Cube Antics

There’s nothing more frustrating to me than having my time wasted, especially when project deadlines are looming around every corner.  Unfortunately, most corporate-tailored training classes are just that; a waste of time.

Why is this? You may ask.  The simple answer is complacency.  Instructors are contracted out by training companies to cover cookie cutter material created by someone who doesn’t know anything about what you are working on, upper-level managers could care less about the specifics covered in a particular training class…

I took part in my company’s annual co-op luncheon this week; where we bring in the best and brightest undergraduate juniors and seniors in for an interview and try to convince them to leave school and work for us full time for a semester. This is a great opportunity for students to get some full-time real-world experience, make a nice chunk of cash, and take a semester off of school.

This was an interesting ordeal for me because I had absolutely…

A very interesting open letter – written almost a decade before I was born – from Bill Gates (of Micro-Soft at the time) offering his perspective on software piracy.

Whether or not you like Bill Gates (personally, I’m a fan) you have to admire one of the last sentences of this letter when he pleads for people to buy his software instead of pirating it.

“Nothing would please me more than being able to hire ten programmers and deluge the hobby market…

Root cause analysis comes in handy when you need to identify why a problem happened so that you can take the appropriate actions to keep it from happening again.

Root Cause Analysis Techniques

Here are the two primary techniques we use at work. They are very straightforward and encourage group-wide brainstorming.

5 Whys

Most everyone defaults to this method, in fact, it is so natural that I bet you probably performed a 5 Whys analysis at some point today. You start of with…

I have some friends in my old group who are having a really rough time with some of their managers at work and their horror stories really got me thinking about the responsibility of being a leader and what separates the awesome leaders from everyone else.

Working for a lame manager is no fun, so don’t be that guy! Here are 10 tips that will tangibly improve the quality of manager you are. Again, this is more geared towards technical…

A friend at work introduced me to the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) assessment. I’m surprised I didn’t hear about this test before now, but what can you do?

You can take it for free at HumanMetrics (please forgive the design, i’m sure they meant well).

For anyone interested, my personality rated INTJ (socially awkward).
Introverted (78%)
iNtuitive (75%)
Thinking (88%)
Judging (78%)

The “Carreer Indicator” suggested I become a computer programmer which is kind of interesting how I fell into the profession that this test said I would…

Here is what my new business cards are going to look like. I tried to keep them clean, geeky, and unique with a hint of professionalism. Hopefully I did a good job. Please let me know what you think.

I work at a pretty awesome place where I actually get paid to play on a computer all day, work in a language I enjoy around smart people I enjoy even more. It seems like ever since I started this blog (which wasn’t that long ago) my head has been filled with tons of different topics that I want to share my perspective on. However, the one topic that takes up the majority of my day, is regrettably, off limits. Unfortunately (for…