Steve Freeman

My reading of this article is that it says that people in charge should concentrate on the people and on setting policy at their level because they’re unlikely to be open to lower-level issues.

“There are good components to power’s effects on a person, in that it helps lead people to action, but sometimes these actions […]

Some problems are so complex that you have to be highly intelligent and well informed just to be undecided about them — Laurence J. Peter

via Glen Alleman

Steve (not me) had a boss who taught him the true art of hall walking:

A great story about illustrating Brook’s Law

via Stefan Tilkov

For the last month or so, I’ve been teaching rather than working on a development team. I’m glad I did it, and now I’m glad that at least the lectures are over.

One surprise, though, was how nice it was to have control over my time again. I put in a lot of hours to […]

Bill Caputo (hi Bil!) has been readiing Jared Diamond’s Collapse. It’s possibly one of the most depressing books I’ve read. Bill writes about how societies cling to established practices, even when they’re disastrous in the current situation.

There is another lesson from the book. There are a couple of examples where societies, for whatever motivation, have […]

The Long Tail of IT Consulting says it’s time to use the internet to cut the travel and high overhead from IT consulting, which means smaller clients can afford to hire you.

via. The Long Tail

via. Hendrick Lorenz on del.icio.us

via JParsec on del.icio.us

Jason rants about the latest news from our National Health Service’s computerisation project. There’s an excellent analysis from Michael Cross in Prospect A wearying catalogue of all the things we already know are wrong with Big Software. I wonder how much money we’ll have to waste before anything changes.

Perhaps the worst aspect of this affair […]

I’m at the AYE with a number of friends and colleagues, such as Duncan Pierce, Alan Francis, and J. B. Rainsberger.

The first session I went to was about how introverts and extroverts interact (badly) and how to mitigate that; of course, the IT industry is heavily biased towards introversion. It turns out that introverts and […]