SOLD! : Legendary Apple Pascal poster for sale on eBay
Published on 5 Jan 2006 at 11:00 pm by Paul |
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Filed under The Cargo Cults of Business, Apple Computer and Macintosh Related.
NB: Item has been sold, to a lucky buyer in the great state of Deutschland!
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Given the interest which the Apple Pascal poster arouses in the Apple fan base, I thought it would be just plain cruel to list my own print on eBay and not put up a blog post about it. Lucas Wagner has the definitive write-up on this famous Apple artifact, originally designed by Jef Raskin and then subsequently submarined by no less a paragon of cluelessness than Steve Jobs. Judging from the reactions of Slashdot respondents to an article on that board a few years back, the poster is something of grail for die-hard Apple geeks (like myself 
).
My print has its own brief history; I acquired it while working at an Apple dealer in Cincinnati back in 1981. We didn’t have space for the garish hanging, so when the store manager elected to throw it out, I was quick to snatch it up. It went on to occupy the dorm room of one of my friends at Carnegie-Mellon University from 1983 until 1987. In the process of returning the poster to me, my friend had it reframed when the original frame was broken in transit.
It then ended up "returning home" when I went to work at Apple from 1990-1993, where it hung in my office. From there, it went on to adorn my cubicle walls at General Magic, where the many Apple alumni at that company were quick to remark on it (I could have had most of the original Mac design team autograph it, but who knew?). It has since been on and off of walls in our home as we have moved around in the years since my departure from General Magic in 1995, but for a 25 year old dealer poster it remains in excellent condition. I’m now rather reluctantly selling the piece to defray some holiday expenses, though being one of those die-hard Apple geeks it was a painful decision.
FWIW,
Paul
The Power to Create… Energy
Published on 18 Dec 2005 at 8:47 am by John |
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Filed under The Cargo Cults of Business, Thanks for Playing, Main Stream Media.
Maybe I’m being overly sensitive but this just irritates me. Sloppy writing/thinking at the BBC.
[UPDATE: They fixed it! Look here: Original version — for the google cached version I’m talking about. ]
The actual function of the device seems straight forward and reasonable. Why not use energy from the vehicles themselves to power the lights etc. needed for traffic safety and convenience? It seems like a very elegant solution, the power source is available at the many and sometimes remote locations where it is needed, and the bill is paid by the folks using the power. It might be less effective in the lowest traffic areas which would also be the most desirable ones from a cost stand point, but that doesn’t mean its a bad idea, just that it might not be perfect. (There’s also a question of how much traffic is necessary to return the life time costs of the device…) I would imagine that Mr. Hughes has given these questions a great deal of thought.
But, what bothers me is the use of language and the implications of it. Confusing power with energy is common enough and I’m reluctant to even quibble about it. It seems to me that "power" has taken on a casual meaning in everyday speech which lumps together power, energy, electricty, volume, and several other concepts. On the other hand, the use of the word "create" in regard to power or energy is just one too many for me. The headline reads "Ramp Creates Power As Cars Pass." The article itself does explain how the device is used, but uses the word "create" again. I really think that this kind of language encourages sloppy thinking on the part of the writer and the reader. Maybe I’m reading too much into it, but I think the writer would like us to believe that the energy is somehow being extracted from the ether rather than the traffic stream. Whether this is evidence of the BBC writer poorly understanding the physics, expecting the reader to poorly understand the physics, or just muddled writing and poor word choice is difficult to say.
How to chase away a customer
Published on 23 Nov 2005 at 8:33 am by John |
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Filed under The Cargo Cults of Business, Service With A Smirk, Business and Corporation Related, Branding and Values.
I’ve had occasion lately to interact with two different broadband providers. I had different reasons for contacting them, but the outcome was more or less the same; they told me to go away. Does that seem unlikely? Perhaps, yet I’ve seen this form of poor customer service over and over again.
In the first case, as a prospective customer, I wanted to know whether a particular broadband provider offered service in my area. I visited their website, filled in a moderately lengthy form, and waited for a response. Several days later I received an email which thanked me for my interest and told me to call them on the telephone during business hours and ask to speak with a salesperson.
In the second case, I used a web-form provided by my ISP to report that a problem with intermittent connectivity outages continues. Again, after several days, the reply: "…we would need to speak with you by telephone. Please contact our repair line 24-hours a day, 7 days a week at the phone numbers listed below."
These incidents are just the two latest examples of a kind of poor customer service I’ve seen many times. For some mysterious reason many companies seem to prefer to do business by telephone, rather than electronically. While I can’t understand that, what really puzzles me is when those same companies offer interaction through their websites… or at least appear to do so. Furthermore, once one is in contact with a customer, particularly a potential customer, why let them get away? Why even encourage them to go away?
It appears to me that there are two dynamics at work here.
First, many companies are, very reasonably, set up with specialized processes. One department handles billing problems, one handles service requests, etc. In this case, it is very poor policy to ask a customer to call back at some other number. The correct way to handle such a situation is to explain courteously and without any implication of blame that the customer has contacted the wrong department, educate them gently on how to get to the right place the first time in the future, and then take responsibility for getting them into the correct queue. I’m imagining a phone contact, but the proper procedure is exactly the same for electronic communications. For example:
"Dear Mr. Jones, Thanks very much for emailing us at Acme Corporation Technical Support. We’re always happy to help out in anyway we can. Unfortunately we’re not very well informed about issues relating to direct purchases of Acme corp. stock. I’ve forwarded your questions to our Share Holder Relations Department and you should expect to hear from them today. For faster service in the future you can email them directly at Stocks@AcmeCorp.com. Thanks again for contacting us; we’re always happy to hear from you."
Second, many companies seem to be unable to handle electronic communications with their customers. This is stickier. If your company prefers not to interact electronically at this particular point in history, my first advice is: "Get Over It." If, however, presumably for unavoidable reasons, you persist in avoiding electronic communications, it’s better not to offer it. It may even be wise to say so in places where electronic communication might be expected. If you have a website but prefer not to communicate electronically it seems a simple to matter to add something like the following.
"While we at Custom Hand Made Products Corporation have provided this web site for your convenience we prefer to do business exclusively in person. The highly personalized nature of our products and the old fashioned craftsmanship which we bring to our work really require personal interaction and are not suited to the cold mechanism of telephone or computer. Please come down to see us and share a pot of coffee, at 12 Main Street. Thanks. — Joe."
I believe it is always best to be flexible enough to communicate with your customers through any means they find most comfortable, including multiple means for different situations. Ignoring this risks chasing them away. I’ve never called the first provider, and I probably will not. One of my purchasing criteria is high quality customer service.
Something doesn’t add up…
Published on 13 Oct 2005 at 8:53 pm by John |
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Filed under The Cargo Cults of Business, Business and Corporation Related, Economics and the Economy.
It always troubles me when part of my model of how the world works appears to be broken. I feel that I’m obligated to reconcile the workings of my mental model with my observations. I either need to show to my satisfaction that the things I’ve observed actually fit within the model even though at first appearance they don’t, or I have to modify the model to account for the observations.
Part of my model of business, prices, and economics is that higher costs will be passed along the transaction chain. ie. If a producer’s costs rise, the prices will rise at the retail level as well. That is a general rule, and the model allows for many exceptions in terms of propagation delay, competitive pressure, etc. but recently I made an observation which, by itself, seems to break the model.
Gasoline appears to be cheaper in Oregon than in Washington. A quick and admittedly unscientific look at gas prices in Vancouver, Washington, and Portland, OR, just across the river, shows prices around $2.66 per gallon in Vancouver, and around $2.59 per gallon in Portland. Which represents a small difference in favor of Portland. Part of this can be explained by the difference in state tax rates. According to a number of different sites, (gasoline taxes) taxes are higher in Washington state by 4 cents per gallon. This leaves us with 3 cents per gallon to explain, a difference which I’m willing to write off to local effects, noise, or whatever.
But… in Oregon self-serve gas is illegal. (several sources including)1
It seems inevitable for two reasons that this law should translate into higher gasoline prices in Oregon than in neighboring Washington.
First, there is the salary of the pumping attendant. I imagine that is a minimum wage job unless it requires safety certification etc. I would suppose this isn’t a major cost. I was unable to find good numbers for the pumping speed of gas pumps, but based on experience, I’d say it takes about 3 minutes to pump 12 gallons. Call it 4 gallons per minute. An hour therefore gives the attendant the ability to pump 240 gallons. Maybe they can manage two pumps at once so perhaps 480 gallons. Then of course unless the station is very busy they have a lot of down time, but let’s call it 500 gallons per attendant per hour. It says here that the minimum wage in Oregon is $7.25/hr. So, that wage could, generously ignoring a lot of overhead and other factors, be under 2 cents a gallon.
Second, and more importantly, my understanding has always been that most gas stations sold gasoline more or less at cost, and made their profits from either convenience store sales or sales of motor oil etc. It seems to me that, if this is the case, full-serve, which keeps the customer in the car and out of the store, would have a devastating effect on sales.
So, clearly I’ve missed something. Are there significant liability insurance savings? Are there state subsidies? Are some of my assumptions above way off the mark? How does this work? Furthermore, if there really is not a net cost, then why don’t we see full service in other states without state intervention? Wouldn’t customers demand the higher level of service? I have been told that the reason for full service becoming scarce in the midwest was the cost combined with the opportunity to get customers out of their cars and into the convenience store.
Something in the economics of gasoline prices in Oregon doesn’t add up. So, clearly I’ve missed something. Anyone care to tell me what?
Update:
Since I wrote this gas prices have been dropping all over the country. In Portland they’re now around $2.21/gallon and in Vancouver they’re at about $2.27. I won’t keep updating these numbers, they’re readily available, at these links for example: Portland Vancouver But, I wanted to make sure what I had noticed wasn’t a very short term thing.
1 As an aside, I take some small issue with Mr. Virgin’s final paragraph:
In those two, and the other 48, the market has spoken as to what the bulk of consumers want. The market, it should be remembered, does not always speak with one voice, or say the same thing in every locale.
While I agree that the market doesn’t always speak with one voice, and certainly doesn’t say the same thing in every locale, indeed, that is a great part of its strength in my opinion, I can’t agree that the market has spoken in New Jersey and Oregon. Clearly in those two places it is the legislature which has spoken, not the market.
Turnaround CIOs
Published on 29 Sep 2005 at 8:06 pm by John |
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Filed under The Cargo Cults of Business, Brain Trust, Business and Corporation Related, Information Technology.
I just noticed this article: Turnaround at CIO. It’s about a month old, but definitely still worth the read.
A few worthwhile quotes:
The need for turnaround CIOs may seem the exception rather than the rule. But with many companies still struggling in an up-and-down economy and the federal government’s closer scrutiny of corporate finances because of Sarbanes-Oxley, a large portion of corporations are looking for these hired guns to fulfill three roles: firefighter for a business beset with numerous problems, drill sergeant for an out-of-order IT department, or guide for an organization embarking on a transformation.
and
…six out of every 10 CIOs should be applying turnaround methods—even if they don’t face a classic turnaround situation.
The article is not terribly in depth, but makes some excellent points, and several of the comments which have been contributed by readers are well said. The only specific item I would add is that there is a danger that they don’t seem to mention. Or perhaps only allude to in passing. I know of several cases in which a successful use of turnaround techniques was used against the manager in question politically.
The reasoning is hard to follow, but essentially the contention appears to have been that since the improvement occurred, it was inevitable, therefore, the expenditures and changes which had taken place were unnecessary. It seems likely to me that this feeling of inevitability is rooted in a naive conception of IT issues and structures as very simple. Since the problems were simple and the solutions obvious, the elaborate and time and money consuming actions of the turnaround manager are seen as wasteful. Furthermore, that manager’s skill set is also devalued.
Factions within a company who either preferred the dysfunctional state of affairs, or always believed it would "get better on its own" seem, in some cases at least, to resent the changes. Once the problems have been solved, it seems to be fairly easy for these folks to submit the improved state of affairs to top management as evidence that the turnaround efforts were not needed. Of course, there’s also the all too common and pernicious idea that once an IT problem has been fixed it’s fixed for good and needs no further maintenance or management.
By way of attempting to solve this problem, I would add this to CIO’s list of six steps. Arguably it’s merely best practice, but I think it’s important enough to call out.
Get specific buy in from top management from day 1. This must include specific goals and metrics and specific acknowledgement that a problem exists. Choose a set of benchmarks based upon those goals, and consistently record them throughout the process. Communicate the progress and the improvement against the benchmarks to top management frequently.
This step may not entirely insulate you from political revisionism, but I believe it helps to keep top management buy in and bolsters a sense of ownership in the solution which may mitigate these effects.
Whether this works or not, it’s probably best to keep in mind that for most turnaround IT executives frequent job changes are probably inevitable. One commenter on the CIO article mentions a new job search every 18 months. That seems a little too often to me, but not by much. I’d have estimated 24 months.
Power-Mart
Published on 22 Sep 2005 at 12:23 am by John |
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Filed under The Cargo Cults of Business, Service With A Smirk, Thanks for Playing, Pathetic Success, Winners and Losers, One Corporation Under God, In Corporations We Trust.
Let’s talk about what power is, and where it resides. The short answer: with your customers.
Wal-Mart is very unpopular in certain circles. There are websites devoted to hating the company, and even Wal-Mart itself is beginning to take notice of its suffering reputation. Lately various sources have pointed to the company’s behavior during Hurricane Katrina with approval.
Unfortunately attitude about Wal-Mart has become some kind social and political identification badge. Free-marketers seem to feel the need to defend everything the company does as long as it makes money, and those of a more socialist bent seem to want to condemn everything it does even if low prices are sometimes beneficial.
But let’s not forget that in business the customer always wins. If you don’t like Wal-Mart, don’t buy things there. Your reasons aren’t really important in this context. If you don’t like the low wages, the effects on small towns, or the atmosphere of the store, it’s all the same. If blue and white color schemes offend your aesthetics, that’s fine. As a customer you can express your displeasure by shopping elsewhere. If enough people agree with you, you will win. In this case, there’s also no need to worry that a few fat cat customers will make more difference than you do, that might work for a seller of private jets or giant estates, but it won’t save Wal-Mart.
It’s not even like you’d have to give up shopping. They do have competitors, and you wouldn’t have to wait long. I’m not an expert financial analyst, purely an amateur, but it looks to me like with a margin just under 5%, and current assets around 13% even if you allow for massive cost cutting and various kinds of shoring up, if its customer base were to desert it completely, mighty Wal-Mart might not last the quarter, and certainly wouldn’t last the year.
Remember, the customer is where the power resides.
Sweetest Poison
Published on 19 Sep 2005 at 5:00 pm by Paul |
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Filed under The Cargo Cults of Business, Manifest Masquerade, Winners and Losers, One Corporation Under God, Limited Lie-ability, In Corporations We Trust, Business and Corporation Related, Health and Safety, Legal, Law, and Courts, Government: Federal, State and Local, Branding and Values, Public Relations and Marketing.
[With apologies for the delayed publication]
Nearly hot on the heels of my recent posts on the CDC’s vaccination machinations and the Vioxx debacle, a recent study by the Ramazzini Foundation in Italy was brought to my attention that lays bare some more of the mythology surrounding, in particular, the artificial sweetener Aspartame. Aspartame, patented until recently by Big Ag giant Monsanto, has had a troubled history of occluded information since it’s approval for human food use in the 1980’s. There is an eye-popping rundown by Dr. Betty Martini over at WNHO’s website. For the medically inclined, the Feingold Association has a reference list of articles from Medline dealing with Aspartame issues.
Of course, it’s not merely the deceitful conduct of Monsanto and its conspirators that leads this issue to grace these pages. It’s the inevitable appearance-over-reality Cargo Cult dynamic that is invariably at the heart of such goings on. The dangers of Aspartame have been known all along, and as usual, there are hosts of independent studies that at the least raise serious questions about its effects on humans and other mammals. But these were all ignored and swept aside by our guardians of public trust, who instead elected to use as their operant data results collated by organizations with clear and prevailing conflicts of interest.
The situation has not been helped by the consumer populace, who seem wholly content to accept the bad science and specious research being promulgated by Big Ag and the other vested interests. That our governances should become corrupted by commercial interests is nothing new; that the citizenry of the United States should stand idly by while known toxic substances are introduced into our food supply is a different matter. I’ve never been fooled: Aspartame, along with other artificial sweeteners, gives me migraine headaches. But had I not experienced deleterious effects from ingesting this stuff, I may never have questioned its relative safety as a food additive. In many cases, the substance is forced on me by a lack of decent choices; most of our local Wendy’s restaurants recently switched to Minute-Maid Lite lemonade only; I can’t get a sugared version any more. At one Wendy’s, this had the effect of constraining all my beverage choices, as everything that wasn’t sugar-free had caffeine in it (something else I actively avoid). All of this, however, seems to pass unnoticed by the consumer rank and file.
I think it all comes down to how the issue is being presented, and a point touched on in previous articles, the facade of legitimacy that is actively promoted by our supposed "gatekeeper" organizations such as the FDA. In fact, I would contend that that facade doesn’t stop at legitimacy but, as seen in the CDC vaccinnation coverup, extends all the way to the appearance of infallibility. In our day and age, public trust is no longer about the integrity and character of the organizations entrusted with our health and safety, it’s all about how good their spokespeople and PR flacks sound on radio and television. And if the perils of this dynamic aren’t clear from the vaccine mercury and Aspartame incidents, then they should be abundantly clear in the Hurricane Katrina disaster, where the inept government response stems almost exclusively from gross incompetence and inability on the part of the glad-handed schmoozers who were given a critical responsibility they had not hope of delivering on.
Our task, then, as consumers, is to stop accepting the glib words and bland reassurances of industry councils and other organizations with vested interests in exploitation. We may lack the power to force ethical compliance on our governances, but we do have the ability to assert at least nominal economic force in the form of our dietary choices.
As a closing point of thought, consider this lengthy monologue by Lisa Zak, quoted at Topview. While she is obviously speaking from a position of impassioned bias, it would be acting on Cargo Cult beliefs to disregard her remarks solely because she is so highly opinionated. On the contrary, I would contend that we must take all the more seriously the remarks of individuals who have been willing to devote their time, attention, and in many cases professional reputations to exposing scientific fraud and government collusion.
Where the health and safety of our children are concerned, we cannot be too cautious where blind trust in our governances is concerned. The Katrina disaster shows quite clearly the overall competency level of these organizations. Going forward, it is imperative that we find ways to shift the oversight of the Monsanto’s and other predatory corporate forces away from an easily corrupted central government and down to distributed bodies of responsible citizens acting at the state and local level.
Meanwhile, I’ll be sticking to good old cane sugar, thank you very much. 
Paul
Innovator’s Dilemma
Published on 15 Sep 2005 at 12:23 am by John |
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Filed under The Cargo Cults of Business, Manifest Masquerade, Brain Trust, Design, Interface, and Usability, Business and Corporation Related, Branding and Values.
Clayton M. Christensen discusses at length what he calls "The Innovator’s Dilemma." In a nutshell, the Innovator’s Dilemma is the idea that great companies run into trouble when they fail to devote resources to the product of tomorrow due to concerns about losing focus, diverting resources from currently profitable products, or the possibity of alienating current customers. This is especially so when faced with disruptive technologies, those which change the competitive landscape, such as much cheaper solutions, technologies which obsolete existing ones, or perhaps those which allow a product to be carried into a new market area. This is a great book which I highly recommend.
It has been my privilege to work for three particularly innovative companies, including a small design firm well known for its innovative habits, and a certain large computer company which popularized the phrase “Think Different”. Even in those places the innovators dilemma proved problematic, for lesser organizations it can be devastating.
On the other hand, I’ve heard of a couple of cases where the book was brought into an organization but not really understood. In a classic example of cargo cult business, the Innovator’s Dilemma became an internal code for "It’s hard to innovate." and disruptive technology/products came to refer to "in your face" marketing. When all was said and done, the lesson which appeared to be derived from the experience was something to the tune of: "We must be on our guard against the Innovator’s Dilemma, in order to meet the challenge we’re going to be sure to focus on our core areas and employ ever greater disruptive marketing."
The Innovator’s Dilemma is a wicked little "Catch-22" and to expect a company to defeat it is perhaps setting the bar a little too high. However, I believe that understanding it, even if to decide it doesn’t apply, is almost a litmus test for modern management.
Getting It Right At Fog Creek Software
Published on 12 Sep 2005 at 1:33 pm by Paul |
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Filed under The Cargo Cults of Business, Manifest Masquerade, Total Quality Madness, Principal Acronyms Only, Winners and Losers, Business and Corporation Related, Information Technology, Branding and Values.
It’s all too rare that you see a company with its act together in the hiring department. Human Resources is second only to marketing as a bastion of appearance-over-reality in most corporations, large and small. The 75% of all positions that are filled by personal networking attest to the inherent emphasis on "it’s not what you know, it’s who you know". This dependence on solid interpersonal skills and a vast network of industry contacts haunts the technical disciplines, where engineers and scientists habitually immerse themselves in the technologies they are paid to manipulate. Assessing candidates on the basis of the firmness of their handshake, the whiteness of their teeth, and the cut of their suits is (or, at least, seems) all well and good if you’re filling a position in sales or executive management, where people skills and not problem solving form the basis of success.
But in a technical discipline, taking such a course is frequently disastrous. As a consultant, I have to cultivate both my interpersonal and technical skillsets, but I’ve been witness to some real disasters where slick talkers were favored by management over people who could actually get the job done. This problem is so pervasive throughout every industry that Bill Whittle addressed it at length in a recent post over at Eject! Eject! Eject! (note that his article is expansive, and the relevant bit about Pink and Grey tribes is a fair way in). And yet, even though emphasis on appearance is recognized as a real issue for technical hires, the ways and means to obviate it seem far from clear, even within the high tech industries where making the wrong call on a senior employee can cost weeks or months of delays and generate rancor in engineering teams. Few groups are more demanding in terms of being able to deliver on claims of technical ability than engineers.
So it comes as a delightful suprise to see that the folks over at Fog Creek Software appear to have their act together. First we have to give them credit for recognizing that great developer talent requires decent care and feeding. Of course, I’d like to see that extended to the entire IT organization (without which modern businesses would slowly but surely grind to a halt), but recognition of the importance of gaining and retaining top technical talent in terms of a good working environment and robust compensation is a step forward at any level.
Second, let’s give credit where it’s due to Joel Spolsky, Fog Creek’s Fearless Leader, for his innovations in the Joel Test. What Joel has done here isn’t simply assemble a set of hints for companies to consider in producing better software. He’s addressed the issue holistically, from hiring process through working environment (having been subjected to the dull roar of cubicle farms when trying to disentangle network management scripts, I was particularly warmed by his comments on a quiet working environment). Any company who takes his comments to heart will, I am certain, reap significant and immediate benefits.
But third, and most importantly, Joel and Fog Creek seem to understand the need to move past appearances in an interview, and focus in on (as Joel puts it) whether a candidate is smart, and whether a candidate can get things done. Joel’s Guerrilla Guide to Interviewing goes into all this, so I won’t belabor it here. What I will concentrate on is the fact that Fog Creek is working– diligently– to "get past" the smarmy superficiality that candidates are conditioned from college to adopt as a requisite for serious consideration for technical positions.
There are, to be sure, some snags in Fog Creek’s approach; some of their tactics, which are designed to reject excessively appearance-based candidates, will (like an errant spam filter) generate false negatives because the candidates are trying, in good faith, to "play the game" as they’ve historically been taught. Hit the candidate with an assessment environment based (for once) on technical reality and not on relational style, and you risk bouncing someone simply because they didn’t realize that, for perhaps the first time in their careers, they were being presented with an open and forthright interview environment, not a manipulative one. It seems to me that the candidates most likely to twig to the climactic shift will be the very appearance-oriented players you want to screen out. Given the inherent dichotomy between the technical and relational personality types, I see the potential for a lot of excellent people falling through the cracks.
I was also suprised at the simplistic nature of the development questions Joel recommends posing, but that just goes to show what I know. One of my friends, who is a powerhouse developer par excellance (it took me a week to learn the C programming language; it took him a weekend), indicated that actually Fog Creek’s gauntlet is robust, since the simplicity makes the excercises do-able, but subtleties in the implementation are revelatory about a particular developer’s style and abilities.
The construction of technical interview questions has a long and storied history; I’ve been on both sides of the query during my time in Silicon Valley. There are a plethora of attempts at creative assessment over at techinterview.com, with more being added, and William Poundstone has a book out on the subject centered around Microsoft’s now famous approach to this process. It think it’s fair to say that it’s as much a matter of style as of incisiveness as to which questions "work the best" for any given organization and employee role. Nonetheless, there is an ever-increasing consensus is that, for identifying the best and brightest in knowledge workers, the traditional interview questions (strengths and weaknesses, etc.) just don’t cut it. Assessment of the candidate’s mental agility is paramount, with relational style a secondary issue– just the opposite of what all the "traditional" methods yield. Fog Creek’s approach won’t help the candidates who simply don’t interview well, however competent their actual on-the-job performance may be (although, at least in theory, that’s what the resume is supposed to address). But by focussing on technical ability, rather than relational style, they have gone to the head of the class in terms of seeking out excellence in their employees.
However, I don’t like Joel’s "impossible question"; that’s just dirty pool. Because however much you may not want an interview environment to be on a power gradient, the fact of the matter is that it is. If you’re an elite outfit like Fog Creek, that’s only going to make stakes– and the tension– that much higher for the candidate. Again, such a question allows a forthright candidate to trip themselves up; they may feel that they must try to answer the question, however outrageous they may know it to be, lest they forfeit their prospects. (Joel would probably say that that is the test, but I think playing mind games starts off any relationship on the wrong foot. And the more honest and sincere the candidate is, the more that is going to be true).
Something else that I would do is test pilot the candidate in a "development simulator"; an environment identical to the one they would be working with. That would allow me to assess the candidate’s comfort level with that environment, as well as their ability to dynamically adapt to a potentialy unfamiliar situation. It would also give them the ability to actually run their code for the excercises, a chafe point with me since I myself am one of those people who, it seems, always manages to include at least one control flow error in my first draft of any program. (Here again, though, since I rather doubt I’m "Fog Creek material", this is probably the very sort of coding ham-handedness they want to select against).
But these are all quibbles; Fog Creek has recognized the great hurdle of appearance-based interviewing for what it is: a stumbling block to be overcome when interviewing knowledge workers. Combined with their other management practices, they sound like excactly the sort of company that, if I were a kick-ass developer and if I wanted to live in New York, I’d be pounding down their doors to go work for. (Maybe someday they’ll adopt Sun’s practice of letting their developers telecommute, which would at least let my friends go pounding on their door. So kudos all around to Joel and his team. In a corporate world dominated by schmooze and excessive emphasis on relational style, it’s great to see a company who understands that at the end of the day, it’s the smartest team will be the happiest team. And the most successful.
Paul
Disclaimer: I don’t usually do disclaimers, but in this case I wanted to note that Cargo Cult has no affiliations with Fog Creek Software, and we’ve never used their products. We just think they’re great based on their stated ethos; whether that ethos pans out in reality is a question you’ll have to ask their employees.
Survey Says! … Apple Wins?
Published on 8 Sep 2005 at 12:00 pm by John |
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Filed under The Cargo Cults of Business, Apple Computer and Macintosh Related, Information Technology.
Apple is widely acknowledged to be the industry leader in ease of use, but an ACSI survey seems to indicate wider reaching implications.
IT World reports on an ACSI (American Consumer Satisfaction Index) survey in which Apple leads the computer industry for the second year in a row, and Dell’s numbers fall sharply.
There’s not much info there about methodology etc. but I found this comment particularly interesting:
Despite all the work the PC industry has done to try to make their products easier to use, customers are still frustrated by PC technology, Van Amburg said.
Van Amburg, the General Manager of ACSI, seems to be equating high customer satisfaction for personal computer purchasers with ease of use. The fact that the highest rated company in his survey has a long standing reputation for leading the industry in ease of use isn’t specifically called out, but it seems like a reasonable connection to make.
There is some further information about methodology here. That page says among other things that they rate based upon; Customer Expectations, Perceived Quality, Perceived Value, Customer Complaints, and Customer Loyalty. They have some specific commentary which gives a little more detail but it still isn’t possible to tell why Apple scores so high. Certainly some critics would claim that by having an overwhelmingly high score in the "Customer Loyalty" category that Apple’s other scores are merely swamped. It’s terribly common to see phrases like "fanatically loyal customers" used to describe the company. Yet, there’s that tantalizing remark about ease of use…
All in all, I wish more info about the survey methodology was readily available. In my experience ease of use can be a powerful element in overall customer satisfaction. It is good in its own right, and furthermore it reduces support costs and the chances of the customer having a poor experience in that area. I really can’t argue with the other attributes they’re attempting to measure, they’re all a solid part of the customer experience and will have a real bearing on overall customer satisfaction, with one exception. I really don’t believe that "Customer Loyalty" belongs on this list any more than say "profitability." There may be some iterative effect at work, but customer loyalty is more the result of high levels of customer satisfaction than it is a cause.
Given earlier discussions here and elsewhere, I’m led to wonder how much of that ease of use advantage comes from the hardware, how much from the software, and how much from the synergy of the two. My own personal opinion is that the higher quality and ease of use of OSX is enough to explain most of the seven point difference between Apple and the industry average. Still, it’s not clear from the IT World story how various aspects of the customer experience were weighted to come to this single rating number. Dell was singled out for criticism based upon less than stellar customer service, while Apple seems to be earning its rating, at least by implication, on the back of ease of use.
It also seems a little unfair to hit Dell so hard for a relatively small decline, one that merely brings them down to the industry average. It causes me to wonder to what standard they’re being compared. The situation could just have easily been described as "Dell loses ground slightly to Apple but still holds a strong second place in the industry." Given the implied focus on ease of use as a driver of customer satisfaction, perhaps Apple is now the standard? If so, why not say so? Perhaps in a Windows centric world it’s a little too risky to admit the Macintosh may be in the process of becoming the new standard?
