thinking we’d be a little more in the Christmas spirit if we all just put cards on the table that said “I put a coat on someone for you today”, or “I gave someone dinner in your (non-specific, ethically pardonable) name today”.
December 3rd, 2008
An article link dropped in my in-bin reads “Should Remote Workers Earn More?“. First reaction: h*** no! (Note: I haven’t yet read the article yet - will give my reaction/thinking, and then see if the article offers any insights I hadn’t considered.)
Argument 1: Remote workers don’t have the same commuting expenses as do local workers. Thus their compensation package doesn’t need to cover that cost of going to work. (Counter argument: but you need to set up a home office, which does cost more. Some of that may be covered by tax breaks for home offices, I imagine, though I’m no tax expert.) Still come down on: no, don’t pay remote workers more.
Argument 2: Remote workers don’t have the same office distractions as do local workers, and thus are more productive. Hmmm…. if that’s true, then that better performance would be rewarded by greater pay, regardless of the locale. But no ipso facto relationship: if it is an effect, then better pay should be granted, but until said effect is indicated, no better pay.
Argument 3: The local office doesn’t have to pay for the cost of the office space of the worker, and thus that worker is cheaper, in terms of overhead expenses. Ergo, the company can pay more for the remote worker. One, that logic only works if a significant portion of your labor force works from home: no one can shift their expense structure that much for one worker being in or out of the office. Two, so what? If it costs me less as a company to utilize you, that doesn’t mean that you get the money. It may mean you get more opportunities to work, because my profit rate for you is higher, but that doesn’t mean I have to share it with you.
Argument 4: Hey, working from home is less burdensome for the employee… It’s a perk (no commute, no dress code, flexibility in hours), that ought to be considered as part of the total compensation package. By that logic, the remote worker should actually get paid _less_. If one perk goes up, and that employee is comparable to other employees, the pay package ought to go down.
All arguments, before reading the article, still lead me to the “employees might be willing to take a pay cut to work from home” rather than “employees should get a pay raise to work from home”. (Note: I could only intermittently work from home, as I have 3 kids at home: productivity with a 2 year old running around just isn’t high on any sustained basis.)
Aha: the article uses the term “remote worker” to mean the guy who works a regular day job, and then is expected to bring work home at night. The argument against paying these folks more is that “Show me one employee who doesn’t waste time at work,” the Colorado-based author said. “I see so much abuse of working hours by employees—personal phone calls, socializing, checking eBay listings, booking personal travel, etc.—that I don’t believe it’s unreasonable for an employer to want a bit of work on personal hours.“. Hmmmm…. isn’t that more of a cultural/management issue, that unwanted behaviors are occurring on the clock? That doesn’t mean you get to change the clock, particularly without specific evidence on an individual basis: ok, you took away 2 hours of “my” time, I’m going to take away 2 of yours. (Sounds like a parenting punishment I’ve used before, actually.) Particularly since in reality it’s more like, OK, you may have taken away some amount of hours of”my” time, so I now have carte blanche to require additional hours of yours.
Note that I’m one of those sick twisted individuals who has a need to keep abreast of the field, checks her email constantly, and would probably be very addicted to a Crackberry, were I to have one. So I’m a remote worker, just by nature. But I do it for me, for my own twisted personality deficiencies. I feel very strongly that I don’t “owe” that to my employer, and were an employer to ever indicate that I owed it to them in any large measure, I’d indicate that there is no compensation package large enough to cover such an agreement. Folks quibble over vacation time in compensation packages, but allow employment overage to eat into just plain ol’ life time.
So to bring it full circle, using their definition of “remote worker”, yes, remote workers should EITHER be paid more, or work less at work. Either way to solve the equation works for me. But if remote workers are required to work more, over and above, just at home rather than at work, then they should definitely be paid more. They should assess the likely hours burden over the year, and use that times their approximate hourly rate to determine what they should be compensated.
These kinds of opinions make me unpopular with services companies. One day, when I have my own company, this post may come back to bite me when I’m older/wiser/burdened by realities of business, rather than just the philosophies of business. I hope I hold true to my statements.
June 26th, 2008
Very nice post on Brazen Careerist entitled ‘Seven Reasons why graduate school is outdated‘. I’d like to add to her comments with a few items as to why I believe grad school isn’t as useful as I once thought. These thoughts are shaped by both my own experiences in an MBA program (either on hold or abandoned, based on the time demands of it versus family life) and discussions with folks in Masters programs in Computer Science:
* Those who rise to the top seem to do so based on leadership and communication skills, neither of which seem to be to be readily teachable in a classroom setting. These both seem to be shaped through use, and by watching others who succeed in those skills, rather than reading about Laslow’s hierarchy of needs.
* Reading and experimentation sticks much more when done on your own time, own interests, and in line with where it’d be useful in your day-to-day life.
* Masters programs are just too darned long! Multiple hours in a single evening in a classroom session, learning something that may or may not stick well (see bullets 1 and 2, above), plus homework, to get the credentials.
* Masters programs have lots of classes that cover things that are “basics” that you may not get to use practically for years, if ever. I think of accounting classes: the principles are useful, but pragmatically, I’m going to pay an expert in the field to do any serious accounting, rather than spend more hours than necessary on it and likely muck it up based on a change in GAAP or in the tax policy. I think of compiler design: I’m never going to write a compiler, but somehow this kind of class shows up regularly in masters programs for computer science.
* The classes that are useful, you’re already doing! If it’s really useful, you’ve likely already had a taste of it, but are forced to spend hours in class hearing lectures on things you’re already at least basically familiar with. Sure, you’re likely to learn something in the class, particularly by the end of it, to broaden or deepen your understanding, but in the meantime you’re to spend quite a few hours in a chair. (I think here of OO classes, or database design for comp sci programs, or classes on ethics/social responsibility, or leadership, or marketing for business.)
I’ve come to believe that these credentials do show a certain commitment to improvement and education on the part of the person who possesses them, but they may not show a respect for their own time. (And if they don’t have a respect for their own time/life, I worry about their respect for anyone else’s time/life!) I respect the personalmba site, questions asked/answered via LinkedIn, and generally asking questions/watching folks to see who’s succeeding, and just as importantly, what things you believe you shouldn’t copy.
June 20th, 2008
I’ve been dreaming of starting my own company. It’s happened before, and nary a business plan or a change in business card has yet come about, so it’s unfortunately unlikely to pass. Any company I work for, I start to think how I’ll do things differently in my company. MY company will be driven by values. MY company will harness the best thoughts and energies of its employees (me included) to greater success than if we worked as individuals. MY company will engage with the community, in ways beyond just giving checks. MY company will be a ‘Small Giant’.
Right now MY company would need to replace MY salary, which is our family’s primary source of income. That’s a pretty heady requirement for a startup, to reliably replace a certain salary and benefits package. You have to have a fair amount of confidence in both the business opportunity, and your ability to execute on it, and be more certain that you’re right than that the statistics on small businesses will fall against you. Hence my reluctance to actually engage. But that doesn’t stop me from thinking. Thinking about who’d be the right people to bring on board. Thinking about, what would attract that combination of people. Thinking about what magic we could accomplish.
For all of the faults any of the companies I’ve ever been at have had, they have had the distinct advantage of actually having pulled the trigger and acted on that startup dream. I keep reminding myself of that.
June 6th, 2008
“So how dumb are we? Well, if we don’t vote some people who actually respect women into Congress soon, we just may be as dumb as those senators think.”
– my quote of choice from Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick in her article “How Dumb Are We?How long will women shoulder the blame for the pay gap?”, on the topic of Congress’s rejection of a bill that would have recognized each subsequent inequitable paycheck as an act of discrimination, rather than just the first one.
I guess the argument is that, although folks realize that womens’ salaries are artificially low because they are women, not remedying the situation is OK, since they didn’t instigate the initial discrimination. The discrepancy after that point can be argued as that individual receiving equitable percentage increases, but just not starting from as large a base. First job seekers, take note: your initial salary anywhere, but particularly for that first job, is one of the primary determiners of your salary trajectory for the remainder of your career. Take your second job as the job you really love; take your first job to set your salary benchmark, and make sure you negotiate for every additional penny you can get. That advice holds for everyone, but for women in particular. Make sure that you can justify any discrepancy LATER as years spent out of the workforce raising children, or sweatshop environments avoided. Just don’t let yourself be pigeon-holed as the woman who’ll cost you less just because she’s a woman and doesn’t know any better.
April 26th, 2008
Every once in a while I like to take a look at the headers of the spam accruing in Google’s Spam folder for me. There’s the usual assortment of titles indicating that, were I male, certain areas of my anatomy could be enlarged for the benefit of the ladies. There are also offers, usually made in ALL CAPS, to help someone down on their luck by acting as a money agent to allow them to transfer funds from some foreign company. Sometimes there are job offers, promising to let me work from home. Nearly always, there are some number of medicinal offerings, beyond the ones promising enlargement of male organs. Once in a while, someone tries to convince me that a certain stock is certain to go through the roof and I just need to get in on the ground floor.
These are all apparently items that folks have tested to some degree or other and believe will cause some percentage of folks to click through and either pick up the virus or spend some money or go to a website that will then let them pick up a virus. Once in a while, though, someone shows some flair and comes up with a new angle. I’m always interested in what the angle is, as much for its commentary on what’s thought to be attractive to the general population.
Turns out, the new thing is shoes. There were 54 items in my Spam folder related to shoes, of the 813 Google Spam items has nicely sequestered away for me. 3 or 4 look to be from legitimate merchandisers with whom I’ve done business with before, though not as a shoe shopper. The rest are honest to goodness spam.
Who buys enough shoes that this is the hot new spam? I’ll send these messages your way. They look to offer amazing deal, from Google’s preview of the message. Gosh, I could get Gucci or Prada or high-end sandals for what I presume must be amazing prices. Just let me know if you want these messages, and I’ll set up a Google filter to forward them your way.
P.S. I’m highly amused that Google’s AdWords account expiration notification ended up sorted by them into their own Spam folder.
April 24th, 2008
As software developers, we often have a favorite toolkit that we can count on in our day-to-day jobs. Favorite IDE (Eclipse), favorite text editor (vi), favorite source control system (Subversion), favorite language (whatever’s paying me now!) - all of these are tools in our virtual tool belt that we look to master to let us concentrate on the interesting details of the task at hand.
Here’s a list of tools that I find essential for my software development career, that I consider outside of my normal tool belt:
1) LinkedIn.com: this is my networking and marketing tool. I use it to keep track of who’s where and who knows someone that might have an answer or a good job. I’m happy to help others in the network, and like to answer questions on the board (see that marketing angle: I think looking at someone’s responses is another view into how they might fit into your organization).
2) Safari.oreilly.com: long ago, I started a bookshelf subscription to O’Reilly. I can check out the latest books, keep an eye on what’s hot, and just generally grab info when I need it, without paying a $40/book charge for something that I may read once and then stick on a shelf.
3) Google’s code search feature. Let’s face: lots of software documentation leaves much to be desired, and often it’s useful to see either source code or samples of how someone’s used something of interest. I often use google’s codesearch feature (http://www.google.com/codesearch) to find a sample usage of an API of interest, or of a configuration file that the documentation just isn’t clear on. Maven’s pom files are non-intuitive to me often: properties that are listed for plugins don’t seem to match with what I’d put in the pom file. But I’m able to do a hunt for pom.xml files that reference a particular plug-in, and have a reasonable shot of finding what I’m looking for.
4) Del.icio.us (http://del.icio.us/) is my personal filing cabinet of interesting things on the web. I tag all sorts of tutorials, examples, or useful tech conversations so that I can go find that OSGI tutorial that talked about how to properly track service references, for example, or how folks have dealt with logging from their containers. I don’t tend to search much across other folks’ tags, just my own. But I love being able to get to it from wherever I am.
5) Google’s Reader for RSS feeds: I love having one source to see what’s happening across the blogs of interest to me. I also love being able to share items of interest with my contacts, and to see what they’re tracking.
March 18th, 2008
I’ve heard and read several analyses of the govt’s plan to give Americans a check to stimulate the economy. The point that several commentators made is that those checks are months away from being in our pockets, and that thus they may be just too late getting to us to have any real effect. One senator who was claiming that he’d like to have seen a different package indicated that a “quick” stimulus to the economy would be if folks spent that money within 2 months of receiving it. He also claimed that folks on the upper end of the income scale would likely save the money or use it to pay down debt, neither of which releases new funds into the economy.
I’ll go on the record as an American looking forward to her check in the mail: I think the effect on the economy will begin well before we actually receive those checks. I already made some comment tonight that we could do something we otherwise wouldn’t, and just count it as borrowing against our rebate check. If you think found money is coming, the economic doom and gloom outlook that otherwise would keep you from spending money suddenly lifts. The money will come tomorrow (as in, the sun will come out…) and we can spend against it today.
Think about the timing: for folks who haven’t paid off whatever they charged for Christmas, the dollars will come in too late for them to earmark it for the responsible thing of paying off bills. Similarly, they’re too late to apply towards any income tax owed, and too late to even tempt you to be responsible and fund a 2007 tax year IRA. No, they’re just funds coming at a time when the general flow of funds has evened out. Mentally, we don’t have to account them against anything. So we can apply them towards dreaming, and getting tastes of those dreams now. If we’re willing to pay credit card interest charges (and lots of us are, according to the credit card industry’s statistics, are), we can have that dream NOW and not even have to wait for the IRS machinery to mesh with the US postal service and deposit a paper check into our mailbox.
My odds are on those paper checks being already spent before they’re in the majority of American mailboxes.
January 24th, 2008
If you schedule a 2 1/2 hour meeting with a very long agenda…. make sure that that’s the LAST meeting you have to schedule for a while. Don’t cover point #1 in your agenda, and then note that we’ll need to have ongoing meetings to discuss the others. I, uh, suddenly have dentist appointments every week JUST at the time when your regular meeting would be held. To help me feel less guilty, perhaps I’ll abstain from Novocaine… it would still be less painful.
July 9th, 2007
A thank you to my friend, Ken, for reminding me about the Freakonomics blog… A quick peek over there today brought me to a theory positing why retirees build such big houses. After all, rationally, most need less space, and have no real need to restart a mortgage. Worse, as my grandmother is finding out, dealing with a big house when your arthritis is acting up and your afraid of breaking a hip if you fall off of a ladder is no fun at all.
I’ll toss my theory into the ring, though, that a house is not a rational purchase. We don’t buy homes to fulfill our need for housing. We buy homes to fulfill our dreams of what our life could be like, in a particular area, or with a home that’s decorated a particular way or that has a certain kitchen layout. We dream of things that we COULD do in a particular space, not of what we will do with our own particular sloppy habits or lack of time.
The homes that are going up in our area are massive. The signs used to say things like “starting in the low 400s”. I can’t say as I’ve seen one of those in a while, unless it’s associated with a townhouse: the numbers have definitely gone up. This, in what is widely listed as a housing downturn.
We debate about buying a new home, or upgrading our own, for a combination of rational and dream lifestyle reasons. We haven’t yet pinned down where the boundary between those lay, and what rationality versus dreams is worth to us. The rational side says that when our kids get bigger, our house will need a bit more elbow room to handle those growing elbows. I want a bigger seating area near the kitchen, so that we can have people over for dinner and not be pinned up against the glass sliding door. And hey, if we’re going to expand out the back of the house (assuming we did an expansion), I’ve always dreamed of a bigger master bedroom with a nice master bathroom to boot. What’s a little more renovation when you’re only dreaming of the tab?
A few years ago now we had our basement renovated. We quickly discovered that tabs run up: we upgraded the lighting system downstairs, and then realized we needed to upgrade the electrical capacity in our home, and then discovered that to meet the new code we needed to install smoke alarms that were hooked into the electrical system upstairs, and THEN decided that since the electricians needed to run wiring up into the ceilings anyway, we’d have them install wiring for ceiling fans in each of the bedrooms. Cha-ching, cha-ching, cha-ching. And that was just for the basement. Imagine rearranging a load bearing wall on the back of the house, adding the plumbing and installations to support a true master bathroom rather than our half bath, dealing with moving cabinets and lighting in the kitchen, and then matching things like siding (oh, we want to replace the siding, anyway: might as well throw it in the mix).
All of this to fulfill some dreams of what we MIGHT do in the house. Note that none of my proposed renovations there really does anything to add too much more elbow room to the kids’ living area… we sort of figure them having small rooms will just encourage them to be more involved with the family. 
June 24th, 2007
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