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Friday, February 25, 2005 |
Based on my experience working at a number of different companies, I think that there is a nice, quality-of-life benefit to working in an environment with a high number of working mothers. Namely, there seems to be a cap on how long the workday is, and that cap seems quite reasonable.
When I have worked at such places, I have found the environment to be free of any "macho" pretensions regarding working long hours for the sake of competition and "face time". There may be two separate effects, one the female influence, and one the mother influence. At any rate, I find this to be a good environment.
11:59:01 PM 
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I bet you could harvest contacts from Wikipedia's history and discussion pages, and get free "consulting" of about the quality you would, best-case, expect from Google Answers. I did it once.
11:52:37 PM
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I just posted a question on Google Answers. I have heard nothing about how this one of Google's experiments is going.
This sends me off on a bit of a tangent...I'm thinking of something Google and Microsoft have in common. Google has lots of experiments going (Google Answers, Google News, Gmail, Froogle), but only their mainstays--Search, and AdWords--make money. Microsoft is rather similar--they are in many businesses, but I have often read that only Windows and Office make money.
11:46:17 PM
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The My Convenience pattern should not be confused with the Pure Self-Interest pattern. They are very similar. However, in the My Convenience pattern, the perpetrator is oblivious to the fact that what they find convenient, others will find quite inconvenient.
In the Pure Self-Interest pattern, the perpetrator is keenly aware of the politics and considerations of others. In arguing for the position which aligns to their self-interest, they strive to analyze the positions of others, and anticipate the counter-arguments that are likely to be deployed against them, and actively devise strategems that consider the externalities.
This pattern is so fundamental it is almost unworthy of mention in the literature of behavior patterns, except to be distinguished from the far more subtle My Convenience pattern.
11:27:27 PM
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Here is another behavior pattern: the lowest-common denominator pattern. In this pattern, some source of authority is utterly unwilling to make the meagerest attempt to calibrate their advice/response/dictates to the particular competence of the invdividual with whom they are communicating. And since the advice has to be "one size fits all", then that size (willfully mixing metaphors here) must be at the lowest-common denominator.
Well-known examples include:
- Any form of help desk.
- Physicians (try to get a doctor to comment on the widely-reported research finding that 1-2 oz of alcohol a day can be net healthful).
I had a recent run-in with the pattern when we got PointSec software to encrypt the hard drive of our laptops. Definitely a good idea. But it only encrypts data on the drive, not in memory. So, if you are working on a confidential document, don't turn off your computer, and the laptop gets stolen, then that document is unencrypted. Thus, the interoffice rollout memo instructs "never transport your laptop with the power on".
Well, sorry, but I kind of like that feature. And there is a big flaw in their reasoning. The hard drive protection is only as good as your password. The same password that protects your locked workstation. So it would seem that locking Windows would be equally effective.
Probably there is some hardware/security geek who could tell me how, theoretically, a thief could crack open the case and read the un-encrypted RAM without logging back in. Fine. Then the instructions could just have said "If you transport your laptop while powered on, make sure to close any and all sensitive documents, including your email program".
But that level of subtle distinction-making would rise above the lowest common denominator.
11:20:22 PM
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Most practical benefit, to date, of maintaining this blog: a Ford employee responded to my Idiosyncratic Review of the Ford Focus to educate me on the fact that my rear seat could be tipped forward, to allow the folding back to lie flat in cargo-carrying mode.
10:31:42 PM
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© Copyright 2005 Erik Neu.
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