Entries tagged 'bi'

greg knauss wrote “wide vs. deep” to explain why he is not happy being management, and what he thinks the difference is between people well-suited to management and those that are not.

i don’t know if i agree with his explanation, but i think it is very important for organizations to realize that there cannot be only one career path that leads up through management. to mysql’s credit, the recent work that was done to standardize our job titles and the path up the ranks acknowledges this, and there is a non-management path for developers. i don’t think we are quite where we need to be in terms of divorcing technical leadership from resource management, but we are getting there.

and mysql is hiring for all sorts of positions.

khoi vinh’s piece on the poor user-interface design of enterprise software was my latest forward to the business-intelligence list. this is something that has bothered me about vertical-market software for a long time, and i have mentioned it in passing before.

i think it stems from a certain combination of ignorance and laziness. i say “ignorance” because vertical-market software often comes from the hands of domain experts who just sort of cobble something together because they don’t really know better. the “laziness” comes in when they don’t recognize that they have really transitioned to being in the software business, and they don’t learn that business, and the vertical market they are addressing is just so happy to have something that they don’t demand something that software experts might develop.

and there’s the ongoing curse of upgrade-itis. from this ask metafilter discussion about final draft, the leading screenwriting software, you can read how it is getting more overburdened with features that fewer people use. that will likely be ongoing until some new piece of screenwriting software (scrivener?) hits a sweet spot of features that satisfies enough people that it will become the top dog, and then eventually get bloated with features in the ongoing quest for upgrade revenue.

the person who figures out how to get people to buy software upgrades that simply get rid of features that turned out to be not very useful will deserve some sort of nobel prize.