I have a tendency of really latching onto very simple ideas. Typically these ideas don’t require complex engineering to make them happen. This is not to say the engineering is not important, but more so that it is some variation of engineering feats that have been done before. The reason I tend to like these over more complex engineering that really makes something better is that making something better is typically a marginal improvement. When it’s a marginal improvement it’s a lot harder to sell.

The more I’ve been exposed to it the more the way a company conducts interviews is a very strong reflection of how the company’s current state is. If you experience a very half hazard interview it’s likely a result that the person interviewing is half hazard in other aspects of their day to day. If you experience that someone is very set in their mind in what they want, and expecting a very cookie cutter answer, it’s a reflection of how they think. There are some cases in which the interviewers simply do not know various methods/styles as such I’d like to address what I feel should be appropriate interviewing process. I’ve been in situations where more of this process was followed than not, and in those cases bad hires were the exception not the norm. The biggest unknown after that was how long until someone was fully integrated into the culture and not a noob but a veteran in some area that others deferred to.

On an entirely separate blog I have a full write up on seduction. The other posts contain steps for how a guy would seduce a girl, I think it’s actually quite pertinent to selling sighing business. Before you start making to many assumptions about the other post let me explain a little further, but dorm the selling side within business.

The cloud has a lot of technical arguments going for it. The problem is consumers don’t understand the cloud, they don’t understand virtual storage and growth and syncing and the complexities of things. The average consumer is generally pretty dumb, they just want to be able to do things and it just work. If they ask a question they want an answer, not the deduction behind the answer. It’s why I loved mint.com so much when it launched. I gave it accounts and it told me everything I wanted to know. If it was wrong I seldom noticed it, such as classifying a purchase into a wrong category. My suspicion is that 98% of the users don’t notice much of the mis-classification that happens. They look the first time and it looks pretty good so they trust it, because if you look at 90% of purchases and classify them, why use mint, why not just use excel, or even go back to a paper and notebook?

A coworker and I were recently having conversations over employee compensation. We covered the gambit around employee feedback, evals, and compensation. He mentioned Joel Spolsky, and his format of being very open about where individuals were ranked. He also pointed me to: http://alumnit.ca/~apenwarr/log/?m=200904#05 which provided good insight, though I most like his final point. The end goal with evaluating your employees and compensation for them is to make sure they’re happy. Sure the business should make sure they feel like you’re worth what you’re being paid, but usually there is no question about this, or if there is you’re quickly escorted out the door. While this is an interesting model, I think it can be much simpler, but companies usually confine themselves too much in giving credit to employees.

There was another recent occasion where a statement was made of ’no more playing stick them up, until next year’. When I first thought about this, I knew I didn’t like the statement, but was unsure of why. The reason is that there can be several reasons why employees leave. Only one of which is compensation. If you feel you’re being adequately compensated for the job you’re doing it makes sense.

But there’s another reason thats very clear in the valley but less clear in other parts of the country. Paul Buchheit at Startup School this weekend in Berkeley said it very well: If you’ve been at your job too long, QUIT. Meaning if you’re comfortable, you know the people, you know how to do your job, and you’re not being challenged, then you should go somewhere where you are challenged.

Facebook is where I have more noise than any other social site, twitter may even tie facebook at amount of sheer content I receive in my feed. With regards to the ratio of what I care about to what I see facebook is a lot better, due to their news feed versus live feed. However, their news feed is still very often off. I wrote some time back about web 3.0, and how essentially showing what I want to see is what the web will become. You’ll take the vast amount of content and distill it into what I want to see. People seem to be taking very half-hazard shots at it and its quite a let down.

I often encounter people whether at my office or at other places of employment that are distraught after getting an earful from a manager from some problem arising. The problem usually isn’t in their control, and therefore they don’t understand why they get heat for this. Most managers though do actually understand when issues come up, however what they don’t appreciate is late notice, lack of problem solving, and dictating what should be done next.

I have a tendency of really latching onto very simple ideas. Typically these ideas don’t require complex engineering to make them happen. This is not to say the engineering is not important, but more so that it is some variation of engineering feats that have been done before. The reason I tend to like these over more complex engineering that really makes something better is that making something better is typically a marginal improvement. When it’s a marginal improvement it’s a lot harder to sell.

The web is becoming saturated. It’s no longer the pimply faced 20 somethings living in their mom’s basements that are the key users and the source of most of the traffic on the web. Now you have communities for pregnant moms, sites for elderly widows looking to date, and social sites for kids from the time they’re able to talk. So now that the web is hitting its saturation point of types of people interacting it becomes a critical issue to take advantage of those users and get them to do more.