The following information targets in-house corporate design leaders, managers, or operations who have departments for which they have financial accountability. This article does not cover the…
In my experience, most professional software engineers in industry have little to no experience doing competitive analysis. That’s a shame, because competitive analysis is one of the most useful skills that an engineer can have.
It was probably inevitable that sitting through a whole lot of job interviews and considering several offers would mean I would end up spending a disproportionate amount of time these past months thinking about what work means to me. This is a topic I am predisposed to (witness the title of this newsletter), and the activity of applying for jobs pretty much made everything else unthinkable. What I’m sharing today is some very rough thoughts about one corner of the way we talk about w...
Italian psychologist Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini was once asked why people keep making the same mistakes. He said: Inattention, distraction, lack of interest, poor preparation, genuine stupidity, timidity, braggadocio, emotional imbalance, ideological, racial, social or chauvinistic prejudices, and aggressive or prevaricatory instincts. Let me add some more: Incentives can tempt good people to push the boundaries farther than they’d ever imagine. Financial boundaries, moral boundarie...