Back in February I met with the Dean of CECS and Chair Harris of the CS department. One "good" problem for them is that nearly all (but few exceptions) are hired after graduation by the existing large businesses in Portland.
I don't hire strictly based on paper and education (being a high-school dropout type) but for many bright people, that is their best entry into CS and engineering. We'll have to work with PSU to increase the breadth and depth of their students - the really good news, no disagreement from them!
I'm moving my family and business to Portland, OR in order to grow. 4 days in Portland and I was able to meet with a couple of dozen people. I haven't seen a better city in this country ready to grow, try new things and be willing to support themselves and others become successful.
Portland Seed Fund is another win for everyone in Portland and Oregon.
No early manager's education is complete in my opinion without reading Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman's "First Break All The Rules".
Do yourself a favor, order a bunch of used copies for your staff to read. I've probably bought 200 or more copies of this book new and used and no other single book published in the micro-computing era has shaped my thinking more about running an organization.
I will add that starting from a good base of effective working culture, then working on culture as a theme will yield significant benefit.
I think the answer isn't just the employment and supporting of people already excelling in the system, it is in changing the distribution of opportunity prior to formal education.
We intend to do this by operating a program within our company, starting with community computer and science lab, promoting to a group work day with interactive collaboration, then eventually fitting a child's interest in a role with a second-seat internship at each employee's desk.
This is all early stage of process, but 20 years of thinking and experimentation. If I'm able to build my current venture out, my next will be promoting these early programs to help expand young people's thinking (and hopefully help them make themselves their own role model) about science and technology.
I am almost 40. I have been in the IT world actively since 1984 here in Berkeley/San Francisco/Silicon Valley. I have worked in big corporate, nationally and internationally.
I have worked with fewer than 10 black men and women in a technical role in my entire career; spanning hundreds of teams and nearly a hundred customers and employers.
It matters because opportunity and outcomes aren't equal. The problem isn't purely the IT scene, but one of the greatest challenges the United States faces.
Awesome point, Bundini. Not all entrepreneurs need to be leaders, but "The One" in every venture needs to be able to influence others to believe. Cultivating people skills, understanding basics of business communication that Dale Carnegie published nearly 80 years ago.
Charisma, people skills, energy, good-vibe - call it what you will, but if you can engage people in a trusting and real dialog they WILL believe in you and follow you into fire.
Obviously my comment was misunderstood. Given everything the author of the post wrote about, "No" should be his "Yes". "No" is something you'll hear in life many, many times and it doesn't even phase people who are truly motivated.
So "No" in this case is brief language for meaning; "Go build a great product, kick the teeth out of the competition/market and don't fall into a rut."
You need to synchronize your operations and shake out the trust issue.
Set up a mandatory morning and afternoon call at the same time every day. 15 minutes.
Spend the first two minutes of each call recapping your current milestones. If it takes more than 2 minutes you're talking about the wrong stuff. See below.
"Yesterday we expected to get to X." Then reiterate what the team members told you in the last meeting.
Person 1: What are you working on? Need anything? Next step?
Person 2: What are you working on? Need anything? Next step?
Person 3: What are you working on? Need anything? Next step?
Anything taking more than 2 minutes take offline, or stay on the bridge line after the others are gone. If you do this for a few weeks you'll quickly spot who is flaking, working for another company or project on the side, or who really just needed more direction from you.
When people experience trust issues, there's a good reason: either they are insecure, or someone is untrustworthy. I've managed large corporate customers remotely for years, performed complex projects remote. Once you get the process under way you can move to a single morning call.
Do not skip it. Do not reschedule it. Do not miss it. Get in the habit and your team will fall in line. The rest of the issues will sort themselves out.
What did I learn from the decision and actions that led to me being fired?
Weigh your politics and actions very carefully in the work place, especially when climbing management. Just because you are absolutely, factually, empirically correct, won't mean you'll win a struggle or a single person will even support you.
Sorry for my slow response; how does the process handle scaling above 1kb? Traditionally there's a predictable curve of expected performance as the scale of request size increases.
Happy to take this conversation private; spent the last 10 years in performance and scalability as a indie consultant for Fortune companies. I know a lot of people looking for replacement mechanisms for high volume, variable sized transaction enterprise buses.
Also interested to understand the data access methods you've tested and what works best with your code. eengstrom >at< gmail.
It may be archaic, but I'm in the same boat with you. If China lined the great wall with dry-erase, provided coffee and a few director chairs, I'd relocate and use the entire space - and a lot of markers... Online I use scriblink.com.
My original idea for this venture started over a dinner. My mind had been churning on related business challenges for a couple of years. I was not only focused on highly visible opportunities, I was looking for the right time and right problem to solve. For me, this meant, how can I help my customers make a great deal more money?
I pulled a sheet of paper out of the printer, scribbled down 12-13 ideas, drew some logical relationships, circled groups, labeled the ideas and then spent about 2 months refining and testing the ideas through discussion and research.
At this point we're narrowed down to about 8% of the scope of the original concept, but that 8% is viable, has customer traction (already) and looks likely to earn 1.5-2mm per customer per year.
We expect to spend another week on the pitching to initial customers and try and get closure with our first enterprise customer in the next two weeks. How long it will take to reach the right funding, we don't know. It's enterprise software and we want to grow.
What's different here is that we haven't coded anything. We won't until we have directed feedback from our pilot customers. Oh yeah, and funding. :)
From my first sentence: serious mistake with a ceramic high-output cook top
We did not go with the induction, I should have run gas. I did, however, test pretty extensively with induction. Even in the $6,000 range I wasn't pleased with the results in testing.
Have you had a chance to measure operational throughput vs hardware utilization yet? I'd be very interested in loose metrics and stats instead of a general "faster than" statement.
I've been focusing specifically in performance and scalability for the last decade. The vast majority of problems that expose themselves under load or many-request scenarios are blatantly obvious in a profiler or tracing data access patterns. I recommend you start there, better use of time.
I don't hire strictly based on paper and education (being a high-school dropout type) but for many bright people, that is their best entry into CS and engineering. We'll have to work with PSU to increase the breadth and depth of their students - the really good news, no disagreement from them!