Posts filed under 'BizExecToBe'
“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
So, I think I’ve mentioned I started a new job a few weeks ago. Thought I’d mention an interesting culture shift I’ve seen… I’ve mentioned that I’m running at lunch now. Most of my office does some sort of exercise at lunchtime. For most of them, bicycling is the sweat-dripper of choice. These guys go out for 16 mile rides, and then come back and sling code with the best of ‘em.
At my previous gig, lunchtime meant walking to a great restaurant in Bethesda and having interesting conversations. Here, it means dripping with sweat and comparing stories as to great hills conquered or sports jelly beans (I want to get me some of those!). Gotta admit, this way is cheaper, and might even lose me a few pounds in the meantime.
June 12th, 2007
A sign that I work in a male-dominated field: the ranking guy at my new office had to send out an e-mail to the guys in the office. He told them that that since their newest hire is female, the gents would no longer be able to commandeer the ladies’ room to use the shower there after their lunchtime bike rides. Sheesh…. I’m used to being in the minority, but this is amusingly out there.
May 30th, 2007
Interesting perks of my job of late:
- seeing us on Nickelodeon and the Cartoon Network in banner ads, and part of the SpongeBob Friend or Foe episode sponsorship.
- knowing that we’re in Best Buy (search ‘kajeet’ on BestBuy.com) and LimitedToo (again, search ‘kajeet’ on LimitedToo.com)
- We were in the WashingtonPost: my boss is the guy holding the cellphone
- We were on CBS News (!) tonight. See clips ‘Eye to Eye: Kids Go Mobile‘ and ‘Marketing Cellphones to Kids‘ (note that we’re the good guys at the end of this clip looking at all the bad things that happen in the market of selling cellphones to kids).
All very cool, and nowhere near anything I’ve had at previous jobs. I’ve been there a bit over a year, and seen us grow (sniff, sniff) from an idea / architecture to an operational system. My part in it? Based on some stats run against our code-base, approximately 28% of the code, or some 125,000 lines of code. (Note that I didn’t run the stat tool and count the numbers highly suspicious. That said, I’m holding onto the email that says ‘She is personally responsible for more than 125,000 lines of custom kajeet code, all written while leading a team of engineers, managing collaboration with Marketing and Product Development/Management, and interacting with half a dozen vendors.’ )
The sad part is that I’m leaving kajeet for pastures closer to home. The commute is killing me (running about an hour and a quarter each way for me in Beltway traffic, since I don’t live that close to Bethesda). That said, that leaves a wonderful opportunity for someone to come and fill my shoes. (No pressure here, looking at those stats above.) Cool job: Java technologies, interesting frameworks, agile development, smart team members, and a focus on building stuff that’s really going to get used. There’s no shelf-ware here: something you build today will hit the production system and be used by customers within a matter of weeks. Those Best Buy customers will be using YOUR stuff. Those CBS news viewers will be checking out YOUR stuff.
Check a job posting for a software engineer at kajeet. Multiple positions being hired, on a variety of skill levels. But it’s a good snapshot of the technologies and platforms in use.
May 16th, 2007
Reading up a bit on the Wii, the new gaming system set to be released by Nintendo just in time for the Christmas rush. Have to admit, even though I wouldn’t consider myself a gamer, this thing sounds appealing. Its price point appeals to me (cheaper by far than the XBox or the PSP3), the fact that you can download “old” games for $5 or $10 bucks to its console appeals to me (hey, I racked up a lot of time on Frogger, Pitfall, and SeaQuest as a kid), and the new controller REALLY appeals to me. The idea of someone rethinking how to interact with a game, beyond the traditional joystick: now that’s the kind of thing that sounds exciting. Wave my hand, and the game responds: I can’t wait to see the magic wand princess game for my girls. I’ll just lead you here to Fast Company’s blog posting, and definitely here, to Nintendo’s site for the Wii.
Oooooh, browsing through Nintendo’s site, found the Mii channel: check out the video of the caricatures you can create, and the thought they put into being able to adjust your caricature/character/avatar. Looking for the announcements that lets me (1) extend the set of caricature features: more facial expressions, ability to add clothing, jewelry, accessory items…, (2) share that caricature with my game-playing friends, (3) personalize the movements of the caricature, and (4) export it in some form that lets me use it on my webpage, cellphone, etc….
September 14th, 2006
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