Stealth Job Site NotchUp Makes Companies Pay To Interview You. that’s right, pay you to interview with them. google and facebook are on the private beta.

Home-Office Life and Its Discontents - New York Times. i’ve heard some people here in seattle say those communal offices can be really hit or miss.

Declutter Your Desk. organize all your gadgets and wires under your desk.

Let My People Go Surfing. an excerpt from a new management book by Yvon Chouinard, founder of Patagonia and a personal hero of mine.

uTest Gets $1.7M for Crowd-Sourced Quality Assurance. Looks like an interesting product as full-time QA staff isn’t viable for a lot of small/medium-size companies.

Tracing Business Acumen to Dyslexia - New York Times “The study also concluded that dyslexics were more likely than nondyslexics to delegate authority, to excel in oral communication and problem solving and were twice as likely to own two or more businesses.”

going postal

As of today, December 3rd 2007, postage for a standard envelope to Canada from the United States via the US Postal Service is 69 cents. Non standard envelope shapes (such as a square envelope) is 86 cents. I am writing this on a blog as a reminder to myself. Why? Well, I can never remember the price and figuring it out from the USPS website is horribly confusing. This always leads to me waiting in line at the post office to get the correct postage instead of buying stamps at a machine or a store. Now, in the future, I’ll just go to a machine.

But why is waiting in line at the post office such a big problem (especially since I only really have to do it around 4 times a year)? Well, it’s because US Post Offices are probably the most soul-sucking work (or retail) environment I’ve ever been in. It does not surprise me in the least that Postal workers are synonymous with killing in the work place. If my office had the air quality of a damp locker room, the dim and oddly off-green glow of crappy fluorescent lights, gave you the same eerie feel of an indian burial ground, and faintly played some terrible easy listening radio station all day long I would (A) work at the post office and (B) easily be on my way to going postal.

Paul Kedrosky: Facebook Really is That Company. as in the greatest place to work where you’ll regret it if you didn’t go there.

An Entirely Other Day - Wide vs. Deep. on going from a programmer to a manager.

10 illegal job interview questions | TechRepublic.com. to date, no one has asked me if i plan on getting pregnant.

The Institutional Yes: The Harvard Business Review Interview with Jeff Bezos. mostly talks about amazon’s customer-centric culture.

When 4-person startup RedSwoosh got in a rut the other year they all went to Thailand for 6 weeks. and got a shit ton of work done. the company got bought out this year by Akamai.

Swearing at work boosts team spirt, morale: Yahoo! News. fucking awesome.

The Pmarca Guide to Career Planning, part 1: Opportunity. i’d call that sound advice.

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas released a new book where he is critical of Anita Hill. Hill wrote an op-ed in the New York Times that pretty much handed him his ass.

Joel Splosky on how side projects can take on a life of their own and how that isn’t always a bad thing.

if it ain’t broken, break it.
- me, describing my office

Slashdot | “Microsoft will be opening a new software development center in Vancouver because of difficulties getting workers into the US.”. haha, the US gov has fucked up immigration so badly that even the richest company in the world can’t get around it. via boris.

Kill the Meeting: Process as a Substitute for Competence “With enough steps, documents, design reviews, and test plans, I think that the proverbial 1,000 monkeys with typewriters really could produce a functional IT system”. via paul.

craigslist info

Came across this post about craigslist which points out some interesting facts.

  1. Craig Newark: “Everything on the site is based on user feedback. Frankly, I have no vision whatsoever.”
  2. The site is serving up seven billion pageviews a month from 200 servers
  3. All 24 employees work at a Victorian house in San Francisco
  4. The company has never had a tech quit in 12 years
  5. Craigslist never holds meetings