Slave Labor != Productivity and Output

Scobleizer goes on a partial rant about slackers. His correlations are all out of whack. I’m not even going to link him as I feel he doesn’t need anymore publicity then he already has.

I still strongly agree with the Edwards W. Demming and the “Toyota” crowd. You don’t slave away to get results, you work smarter. If you can’t get your job done in a nice solid 6-8 hr day, then a 8-15 hr day of “busting ass” is NOT going to get the product done faster, better, or in a more solid way. It usually just means there is a better way to get something done sitting around the corner. Sometimes those hours come up, but by all means they should be a rarity and not a commonality at companies.

To paraphrase, if the ground troops can’t do their jobs, the fault lies at the hands of management. Good leaders can get almost any employee to be a great asset, it is all about positioning, and if that can’t be done those same leaders need to know when to pull the welcoming mat out and send em’ packing.

It sounds harsh, but it really isn’t.

RSS Feed Changes

For those of you who read/subscribe to my RSS feed I’ll be making some massive changes soon. When I make those changes I’m mapping all my future RSS feeds through Feedburner. The link is http://feeds.feedburner.com/LooselyCoupledHumanCodeFactory

So if you’re a subscriber or reader of the RSS feed please re-subscribe to that instead of the domain derived RSS feed path.

The reason for these changes will be seen in the near future when I deploy my own custom built blog/forum/widget based website. So stay tuned, it’s gonna be awesome!

Browser Performance, Yeah, IE Still Gets Stomped!

So I decided, after not checking for months, quarters, probably a year or two, where the performance is for some browsers. Here’s what I got.

IE is bloated – no surprise really. Slow tactile response to clicking. Page load fast, faster depending on caching styles and certain “IE” style caching favoritism it seems to have for Microsoft oriented pages – hmmm.

Firefox is doing very well. Sometimes slow but more active response in tactile feeling. Pages load somewhat fast. Some pages load faster than in other browsers, but it seems to be a little fussy about certain AJAX or Javascript intensive apps. Not as troublesome as IE though.

Opera is doing ok. Tactile response is instant on everything. Pages appear to load extremely fast. If it is ECMA compliant javascript, it screams fast.

The websites I loaded are; www.adronbhall.com (Mostly just CSS and a few externally derived bits and formatting – nothing intensive for the browsers), http://www.nextbus.com/predictor/publicMap.shtml?a=portsc (NextBus Streetcar Java app for arrival times), and www.pageflakes.com (nice AJAXy intensive page).

The results; (click on the images to enlarge)

Initial load with all the browser tabs opened in each browser.

All three browsers displaying the tabs I opened.

I opened up four page flakes tabs in each browser.

I picked one of the tabs (the first one) and added each of these page flake widgets.

Now it became this obvious who rocks, and who does not.

Oh Wait, Nevermind, I Understand Why Architect was Stolen!

So I was digging around on www.indeed.com and they have some really cool analytic tools for deducing what the job market and salary info is for a particular industry. Just put in the keywords and boom, awesome results. One of the things that is self evident, is what the architect and pattern software skill sets allow as for default pay grade. I also want to point out though, these numbers are somewhat low (by about 5-10%). They do however show the fact that with those skill sets, the rates go up substantially. Regardless, the graphs and data are really cool, and some interesting analysis of these data points can be performed.