WikiHow chose to highlight "How to Enjoy Your Job" on a Monday. Discuss.

• 16:43 Downloading yet another IE 6 VHD. Bonus: IE 8 beta VHD.
• 16:52 Fyi - IE VHDs - tinyurl.com/y64upm

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• 11:48 Interesting read on how some corporate cultures thrive on fear - tinyurl.com/6p5cam
• 19:43 At crossroads waiting for iron man to start. :)
• 19:47 Remember when there were just ads for movies before the movies not cars?

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From a review of Seducing the Boys Club: Uncensored Tactics From a Woman at the Top by Nina DiSesa:

To my mind, the most illuminating comments in [the] book come from James Patterson, a former advertising mogul who now writes best-selling mystery fiction. Ms. DiSesa reports that Mr. Patterson urged her to think of life as a game in which we juggle five balls labeled Work, Family, Health, Friends and Integrity.

“One day you understand Work is a rubber ball. You drop it and it bounces back,” Mr. Patterson is quoted as saying. “The other four balls are made of glass. Drop one of those, and it will be irrevocably marked, scuffed, nicked and maybe even shattered.”
- from The New York Times

Also in the Business section is an article on employee clubs that highlights Boeing's wine & beer making club. :)

In 2006, Catalyst looked at stereotypes across cultures (surveying 935 alumni of the International Institute for Management Development in Switzerland) and found that while the view of an ideal leader varied from place to place — in some regions the ideal leader was a team builder, in others the most valued skill was problem-solving. But whatever was most valued, women were seen as lacking it.

Respondents in the United States and England, for instance, listed “inspiring others” as a most important leadership quality, and then rated women as less adept at this than men. In Nordic countries, women were seen as perfectly inspirational, but it was “delegating” that was of higher value there, and women were not seen as good delegators.
- from "The Feminine Critique" in today's New York Times

I end up wondering if women are perceived as being less good at what's most important, or if certain skills are considered "less important" because women are considered to be good at them....

This article on emotional intelligence (EQ) grabbed my attention:

You probably overestimate your emotional intelligence. Most of us do. You could get into real trouble when your EQ is extremely low — like posting naked photos of yourself [...] Most of us are not doing insanely stupid things. We are just doing a series of smaller EQ mistakes day after day.

At some point, if your EQ is too low, you will hit a wall. Most people notice the wall when they can’t get a job, because today, the job hunts that are most successful are based on networking skills — in other words, EQ. But here are other areas of the workplace that are becoming more and more important. And success in each of these three areas depends heavily on EQ.

Some tips from the same writer on making social stuff work for you:

Benefits of being a partial chameleon

Think hard about how you approach a group. Do you hope that the group conforms to you or do you conform to the group? As long as you respect the people in the group, conforming to them enough to form a bond is not a bad idea. [...] But you can find pieces of yourself that match up with just about everyone, if you are in-tune with yourself and other people.

5 ways to be better at office politics:

1. Don’t try to change or resist company culture including dress, communication styles and office hours. Being different does not work.
   
2. Practice self-awareness. This is a life-long task and every day you can become a little bit more aware of how people perceive you. Just doing your job is not enough. You need to do it in a way that makes a positive impression on everyone else.
   
3. Manage your stress levels so you can avoid emotional displays of inconsistent behavior and inconsistent messages. Most emotional outbursts come from unmanaged stress.
   
4. Be approachable all the time – in your cube, in the hallway, even in the bathroom.
   
5. Network before you need to network. Being good at politics means that you are good at relationship building, and you can count on a wide range of people when you need them.

What do these things have in common? Well, besides enough self-discipline to carry them out? I would say it's about providing a consistent experience for your coworkers. Yes, even #1 - if you really can't operate the way they do, then you probably need to find a new job.

Being likeable is a big part of office politics.

Most of us have to work at being likeable. Fortunately, [research] shows that the biggest impediment to likeability is not caring. So if you “just decide you want to do better,” you probably will.

Why is this important?

[P]eople judge your work skills as incompetent if you are not likeable — no matter what your work skills are. It may not be fair, but it’s what people do.

If people enjoy interacting with you, that will color the rest of the transaction. Plus, if you enjoy the interaction, that's a bit of enjoyment to your day you otherwise might not have had.

Again from the daily calendar.

One of the most fundamental problems in organizations, including families, is that people are not committed to the determinations of other people for their lives. They simply don't buy into them.
-o-
The successful person has the habit of doing the things failures don't like to do. They don't like doing them either necessarily. But their disliking is subordinated to the strength of their purpose. — E.M. Gray.

A few articles from Psychology Today

When Persona Aces Person
How much of yourself is appropriate for your office?

Managing the Self
Self-control can be tiring.

The Poker Face
"The successful candidate will mask his true feelings, negative and positive, in the name of professionalism."

And from the Wall Street Journal: "OMG &mdash My Boss Wants to 'Friend' Me On My Online Profile"

Caffeine Jell-O Shots
Fun Cat Photos
Are Vacations Worth It?
Researchers study why people have sex.
California's best Chardonnay is less than $3. Or at least it's not the $120 bottle.
How to Stay Awake at Work

More quotes from the Seven Habits daily calendar.

Samuel Johnson observed, "The fountain of content must spring up in the mind, and he who hath so little knowledge of human nature as to seek happiness by changing anything but his own disposition, will waste his life in fruitless efforts and multiply the grief he proposes to remove."

I would say there's a definite truth here. But it also assumes you've already met the lower-level needs of Maslow's hierarchy.

How different our lives are when we really know what is deeply important to us, and, keeping that picture in mind, we manage ourselves each day to be and to do what really matters most.

-o-

If the ladder is not leaning against the right wall, every step we take just gets us to the wrong place faster. We may be very busy, we may be very efficient, but we will also be truly effective when we begin with the end in mind.

-o-

Efficient management without effective leadership is, as one individual has phrased it, "like straightening deck chairs on the Titanic." No management success can compensate for failure in leadership.

These three all speak to the difference between doing things right, and doing the right thing. Which also reminds me of Dorothy Sayers writing on the need to do good work, not just good works...

I have a 7 Habits calendar. I know, how new-age. This comprises a series of 3 days.

To relate effectively with a wife, a husband, children, friends, or working associates, we must learn to listen. And this requires emotional strength.

Listening involves patience, openness, and the desire to understand — highly developed qualities of character. It's so much easier to operate from a low emotional level and to give high-level advice.

Our level of development is fairly obvious with tennis or piano playing, where it is impossible to pretend. But it is not so obvious in the areas of character and emotional development.

-o-

The last reminds me of Unskilled and Unaware of It (PDF) from the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology:

We argue that when people are incompetent in the strategies they adopt to achieve success and satisfaction, they suffer a dual burden: Not only do they reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the ability to realize it.

The more you know, the more you know what you don't know. That still may not give you the fortitude to listen when you're being told something you don't want to know. But it might help.

I've told this to at least 2 or 3 people now, so I might as well link to it here.

I found a ruby library for testing in IE & I'm working through the tutorial. So I've got IE and the irb window up, and I'm typing

ie.button(:value, 'Login').click

instead of clicking the Login button.

So yeah, it's for scripting. But it's also an oddly verbose way to rest my mouse hand....

A co-worker's post on Cooking for Engineers led me to their site.

And yes, the summary ("recipe card view") makes total sense to me ... tho the normal view does have other helpful info ;)

There's a lot of testing buzzwords that just make me sigh. But I like "Context-Driven". The link has good info, but the example was the "aha" moment for me:

Consider two projects:

1. One is developing the control software for an airplane. What "correct behavior" means is a highly technical and mathematical subject. FAA regulations must be followed. Anything you do -- or don't do -- would be evidence in a lawsuit 20 years from now. The development staff share an engineering culture that values caution, precision, repeatability, and double-checking everyone's work.


2. Another project is developing a word processor that is to be used over the web. "Correct behavior" is whatever woos a vast and inarticulate audience of Microsoft Word users over to your software. There are no regulatory requirements that matter (other than those governing public stock offerings). Time to market matters -- 20 months from now, it will all be over, for good or ill. The development staff decidedly do not come from an engineering culture, and attempts to talk in a way normal for the first culture will cause them to refer to you as "damage to be routed around".

Testing practices appropriate to the first project will fail in the second.
Practices appropriate to the second project would be criminally negligent in the first.

The testing is designed for the project, not the project for testing.

"The price one pays for pursuing any profession or calling is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side."

I ran across this while looking up titles for a crossword. It's very true. I would say it's even truer for testers because we are paid and encouraged to focus on what *doesn't* work.

Also: "All roles are dangerous. The world tends to trap you in the role you play and it is always extremely hard to maintain a watchful, mocking distance between oneself as one appears to be and oneself as one actually is."

This Fortune article discusses how corporations can use blogging to get their word out - and how to cope with their employees blogging. One quote:

Don't shut down existing employee blogs. If they are positive about the company, Rubel suggests turning these evangelists into a voluntary sales force. If they are negative, you might have a larger morale issue that needs to be addressed.

This is so NOT the experience of people I know. But then,

The most important question to ask is whether your company should even blog at all. "There are some corporate cultures where blogging is not going to go over very well," says Sifry. Cultures where blogging thrives, he says, are ones that "have faith in their employees, rather than fear."

Trust is part of it - but so is an organization that's organized enough to know what it wants & how to do it.

We now have an internal blogging server at work. I'll probably mostly use it for musings on testing / QA / software dev stuff.

My first post: ( Read more... )

This article talks about the affects of work stress, but I would think it also would apply to stress in general. The note on "chronic environmental noise" being associated with higher risk of heart attack, for example, is another form of stress.

On a similar note, AlterNet has some nifty resolutions for a sane workplace, including:

This year, make a point of not supporting workaholic martyrs ("I worked all night! I came in on the weekend!" "Really? How lame.") who don't drive productivity but stress everyone around them.

More info on how work and stress can make you sick is here.

Yes, a C board game. Here's a partial pic of the board. More info is at http://www.c-jump.com ;)

I saw some praise for Corporate Confidential at http://minimsft.blogspot.com/, so I took a look at the ToC & read the excerpts available on the website...and had a few observations I wanted to rant share.

1. Are these actually secrets? Or was I a manager too long?
   
       Gossip can make you look like a traitor.
       Work friendships can be dangerous.
       If you're in the wrong "camp" you could be mistaken for the enemy.
       There's no right to free speech in the workplace.
       Companies have very short memories.
   
   That said, there are ones that sound a bit "new" to me and/or I'm interested in seeing what she has to say, like Expense reports hold a secret test of loyalty. and You CAN have an office romance without breaking your career.
   
   
2. The cover & ToC sound rather confrontational, possibly inflammatory. ( Read more... )
3. The excerpts read pretty reasonably, tho. One example I've had experience with on both sides is Sharing personal information could undo all you've worked for - and her excerpted commentary seems right on target: ( Read more... )
   
4. The site also includes an article the author published in the Seattle Times that I liked.

All in all, I'm going to look for Corporate Confidential the next time I'm at a bookstore and look into it a bit more :)

I've had a few people mention the Software Quality Engineer Certification, or CSQE. It's the first software-testing related cert I've heard of, so I looked into it a bit.

It seems interesting to me - but as a "hm, lots of interesting stuff here" not a "yeah, that would help me do my job better". It's QA in the broad sense; project management and dev management and test management and testing and and and. I will note that many of the topics involved in the CSQE dovetails with my recent Amazon purchases.... ( books on testing, management & project management ) Offhand, I get most of these practice questions right. However, "According to Crosby", "Halstead's software science metric" and "According to IEEE standards" draw blanks. So do terms like "cyclomatic complexity", "requirements analysis methodologies", "minor nonconformance", and "defect escapes". Some I could deal with in context, mind you. I even got the "According to Crosby" one right by just picking the right answer and not worrying about what Crosby thinks... ;)

But. The fact that I'm tripping over terminology - and references to Six Sigma, ISO 9000 & IEEE - tells me this is not "my" [shrinkwrap software] world. Does that mean it's a bad thing? No. Just not sure

1. How much of it would be learning new things
2. How much of it would be learning new names for things I already know
3. How much of it would be useful

#2 & #3 in part depend on where my career goes down the road. I think the new terminology would become useful pretty quick if I ever wanted to move out of shrinkwrap....

This is really for me, but I won't stop anyone else from reading it ;)

( Two ideas dominated his work. ) The first had to do with “empowering” workers. Mr Drucker believed in treating workers as resources rather than just as costs. He was a harsh critic of the assembly-line system of production that then dominated the manufacturing sector—partly because assembly lines moved at the speed of the slowest and partly because they failed to engage the creativity of individual workers. He was equally scathing of managers who simply regarded companies as a way of generating short-term profits. In the late 1990s he turned into one of America's leading critics of soaring executive pay, warning that “in the next economic downturn, there will be an outbreak of bitterness and contempt for the super-corporate chieftains who pay themselves millions.”

The second argument had to do with the rise of knowledge workers. Mr Drucker argued that the world is moving from an “economy of goods” to an economy of “knowledge”—and from a society dominated by an industrial proletariat to one dominated by brain workers. He insisted that this had profound implications for both managers and politicians. Managers had to stop treating workers like cogs in a huge inhuman machine—the idea at the heart of Frederick Taylor's stopwatch management—and start treating them as brain workers. In turn, politicians had to realise that knowledge, and hence education, was the single most important resource for any advanced society.

Yet Mr Drucker also thought that this economy had implications for knowledge workers themselves. They had to come to terms with the fact that they were neither “bosses” nor “workers”, but something in between: entrepreneurs who had responsibility for developing their most important resource, brainpower, and who also needed to take more control of their own careers, including their pension plans. ( Read more... )

The biggest problem with evaluating Mr Drucker's influence is that so many of his ideas have passed into conventional wisdom—in other words, that he is the victim of his own success. His writings on the importance of knowledge workers and empowerment may sound a little banal today. But they certainly weren't banal when he first dreamed them up in the 1940s, or when they were first put in to practice in the Anglo-Saxon world in the 1980s. ( Read more... )

I've liked the excerpts I've read of his stuff enough to order The Essential Drucker from Amazon.

Most people think of human capital the way economists and policy makers do - as the skills and knowledge people need to get jobs and thrive in a modern economy. [But it's more than that.]

There's cultural capital: the habits, assumptions, emotional dispositions and linguistic capacities we unconsciously pick up from families, neighbors and ethnic groups - usually by age 3. In a classic study, James S. Coleman found that what happens in the family shapes a child's educational achievement more than what happens in school. In more recent research, James Heckman and Pedro Carneiro found that "most of the gaps in college attendance and delay are determined by early family factors."

There's social capital: the knowledge of how to behave in groups and within institutions. This can mean, for example, knowing what to do if your community college loses your transcript. Or it can mean knowing the basic rules of politeness. The University of North Carolina now offers seminars to poorer students so they'll know how to behave in restaurants.

There's moral capital: the ability to be trustworthy. Students who drop out of high school, but take the G.E.D. exam, tend to be smarter than high school dropouts. But their lifetime wages tend to be no higher than they are for those with no high school diplomas. That's because many people who pass the G.E.D. are less organized and less dependable than their less educated peers - as employers soon discover. Brains and skills don't matter if you don't show up on time.

There's cognitive capital. This can mean pure, inherited brainpower. But important cognitive skills are not measured by IQ tests and are not fixed. Some people know how to evaluate themselves and their abilities, while others with higher IQ's are clueless. Some low-IQ people can sense what others are feeling, while brainier peers cannot. Such skills can be improved over a lifetime.

Then there's aspirational capital: the fire-in-the-belly ambition to achieve. In his book "The Millionaire Mind," Thomas J. Stanley reports that the average millionaire had a B-minus collegiate G.P.A. - not very good. But millionaires often had this experience: People told them they were too stupid to achieve something, so they set out to prove the naysayers wrong. - David Brooks, writing in the New York Times

Brooks goes on to assert that "U.S. education reforms have generally failed because they try to improve the skills of students without addressing the underlying components of human capital." What intererested me more was his categories and descriptions. Those other "components" of human capital are much harder to measure. I'm also wondering if there are other components that aren't included above. Economic skills could go under "social capital", but where would resilience go? How about problem-solving skills? Would "aspirational capital" include a positive, can-do attitude?

In response to an observation of growing up in whitebread America - no racism but no other races, either

I grew up in a bit north of Seattle, what is now the city of Shoreline. When I was in school it was about 10% Asian, 1-2% black, and the rest white or mixed (and most of the mixes were white & Asian). The 2000 census reports it was 77% white, 13% Asian, and 2.8% black.

So. Yes, people of other races. But damned few, even in service positions. And those few I met at school were usually 2nd or 3rd-generation Americans being raised by smart, well-educated, frequently well-to-do (at least to my eyes) parents. Then I went to work at Microsoft Redmond, with its large Asian minority (new immigrants as well as nth-generation), almost everyone comes from one side of the IQ bell curve and most are being paid high-tech wages.

Results?

• I expect people of other races to be as smart or smarter than I and to have as much or more money.
• I do not equate "accent" with "ignorant".
• I do not equate "brown skin" with "accent".
• I did not pick up my mother's assumption that people of color are less educated or poor. This baffled her.
• I did pick up some of mom's BS, largely her discomfort with being emotionally close to people who look different (black, Asian, Latino, noticably richer or poorer).
• I am aware of racial differences. I wonder if I would be less aware if I had grown up in a more-mixed community.
• I wonder if my ignorance leads me to racist assumptions.

FWIW, according to the 2000 census info, King County is 75.7% white, 10.8% Asian, and 5.4% black. The rest is mostly mixed, with some Pacific Islander & Native American thrown in. In Redmond it's 79% white, 13% Asian, and 1.5% black.