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Untenable Workplace Hotshots
“When Smart People are Bad Employees” offers up three types of hotshots in the workplace: The Heretic: “However, sometimes really smart employees develop agendas other than improving the company. Rather than identifying weaknesses, so that he can fix them, he looks for faults to build his case. Specifically, he builds his case that the company is hopeless and run by a bunch of morons.” The Flake: “Then Roger changed. He would miss days of work without calling in. Then he would miss weeks of work. When he finally showed up, he apologized profusely, but the behavior didn’t stop. His work product also degraded. He became sloppy and unfocused.” The Jerk:…
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Weekly Linkage: Google, Politics, and Bees’ Knees
This week’s internet cruising: Coding Horror: Trouble In the House of Google – Jeff isn't the first to point out the problems with Google's search results lately (the content mills are clearly winning, and I swim through a lot of mess to get good results anymore), but he's done a lot of due diligence to try to improve Stack Exchange's rankings over the content scrapers, with mixed results. Excellent post. Sphinx – A better way to write your docs – This looks like an awesome doc writing/management system–I struggle with how much documentation to produce for the internals of a system (i.e. not a publicly exposed API), but I'd definitely…
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A Letter to 2011
Hello, 2011, I’ve taken to writing to you in my personal journal, and in three days it’s already stopped being cutesy and creepy and started being fer skerious. We have words to exchange, 2011. More than words. 2010–bless her heart–was a year of fractured interests: I set a date for my wedding. I changed jobs. I branched out in role-playing. I attacked the hell out of my debt. I wrote in public. 2011, you’re the year of finishing: I’m going to finish my last sliver of debt. I’m going to finish not having a long-term financial plan. I’m going to get married. I’m going to finish my novel. I’m going…
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Enviable Family Ties
My mother always wanted a tight-knit family. Instead, she got me and my father.
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Weekly linkage
This week’s internet cruising: APW Book Club: Elizabeth Gilbert’s Committed, Round II « A Practical Wedding – Not all choices are empowering. "Because here is the thing: the more we talk about marriage here, the more I worry. I worry that we’re being given the illusion of lots of options, and the reality of really sh*tty options. I worry that the sh*ttiest of options (over-work, under-appreciation, enormous sacrifice) are being sold to us under the guise of 'independent womanhood,' instead of under the guise of 'life is hard sometimes, and you can make it through, but you should fight for things to be easier.' I worry when I hear about…