The hiring decison...

One of the smartest guys I know is Joel Spolsky, and I say that even though I know him only through what he writes on his blog.

He's just posted some really interesting views about interviewing, set in the context of hiring a programmer. I particularly enjoyed his perspective on the hiring decision…

If, at the end of the interview, you’ve convinced yourself that this person is smart and gets things done, and four or five other interviewers agree, you probably won’t go wrong in hiring them. But if you have any doubts, you’re better off waiting for someone better.

The optimal time to make a decision about the candidate is about three minutes after the end of the interview. Far too many companies allow interviewers to wait days or weeks before turning in their feedback. Unfortunately, the more time that passes, the less you’ll remember.

If you’re having trouble deciding, there’s a very simple solution. NO HIRE. Just don’t hire people that you aren’t sure about. This is a little nerve wracking the first few times—what if we never find someone good? That’s OK. If your resume and phone-screening process is working, you’ll probably have about 20% hires in the live interview. And when you find the smart, gets-things-done candidate, you’ll know it. If you’re not thrilled with someone, move on.

I'm not sure if Joel has read "Blink" by Malcolm Gladwell but this is what Gladwell would call rapid cognition, that moment when you know something without knowing why.

Gladwell makes some important points about unconscious bias that can creep into the hiring process. The example I remember best from the book is about height. It's possibly no surprise to learn that overwhelmingly the CEO's of big companies in the US are white males. What Gladwell discovered was they were also overwhelmingly tall. Whilst it's possible for companies to argue that the small percentages of women and minorities within the management ranks is simply reflected into the executive ranks; the same argument doesn't seem plausible when applied to height.

Gladwell argues that this is an unconscious bias; that there is a stereotype of what a leader is supposed to look like which is so powerful that when someone fits we become blind to other considerations. I wonder what a stereotypical programmer looks like.

Tags: Joel Spolsky, Malcolm Gladwell, Blink

Getting the world to switch to XML didn't work?

Tim Berners-Lee is a British national treasure. He is the de facto inventor of the World Wide Web. If I've understood (correctly) the research I've done this morning the creation of hypertext is generally credited to Ted Nelson and Douglas Engelbart. Tim linked the idea of hypertext to the DNS and TCP protocols of the internet as he developed and designed the HTML language and - ta-da! — the World Wide Web was born. [DNS is about how computers find each other and TCP is about how computers exchange data with each other]. Tim built the first web browser, editor and web server. He created the first listing of other websites (which I guess is the forerunner of Yahoo).

Today Tim is director of the World Wide Web Consortium (or W3C) and you've probably guessed by now that he has a blog; on which I read this morning that something is up in the world of HTML standards. The first thing I hadn't realised was that the underlying specification for HTML hasn't changed since Xmas Day 1999, and Tim goes on to talk about setting up a new group to move the HTML specification on in small steps in the direction of a well-formed language, without explicitly stating that the destination is XML.

I thought this was the killer quote in what Tim said:

Some things are clearer with hindsight of several years. It is necessary to evolve HTML incrementally. The attempt to get the world to switch to XML, including quotes around attribute values and slashes in empty tags and namespaces all at once didn't work. The large HTML-generating public did not move, largely because the browsers didn't complain. Some large communities did shift and are enjoying the fruits of well-formed systems, but not all. It is important to maintain HTML incrementally, as well as continuing a transition to well-formed world, and developing more power in that world.

I wonder what the blogosphere will say today about how well the switch to XML has worked. I'll be monitoring the conversation on Techmeme.

Tags: HTML, XML, W3C

One of the best panda photo's I've ever seen...

This is Hua Mei in a photo taken at the San Diego Zoo



Picture originally uploaded by muzkid.

I found this via Pandafix.

Tags: panda, Hua Mei

Scrybe, maybe not

Yesterday marked four weeks in my new job. I spent today getting organised, which was mainly about getting back into the GTD habit. So when I took a break to catch up with my blog reading I was immediately drawn to a post by Robert Scoble directing me towards the latest tool for getting organised: Scrybe. The blogosphere is eagerly anticipating the launch.

The registration page describes Scrybe as "a groundbreaking online organizer that caters to today´s lifestyle in a cohesive and intuitive way. Simple solutions for some age old problems."

I signed up for the beta and watched a video of some impressive ajax trickery. What stood out for me, from watching the video, was the way you can get Hipster PDA style functionality out of the product via the papersync feature. I liked that a lot.

However I don't see this as a product that is in danger of replacing my Outlook / NetCentrics GTD add-in combo anytime soon. The lack of an email client, or integration with an email client, means there is no seamless way of moving projects / tasks / next actions from email to the to-do lists. Email is my primary source of next actions, so seamless integration is critical to my organisational process. To-do lists are integrated with the calendar, so I couldn't see easily how you’d operate lists for different contexts (@Home @Office etc) within Scrybe.

At the end of the day a whizzy interface isn't a substitute for process. The GTD process has become an integral part of my day to day approach to being organised, although circumstances sometimes force me off the path, temporarily. The achievement of stress free productivity will always remain more important to me than how flashy the toolset is.

UPDATE 1: I've updated this post to add a link to the YouTube video which is well worth a look, even if it's for no other reason than to see a really classy example of a pre-launch video covering an overview of the product and some of it's distinctive features. As Michael Arrington points out this approach helps the company control the message in the phase before the product is launched.

UPDATE 2: Mathew Ingram shares the sentiment that salivating over the product before it's released and we get to try it out for ourselves is a bit premature.

UPDATE 3: Although Technorati seems to have indexed my post it seems to have missed indexing my tags. So the third reason for this update is to see if updating my post will get Tecnorati to pick up on what it seems to have missed earlier. If not I might get lucky and the blogosphere's most responsive CEO, Dave Sifry, might pick this up and help me out (again).

Tags: Scrybe, GTD, Getting Things Done, Personal Productivity, Robert Scoble, Dave Sifry, Technorati

Scott Adams, triple Nobel laureate?

Scott Adams, the cartoonist creator of Dilbert, might, according to some informed financial sources, be in the running for the Nobel prize in Economics for his Unified Theory of Everything Financial. Today he's staked his claim for the Peace prize.

I don't know what he's thinking, surely he's on the shortlist for the Literature prize. Or does he secretly think a hat-trick is on the cards?

He's a funny guy and I love the way his mind works as reflected in both the Dilbert comics and on his personal blog. I think the USA should regard him as a National Treasure.

Tags: Dilbert, Scott Adams, Nobel Prize

The state of web based powerpointing

I'm guessing it's a pretty safe assumption that Google will eventually develop or buy a web based presentation tool / powerpoint clone. I've seen the odd TechCrunch posting about tools entering this arena but haven't spent any time looking at them until today. The logic behind spending some time on this project today was thinking about a Presentation Zen article that spoke to the issue of planning for the eventuality that I can't deliver a presentation because of a technology failure and the associated thought that in some circumstances it just might be easier to use the web to deliver a presentation rather than lugging a pile of equipment to a difficult location.

The applications I looked at were:

(1) Slideshare - the best of the options for importing a powerpoint file and being able to deliver the presentation from any pc with a browser and internet connection. There is a 20MB file limit, which would be a pretty big presentation. I comfortably imported a 4MB file and was able to play my presentation within minutes of uploading. Very cool.

(2) Zoho Show - can also import a powerpoint format file and deliver it from a pc with browser and internet connection. The file limit is 5MB but when I tested this I had to split a 4MB file into two halves to get it uploaded. In delivery mode the controls for advancing the slides sit over the slide towards the bottom and can potentially obscure data on your slides, whereas slideshare has the controls outside the slide display area.

(3) Empressr - is not capable of importing a powerpoint file (yet) but what I did like about it was it's rich media capabilities that allow the creation of dynamic presentations which isn't presently possible with slideshare and Zoho Show. Perhaps the tool to pick if you want to stand out from the crowd with a web based pitch.

(4) Thumbstacks - strikes me as the least capable of the bunch at the moment but it's very simplicity may turn out to be it's killer feature. It can't import powerpoint and has no rich media capabilities.

I think this will be an area to watch in the coming months. Watch for new entrants into this space, rapid feature releases from the current players and lots of speculation about who Google might be talking with.

Tags: Presentation Zen, Slideshare, Zoho Show, Empressr, Thumbstacks

Fast and free PDF creation

I spotted an interesting tip on Lifehacker about using Google Docs & Spreadsheets to convert documents to PDF format. In a nutshell the tip involving uploading your document into Google Docs (directly from your drive or by emailing the document to your account) and then using the "Save As" feature to convert the document to PDF and download.

I know that the original source article for the Lifehacker posting mentions that this method overcomes the need to buy expensive PDF tools or install any virtual PDF printer drivers but I'd question what's wrong with a virtual PDF printer driver when a tool like PDF Creator is quicker once installed (which takes about as long as getting your first file up on Google Docs), will convert anything you can print from so it doesn't limit you to documents and spreadsheets and is yours to own for the low, low price of absolutely free (although this is such a gem that you might consider donating). PDF creator is high on the list of "must have" applications on any machine I'm going to work on for any length of time.

What's on your "must have" list?

Tags: Personal Productivity, Lifehacker, Google Docs, Google Docs & Spreadsheets, PDF Creator

Holding Better Meetings

BusinessWeek have just run a feature on meetings. As the introduction to the article points out, meetings have a bad reputation because they are often unstructured, uninspiring and unproductive.

In order to write the feature the author spoke with Google VP Marissa Mayer who runs an average of 70 meetings per week. Marissa shared her six keys to running successful meetings:

1. Set a firm agenda.

Mayer requests a meeting agenda ahead of time that outlines what the participants want to discuss and the best way of using the allotted time. Agendas need to have flexibility, of course, but Mayer finds that agendas act as tools that force individuals to think about what they want to accomplish in meetings. It helps all those involved to focus on what they are really trying to achieve and how best to reach that goal.

2. Assign a note-taker.

A Google meeting features a lot of displays. On one wall, a projector displays the presentation, while right next to it, another projector shows the transcription of the meeting. (Yet another displays a 4-foot image of a ticking stopwatch.) Google executives are big believers in capturing an official set of notes, so inaccuracies and inconsistencies can be caught immediately. Those who missed the meetings receive a copy of the notes. When people are trying to remember what decisions were made, in what direction the team is going, and what actions need to be taken, they can simply review the notes.

3. Carve out micro-meetings.

Mayer sets aside large blocks of time that she slices into smaller, self-contained gatherings on a particular subject or project. For example, during her weekly two-hour confab with the co-founders and CEO Eric Schmidt, she sets aside five- to 10-minute segments—or longer, depending on the subject—devoted to such specific areas as weekly reports on how the site is performing, new product launches, etc. This method offers enough flexibility to modify the agenda just before the meeting, should anything pressing occur. It also instills discipline that keeps the meeting tightly focused. Mayer does the same with members of her teams who might need only five or 10 minutes of her time instead of 30 minutes—the shortest block of time her calendar permits. By setting aside micro-meetings within a larger block of time, she accomplishes more. Mayer, who has a background in engineering and computer science, jokingly refers to micro-meetings as "reducing latency in the pipeline." That means if she has an employee with an issue that comes up Tuesday, he or she can schedule a 10-minute micro-meeting during Mayer's large time block, instead of waiting for her next 30-minute opening, which might not be available for two weeks.

4. Hold office hours.

Mayer brought this idea from her experience teaching computer science at Stanford, where she first met the two guys who would go on to revolutionize how the world gets its information. Beginning at 4 p.m., for 90 minutes a day, Mayer holds office hours. Employees add their name to a board outside her office, and she sees them on a first-come, first-serve basis. Sometimes project managers need approval on a marketing campaign; sometimes staffers want a few minutes to pitch a design. Says Mayer: "Many of our most technologically interesting products have shown up during office hours. Google News, Orkut [Google's social networking site], Google Reviews, and Google Desktop all showed up first in office hours." During office hours, Mayer can get through up to 15 meetings, averaging seven minutes per person.

5. Discourage politics, use data.

One of Mayer's "Nine Notions of Innovation" is "Don't politic, use data". This idea can and should apply to meetings in organizations in which people feel as though the boss will give the green light to a design created by the person he or she likes the best, showing favoritism for the individual instead of the idea. Mayer believes this mindset can demoralize employees, so she goes out of her way to make the approval process a science. Google chooses designs on a clearly defined set of metrics and how well they perform against those metrics. Designs are chosen based on merit and evidence, not personal relationships. Mayer discourages using the phrase "I like" in design meetings, such as "I like the way the screen looks." Instead, she encourages such comments as "The experimentation on the site shows that his design performed 10% better." This works for Google, because it builds a culture driven by customer feedback data, not the internal politics that pervade so many of today's corporations.

6. Stick to the clock.

To add a little pressure to keep meetings focused, Google gatherings often feature a giant timer on the wall, counting down the minutes left for a particular meeting or topic. It's literally a downloadable timer that runs off a computer and is projected 4 feet tall. Imagine how chaotic it must look to outsiders when the wall shows several displays at once—the presentation, transcription, and a mega-timer! And yet, at Google, it makes sense, imposing structure amidst creative chaos. The timer exerts a subtle pressure to keep meetings running on schedule.

This was like finding out that everything that I hold to be true about meetings either anecdotally, from experience or because I read it somewhere in the past; particularly structure (via agenda) and an official set of notes (recording decisions and actions), actually holds true in reality for black belt practitioners. I found it to be a compelling insight.

Tags: Personal Productivity, Meetings, Google, Marissa Mayer