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| Volume 8, Issue 8 |
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In This Issue:
 Tips for managing, motivating developers
Coaching styles for Millennials
How to safely use Facebook and LinkedIn at work
What 'The Simpsons' teaches about innovation
 Make your company Gen Y-friendly
This old laptop: Revitalizing an aging notebook on the cheap
Five things you should never tell your boss
 Four hard-to-find fixes for common Windows annoyances
 Power-sipping Flash memory
 The origins of high-tech's made-up lingo
 Getting the raise you deserve
 8 ways to get buy-in from company executives
 Best of the worst: Applicants learn new ways to self-destruct
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Tips for managing, motivating developers
Encouraging productivity from your programming staff--at least in the developers' estimation--requires a few special techniques.
In many ways, managing a developer is just like managing any other employee. Developers want managers who'll help them solve business and technical problems, who'll protect them from unnecessary office politics and who will help them meet their
personal career goals. But programmers are...different. Like musicians, these creative folks can alternate between big-picture thinking and persnickety detail in a heartbeat. They can be sidetracked by silly toys, and convinced to work overtime by
the promise of pizza and a T-shirt. Trying to understand and motivate these people can drive managers—particularly nontechnical managers—to distraction. This is not, of
course, a new challenge. Managers have been trying to inspire programmers since mainframe days, and several classic books still have relevance today. [Based on plenty of conversations with developers, however, most managers still haven't learned the proper skills... So, in the expectation that developers know how their managers can motivate them and can manage them most effectively, I asked in several online communities and social networks... I've summarized the responses below; as you'll see, the introspective nature of the question gave some surprising answers...]
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Coaching styles for Millennials
Perks pale in comparison to challenging job responsibilities for Gen Y employees. Learning coaching basics can make the difference between mere compliance and active contribution and problem solving.
Forget any assumption that great pay will result in superior performance. In an April 2007 New York Times article it was revealed that today's MBA students aren't listing compensation as their top job priority. As important as work/life concerns are to
them, that topic isn't even top of the list. What matters most now: "Challenging Responsibilities," weighing in at 64 percent, is a full 16 percent more important than compensation (48 percent) and 19 percent more important than work/life balance (45
percent). And though they all might claim greening the planet as a shared value, all other attributes, such as contribution to society, ethics, travel and collegial interaction, rated no higher than mid-20s. [How can a 20-something with little
experience and lots of opinion possibly be given impactful responsibility without incurring huge risk? You as their manager have the task of making that work in support of their contribution to your objectives. Coaching-based dialogue is a learnable
technique that offers a method for you to tap into this desire to contribute without gambling on outcomes critical to your organization's performance. Consider these differences in management techniques:...]
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How to safely use Facebook and LinkedIn at work
Reap the benefits of social networking while minimizing the risks.
The virtual flood gates have been opened and social networking is rushing in from the personal lives of employees and into the workplace—bringing a host of concerns along with it. Facebook is no longer restricted to the realm of college students, and
LinkedIn is specifically designed for the professional world. While some companies are banning these networks from the workplace outright, others are timidly wading into the fray to use the networks as a communications tool, experts say. While providing
another way to connect with employees, potential recruits, and a wider community, social networks have a downside. Information posted could fall into the wrong hands, and if those with malicious intent collect enough sensitive information about a
company, it could mean big trouble. We talked to experts about how companies and employees can stay safe when using Facebook and LinkedIn. Outright ban vs. moderate use...
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What 'The Simpsons' teaches about innovation
Copyright 2008 Fox Broadcasting Company |
Creating the longest-running primetime animated TV series -- in which it takes nine months to produce an episode -- is more like IT management than you might think.
Probably the only technical qualification to put Joel Cohen, a writer and associate producer of The Simpsons, in front of the keynote crowd at the Red Hat Summit in June was that
Red Hat Enterprise 5 was used to render some of the animation in The Simpsons movie. But Cohen had surprisingly deep—and quite entertaining—advice about innovation and the creative process to offer the conference
attendees. "Also, I'm eye candy," Cohen added. Managing and encouraging creativity is a large part of Cohen's job. There are more than 400 Simpsons episodes to date, and Cohen and his team need to keep the storylines fresh. During his
keynote address, he used Simpsons' video clips to illustrate his points—a far more fun set of examples than one ordinarily sees in conference presentations—and shared tips
that can apply to any business. (Clips of Ralph Wiggum or PowerPoint slides filled with pie charts? We'll take Ralph any day.)...
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Make your company Gen Y-friendly
Facing a potential onslaught of baby boomer retirements and a smaller pool of Generation X employees to replace them, IT managers who want to create or sustain a Best Place to Work environment will need the additional help of another
group of professionals: Generation Y. Also known as Millennials, this group consists of nearly 80 million individuals born roughly between 1979 and 1999. They are the workforce of the future.
But what will it take to attract and keep these individuals? Are Generation Y's ideas about what makes a great employer different from those of other generations? Yes, and no...
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This old laptop: Revitalizing an aging notebook on the cheap
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All it takes is a couple hours and about $125 to breathe new life into an old laptop.
My ThinkPad R50 just hit its fifth birthday, and the years haven't been kind to it. When it was new, the notebook was reliable and fast, and it traveled with me to many places throughout the world. Today, it's slow and prone to annoying shutdowns. Plus,
it has a broken key, its fan sounds like a 747 taking off, and the case looks like it went five rounds with Lenox Lewis. It can all be fixed, but is it a good investment to revamp a notebook that's worth about
$350? It sure is, because I'm going to give this old notebook a new lease on life for about $125 -- a bargain, considering what it would cost to replace. I'll show you how I cleaned it up, replaced its slow and overloaded hard drive, installed extra memory,
replaced the keyboard, and gave it a software tuneup. Not one of these tasks took me more than 15 minutes to do; altogether they took around an hour. While it's all about
reviving my ThinkPad R50, these techniques will work on just about any laptop...
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Five things you should never tell your boss
There are some things your CIO definitely doesn't want to hear.
In the information biz, more isn't necessarily better. Though full disclosure and transparency are buzzwords today, that doesn't mean your boss wants to hear about everything going on in the office. In fact, there are some things your CIO definitely
doesn't want to hear, and if your career is going to thrive, you'd better know what they are. We asked a group of Computerworld's 2008 Premier 100 IT Leaders to talk about the kinds of messages they never want to hear from their staffers. Here's what they said.
1. All about the technology -- and nothing about the business...
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Four hard-to-find fixes for common Windows annoyances
You start typing only to realize 10 seconds later that the focus is on the wrong window. You see a Windows notification pop out of the taskbar only to have it fade away before you can figure out what it means. You get distracted by all of Windows'
pointless animations. You miss seeing keyboard-shortcut hints on menu entries and elsewhere in Windows dialog boxes.
You could spend hours hunting for the settings that will do away with these four Windows annoyances. At least Vista collects them all in the Ease of Access Center. These usability settings are spread far and wide in XP...
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Power-sipping Flash memory
For some datacenter operators out there, insufficient server processing power isn't driving them to adopt more and more servers. Rather, it's the lack of precious server
memory, necessary to deliver results at the lightning speed users have come to expect -- nay, demand -- from search engines, social networking sites, e-commerce sites, and similar Internet-based applications.
A pair of companies, Virident and Spansion, have announced a remedy to the problem: replacing (or, more accurately, supplementing) the traditional DRAM found on servers with a flavor of flash memory called EcoRAM, capable of boosting a single server's
memory beyond today's 32GB limit to a capacity of 512GB -- without increasing the machine's power envelope. EcoRAM comes from...
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The origins of high-tech's made-up lingo
From blog, byte and browser to software, wiki and World Wide Web.
Technology we take for granted today was new not so long ago, and somebody had to name it. Though sometimes it's hard to pin down exactly who deserves credit -- or blame -- here's a shot at some of the more familiar ones...
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Getting the raise you deserve
The average raise for IT staff across the board is a paltry 3 to 4 percent, but that doesn’t have to be your fate if you approach the process intelligently.
“You have to really go above and beyond to merit a higher raise, or at least be in a hot technology area where there is a lot of demand,” said Lily Mok, an analyst at Gartner. Gartner’s 2007 Market Compensation Study found that companies often pay 10 to
15 percent premiums to attract or retain IT professionals with...
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8 ways to get buy-in from company executives
These tips will help you get your IT proposals accepted.
In these times of tightened budgets, it is more difficult than ever to get executive approval for capital expenditures. IT managers must do their homework before they make
presentations to pitch their projects. Use the following tips to help get your proposals the nod from upper management...
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