#work (328 links)
- Tech Jobs: Design, Programming, Rails, Executive, and more. weworkremotely.com
- Scrum: Agile madness | www.jillesvangurp.com jillesvangurp.com
<blockquote>"You can’t substitute experience with process and that is exactly what agile followers end up doing. Take away the experienced people and you have a lot of people executing the rituals of scrum, kanban, or whatever without really understanding what they are doing. The assumption that that will work at all is naive at best and actually rather delusional."</blockquote>
- This column will change your life: the truth about inefficiency theguardian.com
<blockquote>Inefficiency is subjective: what's experienced as inefficiency by me or you is perfectly efficient, actually, just so long as you're a phone company and your goal is making money. Voicemail thus has much in common with "dark patterns", a term coined by the tech consultant Harry Brignull, to refer to the sneaky ways in which websites "trick users into doing things they might not otherwise do, [such as] signing up for recurring bills". As with voicemail, these often look like incompetent design, but they're not. [...] What feels like tiresome inefficiency, born of sloppiness, really arises because it serves someone's interests.</blockquote>
- Hugs and Kisses medium.com
<blockquote>"Again, money raised its head: to confront the unavoidable truth that you require financial stability to do what you want to do. And that to whine about that being unfair is perhaps childish and irresponsible because if you’re serious about your art, then you should be, well, serious about creating the conditions in which you can create your art.</blockquote>
- Lanyrd: from idea to exit - the story of our startup blog.natbat.net
- Win-win consulting medium.com
<blockquote>Ideas on how to survive unpleasant projects as a consultant</blockquote>
- Why Talented Creatives Are Leaving Your Shitty Agency mobileinc.co.uk
<blockquote>The people who generate all the ideas and work are evolving and realising that they themselves could be reaping the rewards rather than the agency.
Agencies on the other hand are happy to keep trying to live in a world which is ceasing to exist. Clinging onto the same ideas, tools, and ways of working with CEOs who are either oblivious to the current mindset or too frightened to instigate change. It’s the perfect storm of increasing entrepreneurialism, decreasing loyalty and an industry reveling in mediocrity.</blockquote>
- 57 startup lessons defmacro.org
A mixed bag, mostly useful when VC-talk filter engaged.
- The Definitive Guide To Project Billing planscope.io
- front-end-ops smashingmagazine.com
_thenittygritty: Front-End Ops by @SlexAxton http://t.co/MUtey1gK2H
- The Happy Startup School – Helping entrepreneurs realise their dreams, one startup at a time thehappystartupschool.com
<blockquote>One of the mistakes I see entrepreneurs make is they move to business model before locking down strategy. The way I like to think about this is get the product right first, then lock down the strategy of the business, then figure out the business model.</blockquote>
One of the best articles I've read so far this year.
<blockquote>My definition of a good solution to a complex problem is one that solves the immediate problem, is built to last and generates more potential than it uses.
The more I think about complex problems, the more I get convinced that the built to last part is critical. Almost all failures are caused by not aiming for durability.</blockquote>
- Ask HN: What Freelancer site do you recommend? | Hacker News news.ycombinator.com
<blockquote>The spectre of competition means that at work, school, everywhere we think we have to work/study/run as fast as we possibly can, all the time. But, says Bjergegaard, much of that is counterproductive. "We get tired, we don't work as well under constant stress. We don't always need to be there anyway – many of my best ideas have come when I'm running, or on holiday."</blockquote>
- FutureGov | Helping to shape the future of government wearefuturegov.com
- My Interview Questions for Potential Employers | Hacker News news.ycombinator.com
- How do free services on the web make money? | Hacker News news.ycombinator.com
<blockquote>If I had to sum up this book in my own words it would be; “If you are willing to build your business on expertise, you can make a living instead of making a fortune — and occasionally the fortune comes anyway.”</blockquote>
<blockquote>"Mr. Lam’s revenue is low, about $50,000 a month, but it’s doubling every quarter, enough to pay his freelancers, invest in the site and keep him in surfboards. And now he actually has time to ride them. In that sense, Mr. Lam is living out that initial dream of the Web: working from home, working with friends, making something that saves others time and money."</blockquote>
- The Pinboard Investment Co-Prosperity Cloud static.pinboard.in
- Docracy - Free Legal Documents docracy.com
<blockquote>The web’s only open collection of legal contracts and the best way to negotiate and sign documents online.</blockquote>
- Venture Hacks - Good advice for startups. venturehacks.com
- Growing One's Consulting Business training.kalzumeus.com
<blockquote>This is, far and away, the most important lesson to learn as a consultant. People who are unsavvy about business, like me in 2009 or like most freelancers today, treat themselves like commodity providers of a well-understood service that is available in quantity and differentiated purely based on price. This is stunningly not the case for programming, due to how competitive the market for talent is right now, and it is even more acutely untrue for folks who can program but instead choose to offer the much-more-lucrative service "I solve business problems -- occasionally a computer is involved."</blockquote>
- YunoJuno yunojuno.com
- Why Valve? Or, what do we need corporations for and how does Valve’s management structure fit into today’s corporate world? | Valve blogs.valvesoftware.com
The current system of corporate governance is bunk. Capitalist corporations are on the way to certain extinction. Replete with hierarchies that are exceedingly wasteful of human talent and energies, intertwined with toxic finance, co-dependent with political structures that are losing democratic legitimacy fast, a form of post-capitalist, decentralised corporation will, sooner or later, emerge. The eradication of distribution and marginal costs, the capacity of producers to have direct access to billions of customers instantaneously, the advances of open source communities and mentalities, all these fascinating developments are bound to turn the autocratic Soviet-like megaliths of today into curiosities that students of political economy, business studies et al will marvel at in the future, just like school children marvel at dinosaur skeletons at the Natural History museum.
- IR35 contracts & risk: 10 things to be wary of when signing a consultancy contract :: Contractor UK contractoruk.com
"Another point to be aware of is the difference between signing a contract with a client to "supply a worker" to perform services and signing a contract to directly perform services. Different liabilities will arise under each form of contract and there may be arguments that your limited company is acting akin to an agency when "providing personnel" and consequently subject to unexpected regulations and tax legislation."
- Don’t waste your time in crappy startup jobs. « Michael O.Church michaelochurch.wordpress.com
I don’t intend to argue that people shouldn’t join startups. If the offer’s good, and the job looks interesting, it’s worth trying out. I just don’t think that the current, unconditional “startups are awesome!” mentality serves us well. It’s not good for any of us, because there’s no tyrant worse than a peer selling himself short, and right now there are a lot of great people selling themselves very short for a shot at the “startup experience”– whatever that is.
- Coding is priority number five - bitquabit bitquabit.com
Team leads are different. Your job, should you accept it, is to become what I’ve lovingly dubbed Shit Umbrella. Your goal is to find all of the peripheral stuff involved in getting the product out the door—important stuff, such as making sure the delivery schedule for the new servers makes sense for when you want to ship the product that needs them, or taking customer calls at 11 PM on a Sunday because their account quit working and they want to know why they should keep paying you, or figuring out when doing features the sales and support teams want makes financial sense—and then coming back and presenting a focused direction to all the developers so that they can get the features written without worrying about how they actually ship. You switch from doing the building yourself to enabling others to build stuff on your behalf.
I think we’re seeing the emphasis shift from valuing trivia to valuing tools. There’s a new set of baseline skills required in order to be successful as a front-end developer, and developers who don’t meet this baseline are going to start feeling more and more left behind as those who are sharing their knowledge start to assume that certain things go without saying.
The “management team” isn’t the “decision making” team. It’s a support function. You may want to call them administration instead of management, which will keep them from getting too big for their britches.
- Crispy Fried Software Ltd - Hiring your first employee (a UK guide) blog.crispyfriedsoftware.com