I can already hear management’s response: “80 hours? Those are rookie numbers.”
Be sure to read the article, which includes this gem:
The survey recommended maximum 80-hour work weeks with no work on Saturday or after 9pm on Friday.
Category: Work
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New year, new office
I’m a remote employee at Auth0, and as such, I fell under their home office expense and reimbursement policy. It was the perfect opportunity to upgrade to a standing desk and ergonomic chair, which I bought as a package from Autonomous during their Black Friday sale.
The desk and chair were delivered in early December, but I decided to wait until the holidays to put them together as part of my project to turn our guest room into my office (which can still double as a guest room when the need arises).
My only complaint about the Autonomous MyoChair is that it comes with bog-standard plastic office chair casters, which would turn the lovely hardwood floor into a scratched-up mess. Luckily, we live in an age of wonders, which includes these wheels and the ability to have them shipped to me in very short order:
I’ve enjoyed a chair with Office Oasis rollerblade wheels before, and they’re worth the little bit extra. They won’t ruin hardwood or laminate floors or leave black scuff marks like some rubber wheels do. They glide over floor or carpet, and they look pretty sharp. They’re so good, they almost make rollerblading seem cool.
Next task: Find something to put up on those walls.
I’ve been doing interviews with a number of companies in the quest for my next gig, and since we’re still in a pandemic, they’ve all been online. I’ve done enough of them to get to the point where I’ve figured a system and setup that works well for me. The photo above shows me, just after this afternoon’s interview, complete with handy annotations.
Here’s a quick run-down of the setup:
- Primary laptop: The “Star Trek” screen, a.k.a. the one that the video chat lives on. It’s hooked up to two other monitors, where:
- One is open to a Google doc containing questions that I want to ask.
- The other is open to a Google doc of the research notes I wrote about the company interviewing me, their tech, their developer site, and their API. I actually found some typos in the docs and a bug in their sample code, and let them know about it.
- Secondary laptop: This one displays notes about my experience, and the particular story that I want to tell to this prospective employer. In case you’re wondering, my current answer to “Tell me about yourself” is something along the lines of “I’m equal parts Tony Stark, Alton Brown, and Weird Al.”
- Backup laptop: In case some technical issue with the videochat arises on the primary laptop, I switch to the backup laptop. I could switch to the secondary laptop for the video chat, but using that means that I lose a key screen of notes, and I don’t want to throw off my carefully orchestrated set of information that I can get at a glance.
- Jupyter Notebook loaded on all laptops: If I have to demonstrate working code, Jupyter Notebooks let me do it easily, and with Markdown annotations, too!
- Funky shirt and “Zoom mullet”: Gotta look good.
- Podcasting microphone: And sound good, too. I have a “radio voice” — might as well let ’em hear it.
- Not in the photo, but within arm’s reach:
- A whiteboard (and dry-erase markers in many colors), because sometimes it helps to draw a picture, and
- the accordion. I have a rep to maintain.
I’ll let you know what happened as soon as I find out.
If you’re in the Toronto area and looking for a gathering of interesting people in the areas of SEO, social media marketing and selling stuff online, you should come down to Archeo restaurant in the Distillery District and catch the Search and Social Rank Symposium tomorrow night (Monday, January 23rd).
The organizers bill it as an evening where I and a number of other speakers will “showcase weird science at the intersection of search engine optimization (SEO) and social media marketing”. Here’s a list of the presentations and presenters:
Leverage the Strength of Shopify to Build Your Dream Store, presented by Yours Truly, Joey deVilla, Shopify
As the self proclaimed “Tech Evangelist” Joey deVilla’s offers his quirky technical genius through the new e-commerce platform Shopify. Shopify allows online businesses to create and design easy to use digital shop fronts. This widely popular platform is host to over 16,000 retailers, including Angry Birds, Tata, Pixar and Amnesty International. The Queens educated Joey deVilla splits his time as master of Shopify by also writing his immensely popular blog Global Nerdy. If these ventures weren’t enough for this fast-paced techno-king he also frequently rocks out onstage as the “Accordion Guy”.
Harness the power of the social coupon, presented by Geoff Whitlock, Direct Response Media Group and Click Clip Deals
Geoff Whitlock is one of the top frontrunners in the interactive media industry. With over 10 years experience he has helmed many different ventures, including President and Lead Digital Strategist for Lifecapture Interactive in Toronto, Research in Motion’s new position of Director of Social Media, and finally striking out on his own to create Direct Response Media Group (DRMG). As well as leading the industry in social media marketing, he is the co-founder of Click Clip Deals. Click Clip Deals is the number one online coupon trading site, which has been adapted to become one of the most popular Blackberry and Apple Apps.
Optimizing the P3 Presentation for SEO, presented by Craig Backman, McLellan Group
Craig brings a unique juxtaposition of left and right brain business thinking to his work. He holds a Chemical Engineering degree from the University of Waterloo and an MBA in Marketing and Entrepreneurial Studies from York’s Schulich School of Business. He spent 14 years at marketing giant Procter & Gamble where he delivered breakout results in Product Development, Advertising and Sales.
Don’t Talk to Strangers: The Art of Smothering Your Brand to Death, presented by Benjamin Allison, Jib Strategic Inc.
Benjamin Allison is a graduate of OCAD University. He has worked in the advertising and design field for more than 12 years. He has been with jib strategic since 2004. He has worked on campaigns for clients such as Apple, Coca Cola, and Honda. Ben is an accomplished musician / composer and brings a unique perspective to his work.
How planting, tending and growing fields of content makes clients rich, presented by Rob Campbell, Lenzr
Rob Campbell, the artist formerly known as Smojoe, is a relevance producer that handcrafts business stories to show up in search engines. He now manages a clever marketing company called Lenzr Corp that manufactures a natural ‘social relevance’ for clients using a mixture of proprietary tools that both collect and distribute user submitted content. People listen when he talks process because he’s one of the few speakers who will actually get specific with the science and teach empiric knowledge alongside anecdotal accounts of past failures and successes.
TBA, presented by Alex Blom, SalesChoice
Alex Blom is currently the CEO & Co-Founder of SalesChoice, a sales pipeline management and automation tool. Prior, he was the CTO & a Partner of Helix Commerce, where he lead large technology / web initiatives for public, global companies. Prior, he was an organizational troubleshooter and created / exited several web startups.
Want to know more about this event? Check out Rob Campbell’s blog entry.
Where and When
- The date: Monday, January 23rd, 2012
- The place: Archeo restaurant in the Distillery District (55 Mill Street, Toronto)
- Doors open / social / food: 6:00 p.m.. Sandwiches and a glass of beer or wine are included with admissions.
- Presentations start: 7:00 p.m..
- Wifi: will be available at the event
- Admission: $25 + HST, available either online or at the door.
“Sure, it’s unethical, but it’s just a business,” says Jordan Kavoosi, who runs Essay Writing Company, one of those places where students who don’t want to write essays or term papers can have someone else do it form them. "I mean, what about strip clubs or porn shops? Those are unethical, and city-approved."
Plagiarism, Inc. is an article about Kavoosi and his company located in the Apple Valley suburb of Minneapolis/St. Paul. It’s an amusing read, what with Kavoosi’s somewhat sleazy line of work, the even more sleazy way he treats his employees and the generally sleazy way in which comes across in the article.
Here are the answers to the question “Why use an essay writing company?”, which appears on Essay Writing Company’s site:
- Essay writing can be very time consuming. The research that goes into it can be a bit overwhelming. The complexity of your assigned research paper may even discourage you from completing it. This is where Essaywritingcompany.com can help.. We can save you a lot of time and effort by taking on the task of creating a professionally written custom essay for you.
- No matter how complex the writing assignment or a close due date, our teams of academic writing specialists are highly qualified and capable of providing you with a research paper that will make the grade.
- Notice the difference between a normal essay and a professionally written essay.
- Let our academic specialists provide you with a custom essay that will get you the grade you need. This will allow you the chance to continue with your life and spend more time with your friends..
- Our professional essay writing company will do all the research that is needed for your assignment.
The real answer is much simpler and needs only one bullet point: “Because you’re unethical and lazy.”
The best antidote for a day full of meetings in boardrooms in a suburban office park is to finish it in different surroundings. So when my last meeting on Friday ended with a couple of hours of business day to spare, I made a beeline for one of my favourite “field offices” – Cafe Novo, located across the street from High Park, and a very short walk from home.
The photo above was the view from my “workstation” at 4 p.m. on Friday: the bar facing the roll-up front wall which in turn faces the park. Pictured are the tools of my trade – my trusty Dell Latitude XT2 tablet with the memory maxed out at 5 GB and the so-last-century mechanical hard drive replaced with a solid state one, my favourite portable mouse and an iced mocha.
Working in settings like this is one of the perks of the job.
Me and Ballmer at the Microsoft Town Hall in Toronto, October 2009.
Since he’s DHH, he doesn’t have to – he’s a principal at the development firm 37signals, whose web apps I like to cite as examples to follow, and the creator of the web framework Ruby on Rails. Unfortunately, most of us aren’t DHH: we can’t all be brilliant game-changing programmers who are also photogenic enough to have the option of becoming a male model when this computer fad blows over. When a Sith Lord from Microsoft comes a-calling with a job offer, we don’t automatically turn it down; we have to mull it over.
I’ve been working for Ballmer (quite indirectly: I’m a fair number of degrees of separation below him on the org chart) for the past twenty months. I can say with complete certainty that out of all the jobs I’ve held – from the job right out of school building multimedia CD-ROMs in Director to working with Cory Doctorow in his dot-com’s evangelism office in San Francisco at the height of The Bubble to various coding jobs from my own consulting shop to Toronto’s worst-run startup to that very brief stint as a go-go dancer at a nightclub – my current gig as Developer Evangelist for The Empire has been my all-time favourite of the bunch. I get to do two things I absolutely love – working with technology and schmoozing with people – and with a fair bit of autonomy: in the setting of my choice, with a set of priorities that I negotiate. I also get to work with some of the brightest and most passionate people I’ve ever met, both inside and outside the company, and it doesn’t hurt that the pay’s quite nice (although, as Dan ink will tell you, money isn’t the primary motivator in this line of work).
Playing accordion onstage at RailsConf 2007.
Until 2008, I’d worked mostly for small companies, many of whom you could fit into a minivan. I might not have considered working for Microsoft, or any large corporation for that matter, had it not been for a little moment that I internally refer to as “The Abercrombie Epiphany”. And oddly enough, it happened at RailsConf 2007, a conference devoted to DHH’s creation Ruby on Rails, where I played an ode to DHH onstage with Chad Fowler at the start of the evening keynote (that’s what’s pictured above, and there’s even a video of the song).
The second day’s opening keynote was about Ruby, Rails and the enterprise, and the crowd was not impressed. A good chunk of the IRC backchannel chatter was devoted to saying “enough with the enterprise already…who cares?” I distinctly remember someone referring to one of the presenters as “trying to be the Rachael Ray of enterprise computing”. The guy leaning against the wall behind me (I’d arrived late, having taken part in the previous night’s bacchanalia) in an Abercrombie & Fitch T-shirt started putting on a hoodie with the letters “A & F” on it and packing up his laptop. “Who uses this stuff, anyway?” he said to me as he picked up his Starbucks cup and walked towards the door. “I’m going back to the Marriott.”
It was probably the fact that he was wearing all that Abercrombie & Fitch – the company vaguely annoys me – that got me thinking about his question, “who uses this stuff anyway?” It turns out he did: he’d flown to Portland, stayed at a chain hotel, used a laptop and conference wifi, drank coffee from the shop with a branch in every mall and seemingly on every corner and bought clothes from a century-old retailer – and the cycles that enabled all that didn’t run two-week-marathon-written code living on 10-dollar hosting, but invisibly and everywhere on systems he didn’t think anyone used.
I wouldn’t give the incident any thought until just over a year later.
Packing up my stuff after getting laid off from b5media, September 2008.
What got me thinking about that little Abercrombie & Fitch experience was my getting laid off from b5media during the econopocalypse of summer 2008. I’d been interviewing with a number of companies, all of them small, and blogging the experience as a means of amplifying my job search efforts.
While working on a blog entry, I got an IM from Adam Carter, a tech evangelist at Microsoft. It went exactly like this:
Ever thought about working for The Empire?
(Yes, he referred to Microsoft as “The Empire”.)
Every culture has certain tendencies, and the “I build on Mac OS and deploy to Linux” culture of which I was part led me to instinctively dismiss the idea at first blush. Ridiculous, I thought, and besides, why would they hire me? I haven’t coded any .NET since those trivia games for MAXIM in 2002.
(Yes, I really did that, in an office across the street from the downtown Toronto Hooters. It was like working inside a beer commercial.)
But when my friends John Bristowe (who I’d have voted “most likely to work for Microsoft”) and David Crow (who I’d have voted “most likely to take a dump on Microsoft’s front door”) were making suggestions within the company that they hire me, I had to give Adam’s out-of-the-blue IM a little more thought. And in that thinking, I was reminded of the Abercrombie incident.
Many people would (and did) see working at Microsoft as “the safe move”, but to a guy from the culture of DHH, who’s always worked in all small companies and one medium-sized one and hadn’t used their development tools in over six years, it’s the scary one. When word got around that I was interviewing at Microsoft, I heard a small chorus of voices – one of them that nagging voice of doubt – saying the same thing: “You couldn’t pay me to work for Ballmer”.
But I took the job, anyway. It offered the most challenges, the greatest learning opportunities, a journey to places well outside my comfort zone, and I hadn’t done anything like it before. It was a window into a world I’d only seen from the outside, toward which I’d only made snarky comments from the peanut gallery. It offered me the lever that Archimedes talked about – one big enough to move the world – and a chance to see this computing the Abercrombie guy thought no one used.
(It even gave me the perfect excuse to pull out the Jean Cocteau quote at parties, when explaining my change in career direction: “Since it’s now fashionable to laugh at the conservative French Academy, I have remained a rebel by joining it.")
Yesterday’s work enviroment – my setup at HacklabTO.
What is working for Ballmer like? I can’t speak for all of Microsoft’s 90,000 employees, but this Developer Evangelist job is pretty sweet. I’m classified as a mobile worker, which means no cubicle – I’m either working out of the home office, a select bunch of work-friendly cafes, or quite often at HacklabTO, the “hackerspace” in Toronto’s colourful Kensington Market where I’m a member with 24/7 access. Every day’s work environment is different (the picture above shows yesterday’s, at the Hacklab), and this constant flux keeps me going.
I get to noodle with all sorts of interesting tech, from dev tools to cloud computing to game consoles to phones, and I have a hardware guy stocking me with the latest gear. I get to shape the content of a cross-Canada conference that thousands of professional developers across Canada, whose work makes your money move, your electricity flow and your favourite retail stores stay stocked. I get to participate in all sorts of fun stuff, from holding a pre-conference in a train car to having a little fun with Richard Stallman. I get to inspire students as they start their search for jobs in a shaky economy. I get to concentrate in the web, mobile, and open source — fields where the company’s traditional strengths aren’t.
Simply put, I get my shot at changing the world. That’s what DHH is also trying to do – he’s just working it from a different angle. If you want to do that as well, I’m sure you’ll find your own angle, whether it’s homesteading in your own indie software company working out of a cafe to doing it as a part of a Fortune 500 company. DHH is DHH, and you are you, and while he could never work for Ballmer, you might like it like I do, and that’s okay. After all, that’s why the saying goes “Do not follow in the footsteps of the masters; seek what they sought instead.”