The difference between working for a business and being at a university is in a business we’re not paying you to show us how smart you are. Don’t get me wrong. I think the best career advice I ever read was in an article by James Watson in Technology Review, never be the brightest person…
Let’s assume, based on a random fact that I just made up for the moment, that 50% of all businesses that succeed are restaurants. Based on this fact, as a business consultant, you advise me that I should offer daily specials, make up flyers that I post on cars around the neighborhood, be sure I…
You know those movies you see where there’s a guy that looks like Brad Pitt (or is Brad Pitt) and some woman who looks like Miss Universe and they sit down at a random computer and in less than five minutes they have re-programmed all of the computers on Planet Earth while simultaneously disarming the…
AN ACTUAL CONVERSATION THIS WEEK … “This paper is not going to be as much an academic treatise as most of the ones I write, but I am hoping it will be more interesting. I was wondering about the fact that some well-respected people say the secret to career success is to be the foremost…
So, I am writing these papers on moving from novice to intermediate programmer and Kim Le Bouton has to go apply logic to it and ask, “Just how do you define a novice programmer, anyway?” I was tempted to be a smart ass about it and answer that it was anyone who didn’t come to…