bradb3030's comments

Your description reminded me of a book: The Great Game of Business - Jack Stack

It describes employee-owned companies and frames the type of spinoff you described as a positive investment, mutually beneficial, to re-leverage debt and provide growth for leaders that are blocked.

Obviously I don't know the situation and the mindset of leadership, but I wouldn't ridicule what you suggested as stealing their IP. They're getting a % ownership in a company in hopes of it becoming a valuable asset -they'd be making a choice.

The best I can recommend for managers: https://roadmap.manager-tools.com/product/basics/1

Not sure you're into podcasts, but I recommend Manager Tools Podcasts, which is like a 15-year gold mine of free training. https://www.manager-tools.com/all-podcasts

Outside of searching the keywords "interview" and "hiring" and looking for what seems relevant, I'd recommend specifically the 4 "Management Trinity" episodes and "Juggling Koan".

source: 5-year manager at a public SaaS company in the Midwest, recently discovered the podcast.

There's a book "Zone to Win" by Geoffrey A. Moore that describes these various transitions for Microsoft and it suggests that it's intentional to transition one business unit at a time.

It reminds me of hint.fm/wind

I was reminded of http://strategy-madlibs.herokuapp.com/ that is mentioned in this great talk by Simon Wardley. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fYH-vLWHhyY

It sounds good, but isn't good. I think the answer in response to it is to have ammo that both sounds good and is useful, and it'll win out to the smart people.

Or a realistic interpretation of what was intended by having content after "starts at $12 hour" would be that they demonstrated they could both do the work and demonstrate customer service skills, and began earning more like $25/hour to get to that "up to 70k/year" more easily.

Home loan which re-amortizes to the full term every month so when you pay ahead on it, the amount lowers over time. Snowball your home loan, easily marketable.

Tivo for streaming video on a PC so you can locally store/rewind/replay things you've watched recently, locally.

10-Q filed today says 23.3% decrease in revenue. https://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/viewer?action=view&cik=000105809... Interesting that Foursquare can be a leading indicator, 15 days before the filing.

My Dad always said the turn on the road here was because of that. https://www.google.com/maps/@47.1818501,-110.1911451,14z

Really fun, nice game!

4/6 easy, 19.1s 47/77 medium, 16.2s 19/25 hard, 17.8s

I started scribbling numbers on paper without looking down when I got to the hard ones, which helped...but I still think the hard ones were slightly easier than medium ones.

Good question design: forcing you to look ahead simplify things like 69 * 2 - 5 / 7 ...

realizing that 69 is one smaller away from being evenly divisible by 7, when doubled is 2 smaller, minus 5 makes it 7 smaller so the divided by 7 can apply to the thing it's close to...140 as well as the 7 smaller..140/7 minus 1...19

Common core on steroids?

Good post. I don't understand why they focused on share price. Companies routinely do reverse share splits pre-IPO to make the total number of shares what they need to be for the valuation divided by shares to equal $12-18. That point seems to be just a magical desired range for SaaS IPO's. Someone smarter than I may know the reason, but I think they could have hit nearly any share price they wanted to.

I don't know if the timing applies here, but if you starting notification on Friday night...be patient and wait for a business day.

I'll share my coaching criteria as a manager:

an acceptable Junior Software Engineer... uses tools to make properly formatted code

produces readable code, mostly self-documenting

becomes a 'goto person' on code after spending 2 total weeks in it.

rarely goes 3 days without obvious progress or output to the sprint team

is comfortable making estimates about new work

is comfortable re-using existing patterns for new work, even in unfamiliar code

can explain the 'why' of processes and rules, and be able to see situations where they may not apply

understands agile development and participates effectively

----------------

a Senior Software Engineer... is also a Software Engineer with everything that comes with it

is a team representative of code, projects, and end-users

has a running list of 5 things the team or the team's code is weak in, and could be doing better

considers edge cases well, writes bulletproof code

understands integration points with other teams and projects

reliably resolves tickets in team's estimated timeframe.

does code reviews and design reviews that are kind and instructive

is able to refactor code to improve maintainability without being too aggressive and causing additional problems

is able to help any other dev with problems in any of the team's code

is capable of teaching a new employee about all of the team's code, projects, and end-users

brings innovative ideas back to the team from reading, experimentation, and conversations in addition to normal work

is a student of agile development and can effectively coach and mentor others in agile development

maintains good relationships among cross-functional team members

can boldly estimate very low or very high for new work, keen prediction for the very easy and very hard

can sense CPU, memory, and computation time problems in code invents new patterns and solutions rather than always using existing patterns

sees the give and take in processes and rules, uses them as a tool for guidance not to be followed rigidly 100% if not best for the company

understands feelings and history about codebases and projects, not just the immediately apparent facts

is not just extremely knowledgeable, but also with passion and proper application and improvisation of concepts