Category: Thoughts

What makes a happy employee?

I don’t have the answer but I’ve given a lot of thought to that question lately. In my current job I have the opportunity to speak with a lot of young employees, many of which this is their first job out of school. The job market is still quite good in Seattle and these people have a lot of opportunities presented to them. Some leave our company and go to work for Microsoft. Some go back to school. A few decide that technology isn’t the right field for them. And I’m sure some leave for money while others tire of the required travel.

From my experience, younger employees tend to focus on the employer as much as they do the job. The lure of going to work for Microsoft is too much to pass up. The excitement of being recruited makes them feel as though their skills are valued. They feel special.

And I think this is fine as long as the person understands that it’s really the job that will bring long term happiness, not just the company. Having a well known company on your resume can’t hurt but it’s the skills you gain in the job that you keep and take along when you leave the job.

I think back to one of the first jobs I had after college. I went to work at a local ISP in downtown Seattle. Most everything was Unix based. Even our desktop workstations were NeXT machines. That made it hard at times to get basic computer tasks done, but the skills I gained were invaluable. The company was small and didn’t have a lot to offer as far as benefits. But the employees were excited to be there and the skills I gain in that job helped me land several future jobs. In fact, the skills I gain working at Wolfe Internet are those that launched my career in technology. Without that opportunity, I’d probably be teaching German somewhere in Utah.

Yet whenever I’m asked where I’ve worked, they inevitably focus on my tenure at Microsoft where I learned very little compared to my time at the ISP. What I learned at Microsoft too was very valuable. I learned that I would never put my work before my family. I learned that having a good manager can shoot your career off in the right direction while a bad manager can do just the opposite. I saw a lot of people with a lot of money who still seemed very unhappy. Looking back the best thing I gained while working at Microsoft was the network of people I’ve kept in contact with over the years.

So I’m not certain what makes an employee happy. Maybe the question is too general. I’m a bit more certain what makes me happy: challenging work, flexible schedule, great manager, fun coworkers, and fair pay.

I try to keep those things in mind when meeting with my group. Anything I can do to keep them challenged and keep them happy hopefully helps me keep them employed with us.

More Random Thoughts

Don’t burn bridges. I don’t understand why some people don’t understand this concept. If you’re on your way out of a company, don’t bad mouth your boss or your coworkers or the company. It makes you look like a schmuck, not the company.

How soon till Microsoft pulls the plug on the Zune? I give it 12 months at the most. It seems like the next Ultimate TV. Years ago when Tivo and Reply TV started making a splash, Microsoft decided that need a piece of the pie so they created Ultimate TV that wasn’t a bad product but it wasn’t better than Tivo. It was met with a lukewarm reaction. The Zune seems to be following the same path. It’s not a bad product but it’s no match for the iPod. It needed to be revolutionary. It isn’t.

I find myself using RSS readers less and less. There is a perspective I gain by visiting the writers website that isn’t as noticeable in Google Reader or Bloglines. The writer’s personality is on display. It reflects their style. RSS Readers take that away and makes the content feel septic.

Along those same lines, if you decided to pursue another position outside of your company, never ask your boss this question: “If it doesn’t work out, can I have my old job back?” This is like asking your girlfriend if you can date her best friend but come back to her if things don’t pan out.

It takes four days to stop sugar cravings. Ok, this isn’t scientific and it may only pertain to me. The first three days are no fun. If my body is used to having sugar, it wants more. But after four days, the sugar is gone and the craving is gone. Now it’s easy. Take all that Halloween candy into work for the young guys. Just get it out of your house and remove the temptation.

One of my best purchases in the last five years was a good quality shredder from Costco. I’m serious.

Two best times of the day: Going into each of the kid’s rooms and kissing their warms cheeks before I go to work. Arriving home and getting mauled by same kids.

How a company handles paychecks and expense reports is a good gauge of how it treats its employees. Is the process seamless with a quick turnaround? Or is it littered with senseless rules and turnaround takes weeks?

Whenever I install Windows I’m reminded that my job is safe for another ten years. The process hasn’t improved much since the Windows 95 days with endless floppy drive swap parties. Computers are still far too difficult to use and require way too much babysitting.

On the subject of Windows, how is it possible that Windows doesn’t include a simple backup program for moving important files to an extra drive?

The people you work alongside are oftentimes more important than your actual job. The sooner you figure that out, the happier you’ll be.

While driving in traffic, I always feel better when I slow down and let someone in rather than speeding up to cut them off. Many drivers seem downright shocked when I do so in my BMW.

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The Sunday Evening Test

Over the years and many jobs later I’ve come across a method to help determine if I should stay in my current job or start looking for something else.

After an enjoyable weekend as things start winding down on Sunday evening, I ask myself, “Am I excited to go into work tomorrow?”

If things aren’t going well, I’ll feel nervous, uneasy and sometimes even a bit sick to my stomach. A few weeks of this and I know I’d better start looking around.

But if I look forward to going back to work on Monday morning, that’s a good indication that the job is a good fit.

As I arrived at work this morning at 7:30 am, I sat at my desk, fired up Slacker radio and thought to myself, “I love working with the techs. This job rocks”.

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How to get around NBC’s boycott of iTunes

Some brain-dead idiot at NBC decided that pull their shows off iTunes.

According to a statement from the company, NBC refused to renew its agreement with iTunes after Apple balked at paying fees that it said would more than double the wholesale price for each NBC TV episode.

Apple said NBC’s demands would have raised the price of NBC shows to $4.99 an episode from the current $1.99 price tag.

Pure, unadulterated arrogance. Once again, a big media company wrongly believes they hold all the chips. Shows like The Office have always been available for download over Usenet or Bit Torrent. But when they came to iTunes many people like myself decided it was worth the $1.99 to get a good quality version without all the hassle of locating a reliable torrent site. I also felt like the networks were finally coming around and offering their programming in a format and over a network that consumers were already familiar with.

And then NBC decided their viewers were all wrong all this time and stopped offering shows like the Office and Heroes on iTunes after last season. They do offer most of their shows on the NBC website but you can’t download them to your computer or iPod and they include commercials. No thank you, NBC.

So here is a solution if you were you used to grabbing missed episodes off iTunes.

  1. Download Miro which is sweet video player that supports BitTorrent and RSS. This allows you to subscribe to your favorite TV program and have it automatically downloaded to your computer when it becomes available.
  2. Once you have Miro installed, all you need is the RSS feed to the program you want to watch/download. You’ll find a huge number of TV feeds at tvRSS including the The Office, Heroes, and 30 Rock.
  3. Once you have the RSS feed, open Miro, go to Channel and add a new channel by giving it the RSS feed you found.

It might find more than one version of an episode so you can go through and delete any duplicates. But once you have it setup, it’s easy set it and forget it. Miro will download the newest episodes automatically as they become available. And unlike the old days, most programing is recorded in HD quality which means they look as good or better than those offered on iTunes. The episodes offered at the NBC website look terrible.

When NBC pulls their head out and goes back to giving their viewers what they want I’ll go back to using iTunes when I miss an episide. But for now, Miro isn’t a bad alternative.

Testing Opera 9.5

I’ve been using the Opera 9.5 browser full time for two days now and am very impressed. It’s not that I’m tired of Firefox, but it’s become less stable for me over time, and I figured I’d give Opera a shot.

One thing is for certain: Opera feels substantially FASTER than IE 7 or Firefox 2. I don’t know how they do it but it accesses the browser cache so quickly it might just blow your mind. It feels very stable so far and is very simple to use. It’s scaled down UI reminds me a bit of IE 7 but it’s better organized.

Two features I really like are the integrated Bit Torrent support and a thing they call “Speed Dial”. When I open a new tab, a page pops up that shows thumbnails of the nice sites I visit the most often. Adding or removing pages from this page is very simple. This is a really great feature!

At this point I can’t say for certain that I’ll stick with Opera full time but it’s looking like a strong possibility. The only feature I’ve missed so far is the ability to load IE within an Opera tab like I an do with Firefox using IE Tab addon. If I can track down such a thing on Opera I’d be golden. My company email is on Microsoft Exchange so I use Outlook Web Access from home. Otherwise, I’d just uninstall IE…oh wait…it’s part of the OS, right? 🙂

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When to look for another job

Does your company ban employee blogs? If so, start looking for another job.

If your company doesn’t have a blog, offer to head up the creation of one. If you are told, “No thanks” then start looking for another job.

Is your company’s blog written by a public relations firm? If so, start looking for another job.

Does your boss tell you to comment positively about your company’s products on other blogs? If so, start looking for another job.

Did your company’s CEO use the lackluster theater success of “Snakes on a Plane” as evidence that bloggers have little influence? If so, start looking for a new job.

Disregard for the present

Recently, I was reading an interview with Jerry Seinfeld.  He mentioned that he’s big on civility and the interviewer asked him what his top three incivilities are and one of them struck a chord with me: total disregard for the present moment.

We’ve fallen into a trap of ever widening orbits on contact and there is a total disregard for the present moment. I recently sat down for a breakfast and asked a friend about a trip she’d taken. Eventually, she looked up from texting someone and said, “You mean me?” I said, “No, I’m talking to the stack of logs behind you”

I’ve been guilty for pulling out my phone during a conversation with Kim or my kids. I’ve taken calls and sent texts as well. The same skill I’m praised for at work, the ability to “multi-task” is a double-edged sword when it comes to friends and family. My phone and access to email has allowed me to work from home and spend more time with my family. But if those times are constantly interrupted, then I’m better off just going into work until I’m able to give them my full attention.

Have you ever been invited to someone’s home and the host insists on answering the phone even in the middle of a meal? The message this sends is “Stop talking to me because this other person might have something more important than you do“. Whenever this happens there’s that awkward moment where the person left standing wonders if he/she should just leave. How about taking the dang phone off the hook when you have visitors over or turn off the ringer and let voicemail do its thing?

People who put others on “call waiting” are no better. My friends no longer even ask if I’ll hold because they know I’ll just hang up.

How many times have you been talking to a friend, spouse or boss who keeps looking at his Blackberry? Have you been in a meeting where it seems like everyone there is messaging and doing email? Why do these people even show up to the meeting if this other chatter is so important?

I never take my laptop into meetings today, but going forward I’m going to leave my Motorola Q in my office as well. Calls and email can wait. If I feel I must stay connected I’ll consider declining the meeting request.

Multi-tasking has its place. But it shouldn’t shove family, friends and coworkers to the background. One trait my grandma has is the ability to give you her full attention. When I’m with her, I feel like the most important person in her world. I don’t think it has anything to do with technology either. It’s about giving people your undivided attention. It’s courteous. It’s respectful. And it’s a rare trait today.

Goodbye Newspapers

As I kid I looked forward to the time between 3 and 4 pm each afternoon when the Standard Examiner paper would land on our porch. The Standard was and still is the local newspaper for Northern Utah including Ogden. If I could beat my dad to the porch, I’d take the paper into our living room and lay it out on the carpet. I’d start with the comics section. Frank and Ernest and Born Loser were my two favorites. I’d move on to the sports section and finish up with the ads. Sunday’s edition was my favorite of the week because it included “The Parade” insert. I always made sure to fold the paper back just right for my dad. Sometimes one of our cats would run across the stretched out paper and wrinkle it.

Even during the years I was a poor college student, I made sure to budget enough money to subscribe to the Salt Lake Tribune. When I moved to Seattle I took the Seattle Times and the Wall Street Journal for a while. But as I began to spend more time on the internet I found unread papers stacking up outside my door. It wasn’t long before I decided to cancel our paper subscriptions. harrytrumandeweywins

That was about eight years ago. On two separate occasions we’ve tried subscribing to only the Sunday edition of the Seattle Times but that was primarily for Kim to peruse the ads. It never lasted more than a few months.

I can’t imagine ever subscribing to another newspaper again. MSNBC, Digg, Fark, Twitter and RSS feeds are now my sources of news for better and for worse. When big news breaks today I’m far more likely to hear about it on Twitter than on CNN or the radio. The thought of waiting for the paper the next morning never crosses my mind anymore. And have you seen the local news lately? It’s so embarrassingly terrible it’s not even worth tuning in for the weather. I now get my weather through a Google Desktop Gadget which sure beats the phoney banter between the weatherman and anchor.

I suspect that one day I’ll receive a lot of my news through my phone. I’m starting to get more of it that way mostly through RSS as the web on my Motorola Q isn’t a great experience. But it’s weird to think that my kids may never know what a newspaper is. I guess they will miss out on some good comics.

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The Green Machine

Kim was organizing boxes full of photos this weekend and came across a picture of me on my Green Machine during the summer of ’78. A couple of weeks ago I took a picture of my son, Lincoln, on his Kett Car for comparison.

The Green Machine was ahead of it’s time. It was the ideal three wheeler if you liked to drift into traffic. The wheels were made of thin plastic and it didn’t take long before I’d worn a hole in the front wheel, making it even less stable which is really saying something.

My parent’s house was next door to a large apartment complex. There was a decent sized hill that cars would use to get to the 2nd level of apartment homes. It was a dog-leg left formation that I’d use to pick up speed before drifting out into oncoming traffic along our street. It’s a miracle I never got run over since the Green Machine was so low to the ground.

Lincoln’s Kett Car is much more nimble and safer to drive. It has a hand break you can see on the right and it’s wheels are much larger and provide at least some level of grip, unlike the skinny ones on the Green Machine.

I sure had fun terrorizing the neighborhood on my green machine. My Spiderman tank provides a nice and classy tribute to the times.

boystoys

 

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