Cash, flextime, recognition, VPN, culture....
on
Improving Company Morale?
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
There are MANY things good companies do to attract and keep the best folks in the industry. Performance-based cash bonuses a couple times a year go a long way. Flexible hours are key. Public recognition of hard work / successful projects is good for everyone. Encouraging developers to work from home as needed, 1 or 2 days a week, is great. And establishing a culture of trust and teamwork and sense of shared purpose is also very important.
This may sound like a fantasy, but my company provides all of these things, at least to some degree. Yes there have been layoffs -- but it is management's responsibility to make sure that its talent pool remains strong. So they eliminate the weak, and reward the strong, and amazing things happen. My coworkers and I work 50-60 hours a week on average, and more often than not finish the week feeling good about what we accomplished.
Also, while most of the corporate HR cultural initiatives have been somewhat bland and, well, corporate, individuals are fully empowered to take initiative themselves to make it a cool place to work. For example I started an indoor soccer team, and we've had several foozball tourneys, etc.
Anyway I wanted to share some thoughts on how some companies (mine at least) are doing it right.
I'm hoping for all the same things -- as is my brother (david.weekly.org -- btw he happens to be a huge advocate for OSS and GNU.) Though I'm not sure how open the licensing model will be, at least he and his fellow geeks on there's engineering team want it as open as possible... my understanding: the whole idea is for There to build an infrastructure and a "planet" (to start with) and a really cool island on it, and to leave the rest of the "world" as a huge frontier for there's user/developer base to explore and develop. so it's got to be attractive/compelling enough codewise AND licensingwise AND userexperiencewise (no I'm not German but I speak it and let it inform my chatgrammar) for geek types to really get excited about... here's hoping!
-chris
ps wrt Lain, I got the dvd set for christmas and finished the first 3, looking fwd to finishing soon... good stuff!
that is where There is heading. my brother is one of their lead engineers and this thing has been under wraps for over 4 years with some of the best minds in the industry hammering it out, making it scalable and extensible... it's the framework for something very.. very... different, than anything else done so far (including simsonline).
also, to reply to your footnote -- notice how every word written here contains one or more "o" or "r"? how appropriate! ok, enough already. yours truly, Christopher ;)
in my first astro course at uva 10 years ago, the hubble constant had our universe's age at about 15 billion years. the estimates of this constant (the rate of expansion of spacetime) have not been significantly altered in the last 10 years. so why is this news?
I am surprised to see so many otherwise informed people make such an optimistic assumption; that our species will live another 500 years, let alone 5 million, is in serious doubt.
wearing leather and a helmet protect most riders against all but the worst spills. I have no stats to quote offhand but I believe the problem is usually not the fall, rather the fact that you're lucky if you only get run over twice. an airbag won't help when the cars behind you can't slow down in time.
the ops crew are still occasionally found barefoot though that's rare.
this is at a 200+ person officepark company that's not really a startup anymore.
individuals can and do affect corporate culture, have some spine and shape your company as you see fit, or don't complain when one you don't like is foisted on you.
...free colocated Internet access to individuals and non-profits. If you represent a not-for-profit endeavor that seeks to have a web presence, an email account, or a rackmount server of your own, we'd love to help....
....We currently host several dozen servers in the San Francisco Bay Area, with locations in both Fremont* and San Francisco* connected to the Internet at gigabit speeds: both locations have multiple outbound fiber links for redundancy and excellent physical security, with locked cabinets, commercial-grade UPS-backed power, access control lists, and active environmental control. Our Fremont location* has 24/7 onsite staffing for easy and secure remote reboots and accessibility. We are serving up hundreds of websites, covering everything from Open Source, to current events in Argentina, to streaming MP3 Buddhist teachings, to personal sites, to information about socialism. We host the database backend for the Special Olympics.....
...start in Prague, lots of jobs there, great city to live in. cheap, too. get a TEFL cert (there), takes 5 weeks at ITC, tell em chris weekly sent you. wife and i did that 4 years ago, found jobs right away, no regrets.
a friend brought a cool little WMA (hardware-layer supported wma, so no encoding/decoding needed) player/recorder with 256MB of RAM... to a KDTU (Karl Denson's Tiny Univers -- see them!!)show last week, patched into a serious taper's rig, and now has a great recording and didn't have to bring anything with him that didn;t fit in his pocket. he said the device cost him $200. wish I could recall what it was, but seriously, any mp3/wma player really needs good recording ability to pique my interest. am I alone?
terminology shift? when did "honeypot" cease to refer to an insecure machine left open in order to attract and hunt crackers? now people use it to mean any WNAP left open?? hrm. dubious.
I'm a software developer in a free-range (read: sans-cubicle) environment -- and headphones allow for a lower interrupt level and fewer distractions. About a dozen of us pitched in for a 60GB drive a year ago and have been filling it with our favorite tunes. We paid for the drive, the bandwidth usage is reasonable, we're all happier and more productive, and everybody wins. Fortunately mgmt understands this here...
Congress doesn't regulate whether individuals or corporations lock their doors, install security alarms, or any of a plethora of physical security measures. Then, why would I want them to step into the fray and regulate security responses and policies in cyberspace?
<opinion>
While I agree that Congress passing new laws is not a good approach to solving security and privacy problems on the net, I think your analogy is fatally flawed. Individuals failing to lock their homes' doors negatively affects only those individuals themselves, if a criminal takes advantage of their negligence. However, a sysadmin who fails to take seriously the integrity of his/her network or server(s) potentially (and often, historically) contributes significantly to criminals' power to harm others.
There's a crucial distinction.
</opinion>
Um, I met my wife at work 5 years ago and am very happily married.
Also some of my very best friends are people I work with (and play fooz with and hike with and snowboard with and etc). We encourage and help and teach and learn from each other, load-balance when possible, and help relieve each others' stress. I cannot imagine spending this much time in a place with people I did not trust and like.
Your paranoia may be founded on bad personal experience, but it is extreme and unhealthy. I feel very bad for you. Your days at work must be very unhappy indeed. I hope your situation and outlook change, for your sake. It does not have to be this way. Really.
Given the right environment, hacker types are among the most truly social, uninhibited and communal personality types there are!
Anecdotally, I work in a Technology group comprised of about 60 people (feeds, db, app, backoffice, webdev, ops, tools, qa...) and we engineers *often* meet after work in decent numbers for beers, organize foozball tournaments at work, go out for lunch, go out for dinner, go on ski trips, go hiking, etc etc. I have found this group to be among the most varied, interesting, friendly and social group of people I've ever encountered. The ken-and-barbie types in biz dev and marketing -- the supposedly social crowd -- have nothing like this level of personal interaction, and groups outside Tech commonly complain that we have so much more fun than any other group here. I do not believe this to be an anomaly. Smart people with a range of interests are bound to find each others' company enjoyable.
If geeks have a reputation for antisocial behavior, it is IMHO due largely to their inability to relate to the shallow and selfish "in" groups in their school years. Once free to pursue their interests, they thrive. In the end it is the "popular" crowd from earlier years who end up lonely, ostracized, outcast for their inability to do or become something interesting. Being "cool" becomes pretty stale once you hit your mid-twenties and have shown no passion for mind, and for sharing and developing ideas....
I could continue but I owe my good friend in the app team some code before we go out to lunch.
This is not particularly suprising.
The ramifications of the tragedy -- the full implications of the impact it's had on our collective psyche -- will be impossible to gauge for months yet. But it is clear that in addition to paving the way for violations of civil liberties by the federal government, the attack has had quite an effect on corporate america, including the music industry. I refer not to its financial impact, rather the changes it is wreaking in the political climate of these large organizations. They are steering well clear of ANYthing that might be construed as controversial or sympathetic in any way to those responsible for the attack. The irony, of course, is that in excercising their typically befuddled judgement they self-censor the most pro-American, anti-terrorist, community-strengthening and potentially healing songs in their archives. This is a time when we need these songs most, but they are so afraid to misstep in this time of crisis that they do us all the worst disservice they could, giving the terrorists one more of countless small victories in their struggle to destroy our way of life.
Slashdot Mirror
There are MANY things good companies do to attract and keep the best folks in the industry. Performance-based cash bonuses a couple times a year go a long way. Flexible hours are key. Public recognition of hard work / successful projects is good for everyone. Encouraging developers to work from home as needed, 1 or 2 days a week, is great. And establishing a culture of trust and teamwork and sense of shared purpose is also very important.
This may sound like a fantasy, but my company provides all of these things, at least to some degree. Yes there have been layoffs -- but it is management's responsibility to make sure that its talent pool remains strong. So they eliminate the weak, and reward the strong, and amazing things happen. My coworkers and I work 50-60 hours a week on average, and more often than not finish the week feeling good about what we accomplished.
Also, while most of the corporate HR cultural initiatives have been somewhat bland and, well, corporate, individuals are fully empowered to take initiative themselves to make it a cool place to work. For example I started an indoor soccer team, and we've had several foozball tourneys, etc.
Anyway I wanted to share some thoughts on how some companies (mine at least) are doing it right.
less funny when a recreational boat user runs aground when lost in fog and the only aid is gps. in which case those hundred meters count for a LOT.
I'm hoping for all the same things -- as is my brother (david.weekly.org -- btw he happens to be a huge advocate for OSS and GNU.) Though I'm not sure how open the licensing model will be, at least he and his fellow geeks on there's engineering team want it as open as possible...
my understanding: the whole idea is for There to build an infrastructure and a "planet" (to start with) and a really cool island on it, and to leave the rest of the "world" as a huge frontier for there's user/developer base to explore and develop. so it's got to be attractive/compelling enough codewise AND licensingwise AND userexperiencewise (no I'm not German but I speak it and let it inform my chatgrammar) for geek types to really get excited about... here's hoping!
-chris
ps wrt Lain, I got the dvd set for christmas and finished the first 3, looking fwd to finishing soon... good stuff!
that is where There is heading. my brother is one of their lead engineers and this thing has been under wraps for over 4 years with some of the best minds in the industry hammering it out, making it scalable and extensible... it's the framework for something very.. very... different, than anything else done so far (including simsonline).
ok, good point.
;)
also, to reply to your footnote -- notice how every word written here contains one or more "o" or "r"? how appropriate!
ok, enough already.
yours truly,
Christopher
in my first astro course at uva 10 years ago, the hubble constant had our universe's age at about 15 billion years. the estimates of this constant (the rate of expansion of spacetime) have not been significantly altered in the last 10 years.
so why is this news?
I am surprised to see so many otherwise informed people make such an optimistic assumption; that our species will live another 500 years, let alone 5 million, is in serious doubt.
No?
I don't get much phonespam b/c I have not had a land-line for the last 3 years (lived on a sailboat, used mobile phone exclusively) ...
but I don't imagine the costs of international calls would offset the cost savings of a cheap offshore call center?
I wonder if anyone knows what percentage of U.S. household phonespam is international?
This may be true but if one hammer smells like roses and the other one smells strongly of piss, smell becomes a valid criteria.
wearing leather and a helmet protect most riders against all but the worst spills. I have no stats to quote offhand but I believe the problem is usually not the fall, rather the fact that you're lucky if you only get run over twice. an airbag won't help when the cars behind you can't slow down in time.
the ops crew are still occasionally found barefoot though that's rare.
this is at a 200+ person officepark company that's not really a startup anymore.
individuals can and do affect corporate culture, have some spine and shape your company as you see fit, or don't complain when one you don't like is foisted on you.
California Community Colocation Project provides:
...start in Prague, lots of jobs there, great city to live in. cheap, too. get a TEFL cert (there), takes 5 weeks at ITC, tell em chris weekly sent you. wife and i did that 4 years ago, found jobs right away, no regrets.
a friend brought a cool little WMA (hardware-layer supported wma, so no encoding/decoding needed) player/recorder with 256MB of RAM... to a KDTU (Karl Denson's Tiny Univers -- see them!!)show last week, patched into a serious taper's rig, and now has a great recording and didn't have to bring anything with him that didn;t fit in his pocket. he said the device cost him $200. wish I could recall what it was, but seriously, any mp3/wma player really needs good recording ability to pique my interest. am I alone?
"...all the people she passes go 'aahh'."
heh. the plane from ipanema.
terminology shift?
when did "honeypot" cease to refer to an insecure machine left open in order to attract and hunt crackers? now people use it to mean any WNAP left open?? hrm. dubious.
I'm a software developer in a free-range (read: sans-cubicle) environment -- and headphones allow for a lower interrupt level and fewer distractions. About a dozen of us pitched in for a 60GB drive a year ago and have been filling it with our favorite tunes. We paid for the drive, the bandwidth usage is reasonable, we're all happier and more productive, and everybody wins.
Fortunately mgmt understands this here...
<opinion>
While I agree that Congress passing new laws is not a good approach to solving security and privacy problems on the net, I think your analogy is fatally flawed. Individuals failing to lock their homes' doors negatively affects only those individuals themselves, if a criminal takes advantage of their negligence. However, a sysadmin who fails to take seriously the integrity of his/her network or server(s) potentially (and often, historically) contributes significantly to criminals' power to harm others.
There's a crucial distinction.
</opinion>
Also some of my very best friends are people I work with (and play fooz with and hike with and snowboard with and etc). We encourage and help and teach and learn from each other, load-balance when possible, and help relieve each others' stress. I cannot imagine spending this much time in a place with people I did not trust and like.
Your paranoia may be founded on bad personal experience, but it is extreme and unhealthy. I feel very bad for you. Your days at work must be very unhappy indeed. I hope your situation and outlook change, for your sake. It does not have to be this way. Really.
Given the right environment, hacker types are among the most truly social, uninhibited and communal personality types there are!
Anecdotally, I work in a Technology group comprised of about 60 people (feeds, db, app, backoffice, webdev, ops, tools, qa...) and we engineers *often* meet after work in decent numbers for beers, organize foozball tournaments at work, go out for lunch, go out for dinner, go on ski trips, go hiking, etc etc. I have found this group to be among the most varied, interesting, friendly and social group of people I've ever encountered. The ken-and-barbie types in biz dev and marketing -- the supposedly social crowd -- have nothing like this level of personal interaction, and groups outside Tech commonly complain that we have so much more fun than any other group here. I do not believe this to be an anomaly. Smart people with a range of interests are bound to find each others' company enjoyable.
If geeks have a reputation for antisocial behavior, it is IMHO due largely to their inability to relate to the shallow and selfish "in" groups in their school years. Once free to pursue their interests, they thrive. In the end it is the "popular" crowd from earlier years who end up lonely, ostracized, outcast for their inability to do or become something interesting. Being "cool" becomes pretty stale once you hit your mid-twenties and have shown no passion for mind, and for sharing and developing ideas....
I could continue but I owe my good friend in the app team some code before we go out to lunch.
chuckle.
/.ers got that though
wonder how many
The use of a one-time pad is the key.
How is the pad itself shared by both nodes?
If this article does nothing more than turn a few more people on to a great, free, Free tool, then it was worth posting.
Thanks Tim.
This is not particularly suprising.
The ramifications of the tragedy -- the full implications of the impact it's had on our collective psyche -- will be impossible to gauge for months yet. But it is clear that in addition to paving the way for violations of civil liberties by the federal government, the attack has had quite an effect on corporate america, including the music industry. I refer not to its financial impact, rather the changes it is wreaking in the political climate of these large organizations. They are steering well clear of ANYthing that might be construed as controversial or sympathetic in any way to those responsible for the attack. The irony, of course, is that in excercising their typically befuddled judgement they self-censor the most pro-American, anti-terrorist, community-strengthening and potentially healing songs in their archives. This is a time when we need these songs most, but they are so afraid to misstep in this time of crisis that they do us all the worst disservice they could, giving the terrorists one more of countless small victories in their struggle to destroy our way of life.
For those having a hard time loading the (enormous) page, I found this one image
http://arstechnica.com/wankerdesk/01q3/war/pale
particularly moving.
It is two Palestinians, weeping for the victims.
It is of utmost importance to remember that the atrocity was committed by a handful of lunatics, not the peace-loving Islamic community at large....