Posts tagged with 'business'
Jonathan Danylko talks to Matt about the results of the 2019 Stack Overflow developer survey. We kinda go all over the place for this episode!
This episode is not sponsored! Want to be a sponsor? You can contact me or check out my sponsorship gig on Fiverr
Show Notes:
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This episode is a bit different than normal episodes. It’s an informal discussion of the Stack Overflow survey results by two people who are not and have never been Stack Overflow employees. We discuss a few things that stood out to us, but we barely scratch the surface of all the data that you can dig through. Make sure to check out the survey results yourself for the entire picture!
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We talk a bit about remote work. If you’re interested in that, I recorded a whole episode with Gino Ferrand and published it last week last week.
Want to be on the next episode? You can! All you need is the willingness to talk about something technical.
Gino Ferrand is building a company for distributed teams. This episode is not sponsored! Want to be a sponsor? You can contact me or check out my sponsorship gig on Fiverr
Show Notes:
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Book: Remote by DHH and Jason Fried
Want to be on the next episode? You can! All you need is the willingness to talk about something technical.
VM "Vicky" Brasseur talks open source and free software. This episode is sponsored by Smartsheet.
Show Notes:
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Patreon: VM (Vicky) Brasseur is creating writings & talks, supporting free & open source software
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Some free and open source software mentioned in this episode:
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Copyleft was mentioned at least once.
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Paper: Open Source Archetypes (PDF) by James Vasile and Karl Fogel
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Utility is a concept brought from time to time in EconTalk, one of my favorite podcasts.
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In this episode, VM discusses Microsoft’s patents. This episode was recorded BEFORE the announcement from Microsoft joining the Open Invention Network. (This is one of the reasons I like to say the date of the recording at the top of every episode). I did not reach out to VM to get any further comment on this event.
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Redis licensing changes. We had an extended discussion about Redis licensing that I cut just due to time constraints, but definitely reach out to VM if you have questions!
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Something else that happened since this podcast was recorded: MongoDB made a license change. I think it’s similar to Redis’s change, but I’m not entirely sure.
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Book: Producing Open Source Software by Karl Fogel
Want to be on the next episode? You can! All you need is the willingness to talk about something technical.
Music is by Joe Ferg, check out more music on JoeFerg.com!
Doc Norton talks about the experimentation mindset. This episode is sponsored by Smartsheet.
Show Notes:
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Slides from Doc’s presentation on the experimentation mindset
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Other methodologies that fall into the "agile" category: Scrum, Lean
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Kent Beck, Ron Jeffries, and Ward Cunningham were all mentioned. They are all signers of the Agile Manifesto.
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Chris Argyris was mentioned in regards to single-loop and double-loop learning
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Book: Escape Velocity by Doc Norton - it has increased in price since the recording. It will now set you back at least 5 entire dollars.
Supplemental links from Doc:
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Video: Experimentation Mindset
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From Harvard Business Review:
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link:http://www.edbatista.com/2008/05/double-loop.html[Ed Batista blog post on double-loop learning
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Book: Scaling Up Excellence
Want to be on the next episode? You can! All you need is the willingness to talk about something technical.
Music is by Joe Ferg, check out more music on JoeFerg.com!
Andrea Cremese wrote a dissertation on developer motivation.
Show Notes:
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Frederick Herzberg talks about "hygiene factors" in the book: Motivation to Work
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Check out episode 36 on the film Pirates of Silicon Valley for some talk about Xerox PARC
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Some positive examples, per Andrea:
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Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft
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Amazon
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Smartsheet
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Glassdoor is a site where employees review their employer. I’m not terribly keen on it, especially when there is a small sample size, but it could be a useful tool in some situations.
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Dan Ariely was mentioned, check out his TED talk What makes us feel good about our work?
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Some quotes regarding Ariely that Andrea wanted me to share:
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Large Stakes and Big Mistakes, (Dan Ariely one of the authors), quote: "Workers in a wide variety of jobs are paid based on performance, which is commonly seen as enhancing effort and productivity relative to non-contingent pay schemes. However, psychological research suggests that excessive rewards can, in some cases, result in a decline in performance. To test whether very high monetary rewards can decrease performance, we conducted a set of experiments in the U.S. and in India in which subjects worked on different tasks and received performance-contingent payments that varied in amount from small to very large relative to their typical levels of pay. With some important exceptions, very high reward levels had a detrimental effect on performance."
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Does money really motivate people?, quotes: "But maybe the small sums involved in Ariely’s example and Deci’s experiments undermine their application to real-world international business and finance. To address this, Ariely and colleagues, recruited villagers in India to play games testing memory, creativity and motor skills, offering three different groups four, 40 or 400 rupees per game for scoring highly. The maximum reward was equivalent to the amount spent by the average person living in rural India in five months. They found that those offered the highest incentives performed worst, earning an average of 20% of the maximum possible, compared to around 36% for those in the low and medium reward groups. "Our results challenge the assumption that an increase in motivation would necessarily lead to improvements in performance," says Ariely."
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And: "If I gave you a bigger bonus to jump you would jump more times," says Ariely. "You have very good control over your legs and if I give you more money you will transmit more power to them and therefore you will be more successful. We don’t have the same control over memory, creativity and concentration. You can’t will yourself into a higher state of concentration and creativity. It’s actually counterproductive and hinders performance strongly." Anyone that has tried to force themselves to concentrate can probably relate to those findings. But there are also more subtle effects of motivation that can be teased apart using these new techniques.""
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In the same vein as Pirates of Silicon Valley, check out The Triumph of the Nerds
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Halt and Catch Fire! You should check this show out. I personally can’t get enough of the opening theme. Here’s a part of one my favorite scenes in the series (minor spoiler alert if you haven’t watched any of the show)
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Not related to the dissertation at all, but check out Better Call Saul (NSFW language)
Want to be on the next episode? You can! All you need is the willingness to talk about something technical.
Music is by Joe Ferg, check out more music on JoeFerg.com!
