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Coronavirus and Work

Currently the big news issue is all about how to respond to Coronavirus. The summary of the medical situation is that it’s going to spread exponentially (as diseases do) and that it has a period of up to 6 days of someone being infectious without having symptoms. So you can get a lot of infected […]

Self Assessment

Background Knowledge

The Dunning Kruger Effect [1] is something everyone should read about. It’s the effect where people who are bad at something rate themselves higher than they deserve because their inability to notice their own mistakes prevents improvement, while people who are good at something rate themselves lower than they deserve because noticing all […]

Work Stuff

Does anyone know of a Linux support company that provides 24*7 support to Ruby and PHP applications? I have a client that is looking for such a company.

Also I’m looking for more consulting work. If anyone knows of an organisation that needs some SE Linux consulting, or support for any of the FOSS software […]

Preferring Not To

I’ve just read Bartleby the Scrivener which is a short story about a scrivener who refused to work saying “I’d prefer not to”.

It reminded me of some situations in the computer industry. I’ve never seen a single case where someone preferred not to work when everyone around them (colleagues and management) wanted them to […]

Phone Calls and Other Distractions

Harald Welte has written about the distraction of phone calls and how it impacts engineering work [1]. He asks why people feel that they are entitled to interrupt him given the cost to his work.

Some years ago while working as a programmer I was discussing such things with a colleague who worked for the […]

Recruiting at a LUG Meeting

I’m at the main meeting of Linux Users of Victoria (my local LUG). A couple of recruiting agents from Interpro [1] are here and have been working the crowd, one of them is on each side of the room and it seems that their plan is to speak to every person at the meeting and […]

Security and Hiring

The main sources of information used when hiring someone are their CV, the interview, and references.

CV

The CV is written by the applicant or sometimes for the applicant. Naturally it says only good things, if a CV notes no skill in a particular area then it may be used to exclude an employee from […]

Ownership of Laptops for Work

Jetstar has announced some new changes to the way they manage their IT infrastructure [1]. Some parts of it are obvious things that people have been doing (or wanting to do) for a long time – such as using thin clients with no moving parts (not even cooling fans).

But the really interesting part is […]

Increasing Productivity through Clean Air

Kamal Meattle gave an interesting TED talk about using plants to produce enough oxygen to support people in sealed buildings [1]. The combination he advocates is Areca Palm for the living-room (four shoulder-high plants per person), Mother-in-law’s Tongue for the bedroom to produce oxygen at night (six to eight waist-high plants per person), and Money […]

A “Well Rounded” CV

When discussing career advice one idea that occasionally comes up is that someone should be “well rounded” and should demonstrate this by listing skills that are entirely unrelated to the job in question. Something along the lines of “I’m applying for your C programmer position, and I like spending my spare time playing tennis and […]