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I read a couple of excellent posts by Tina on Make Profound and Lasting Change & How to Find Passion in Your Job. It is a summary of Prof. Srikumar Rao’s Leading@Google talk. You read it & watch the video, if any of the points below is true about yourself. If none is true, you many not like them.

You are looking for an Ideal Job always: Assuming that our ideal job is out there somewhere, and we have to go out and find it. We tell ourselves that our lives will be great, just as soon as we find it. Chances are, that job probably doesn’t exist. Assuming that it did exist and we were put into that situation, within a few months, we will probably be back in the same state we are now. Unsatisfied.

You are being Judgemental about everything in the world: The question is not to ask whether something is true or false, right or wrong, good or bad. The question to ask is: Does this work for me better for my life than what I am presently using? If the answer is yes, use it. If not, don’t waste your time and energy judging it, because it may be useful to you at a later time.

Self Pity: We tell ourselves, “Oh, poor me. Poor me. How unfair this situation is.” We start to view our lives as if everything existed as to make things more difficult for us. We focus entirely on how the world affects us.

Thank you Tina for the nice summary & helping me find the Google Talk.

Five considerations for Large Scale Systems

If you are an Architect or an Aspiring Architect, Go read this a 100 times. A diamond of an article.

http://www.pluralsight.com/wiki/default.aspx/Craig/FiveConsiderationsForLargeScaleSystems.html

I really liked the way Scalability and Availability are explained for Middle Tier & Data Tier.

Peopleware – Interim notes

I am reading ‘Peopleware – Productive Projects and Teams, Second Edition by Tom DeMarco & Timothy Lister’. It is an enjoyable read. I will post the complete notes within a couple of days, once I finish the book. But I couldn’t resist posting a few notes / quotes or whatever you call it. It is an exciting read and I heartily recommend it for anyone who has worked in teams for a couple of years.

“…Workaholics – Workaholics eventually realize they have sacrificed a more important value (family, love, home, youth) for a less important value (work). Managers who exploit their workaholic employees eventually lose them. The key is to get ‘meaningful productivity…’ .

“…There ain’t No Such Thing as Overtime – There will usually be an hour of ‘undertime’ for every hour of overtime. There may be short term advantages but certainly no long term ones. Nobody can really sustain the intensity required for creative work more than 40 hours a week. Overtime is life sprinting, you have to slow down to catch your breath later, it doesn’t make sense in a marathon. The best workers just ignore managers who often request that they sprint…”

“….Reprise – People under time pressure don’t work better; they just work faster. In order to work faster, they may have to sacrifice the quality of the product and their own job satisfaction…”

“…Visual supervision is a joke for development workers. Visual Supervision is for prisoners…”

“… Parkinson’s Law almost certainly doesn’t apply to your people…”, “… Treating your workers as Parkinsonian doesn’t help. It can only demean and demotivate them…”

“… The structure of a team is a network, not a hierarchy. For all the deference paid to the concept of leadership (a cult word in our industry), it just doesn’t have much place here…”