Today is my last day at Apple

Today is my last day as an Apple employee. I’ve been trying to track down and say “thanks” to as many of the folks I’ve gotten to know over the years as I can, but seeing everyone is simply impossible, so I bet the list’s indulgence for a bit.

As the time arrives for me to start the next leg of this journey, I felt it

necessary to say thank you to some of the people here that made this place so special.

I arrived to a copy of Odyssey and a T-shirt. Now, almost 18 years later, I leave having

spent almost half my life on this planet at Apple. It’s not often you have the chance

to change the world and make it better; Apple is a company that has found a way to do

that many times. To watch it happen, to be part of the process, is a privilege and a joy.

I’m proud of the work that I’ve done over the years to help make Apple the kind of

company that could change the world.

From one round peg to another, all I can say is — thank you. Thank you for the

opportunity to make a difference, and thank you most of all for being part of something

that has made me a much better and stronger person for being a part of it.

My path and Apple’s diverge, but only slightly. Apple will likely not even notice

the loss; I carry with me a love and respect for the company and its purpose, and most

important, I carry with me the memories and the people and the friendships that

made this a special place for me.It’s amazing to look back and realize how few years

separate the MacPlus and the MacPro, from the Newton to the Nano, from

MacDraw to Aperture and iTunes.

Thank you for making this place the kind of place you want to give a damn about, and

be a part of. Be true to your purpose, but more important, be true to yourself. Never

forget that it’s not about the tech or the toys or the geek words, but about the people; the

people both inside Apple and around us.

Maybe we have to be crazy.

How else can we stare at an empty canvas and see a work of art?

Or sit in silence and hear a song that’s never been written?

Think Different.

Please keep in touch!

Chuq Von Rospach

408-221-0797

chuqui@plaidworks.com

(as of 3PM, it will be no longer my fault….)

My thoughts on today’s announcements…

I decided to take in today’s keynote in Caffe Macs, on campus, since today’s the last one I’ll see as part of Apple.

Some keynotes are important, some less so. It seemed, today, that the entire campus was electric leading up to the event. People showed up early, people showed up in large numbers — it was crowded and full of anticipation. Even Apple employees seemed to feel this was something special about to happen.

Then steve arrives, and it goes quiet.

New iPod: nice evolutionary upgrade. Some of the new features are very nice — the gapless encoding especially, but the search functions were a nice tweak. the games — most of them are really retro, but retro is hot, and I’m amused when I see bejeweled hauled out as the prime game again; of course, it’s the ONE game I put on my Treo….

New Nanos. Really nice upgrades all around, especially the $149 price point for the new capacity. and colors. god, do I go for 4gig’s in blue, or 8 in black? choices, choices…

and the new shuffle. I fully expected the shuffle’s to be sent to Buffalo and the style retired; at $149 for the low end Nano, is there still a price point for them?

Well — yes. it’s one to give heartburn to other manufacturers, especially a place like sanDisk. Beyond that, it wasn’t just doubling capacity, it was a complete redo of the exterior. I gotta say, the new, femto-sized device is just, well, cute. Very well done, and at the price, hard to beat for what you get.

iTunes 7: I really like the new looks. been playing with it a bit, and it’s nice.

I’ve found one bug I need to report. I have a smart playlist, named “never played”. It is, (duh), songs who’s play count < 1. I then have a 2nd smart playlist, “nano never played”, which uses a selector of the playlist “never played”, and a selection out of it by random of size N megabytes (where N is adjusted based on what else is on the nano to fill it up). That way, I have a place to get my hands on stuff that’s been in my library so I can go through it. Once I catch up (about 400 songs to go, mostly my swing CDs I encoded), I’l replace it with something based on least-recently played, or smallest play_count.

Anyway, under iTunes 7, this playlist is flagged as being dependent on a missing playlist. the Nano is filled out properly, it’s purely cosmetic, but it surprised me. Evidently because the original is based on a playlist that isn’t copied to the nano (“never played”), itunes is confusing itself. anyway, for folks who do similar things, be aware, and it’s not you.

One neat new feature (that some of us have been clamoring for for a long time): skip_count and last_time_skipped. new fields that track if you’re skipping past a song. So you now have a way to create a smart playlist based on your pushing “next” when a song starts playing, so you can hen exclude those songs from other playlists… VERY nice.

Movies: about waht I expected. the ugprade of resolution is very nice. Only thing I find missing: iTunes 7 will upgrade my album art, but any video I downloaded in the old, smaller format, there seems no way to update it to the new, larger size. ohwell. there should be, folks.

new machine syncing is nice. means I’ll be able to sync my nano to my other macs, and use them and leave the nano in the car most of the time.

Will I buy new nano’s? buying an 80 gig for laurie while I have the discount. My nano is what I need, so I’m going back and forth on upgrading.Access to games would be fun. so would be the ability to use it as a photo wallet for my tripes, but that’s a minor one. Right now, I jus buy more compactflash (whenever i go out, I carry about 1000 images worth of memory these days. that’s enough)

It’s real late, been a long day. I’ll talk about iTV tomorrow. (well, later today). now, gotta crash. but: iTV changes a lot of things. I’m impressed as hell. and when it was announced for Janaury I turned to someone I was with and said “well, our FCC didn’t come thtough in time, did it?” — and he just rolled his eyes. In anyy even, I’m already on the hook for two….

and it really changes, and messes up the fight for the living room for other companies. obut more on taht later…

Canada scrambles to buy precious native artifacts

Canada scrambles to buy precious native artifacts:

Federal heritage officials, museum curators, including those from Victoria, and aboriginal leaders are scrambling to create a multimillion-dollar war chest to purchase and repatriate the world’s most prized private collection of native Canadian artifacts.

The treasure of sacred objects from 19th-century British Columbia is to be sold in three weeks at a landmark auction in New York.

The famed and controversial Dundas Collection — for years the focus of a high-profile struggle between its British owner and the Canadian Museum of Civilization — was acquired in 1863 by Scottish clergyman Rev. Robert Dundas at Metlakatla, a Tsimshian First Nation settlement near Prince Rupert.

Now the property of the missionary’s great-grandson, London retiree Simon Carey, the collection includes several masterpieces of West Coast artistry and is deemed by B.C. native leaders “as significant to Canadian heritage as the Group of Seven.”

birds harrassing crows…

Not that this is the first time this has ever happened, of course, but…

as I was headed to work today, I was watching a crow fly towards me from central park. Suddenly, it squawked and basically went into a tumble towards the ground. As I was trying to figure out what had happened to the crow, I realized there was this tiny thing following it down.

Yup. the crow had been bit by a hummingbird. It evidently didn’t see it coming, and the hummer scared/suprised the hell out of it. The crow ended up dropping about 15′, then regained flight, at which point I heard the hummer make a noise, and it flew off at top speed for the closest tree, with the crow in full chase. The crow made enough noise four friends joined it for the fun.

Now, this is the wrong time of year for nest protection, even for a hummer. And the crow wasn’t anywhere near a tree that might have had a nest. The crow was a good 50 feet in the air, and 50 feet from any tree. It seemed to me that the hummer dropped down from above, given the crow’s reaction.

That’s one heck of a territorial hummer — or just one with no sense of danger and a wry sense of humor. At it’s size, I’m not sure I want to thumb my nose at four or five crows.

Countdown…. 4 days to pumpkin day…. — and regrets.

So, it’s finally the last week. As of friday, I’m officially a pumpkin.

I went out to lunch with a close friend today at work, who’s also been somewhat of a mentor, and a sanity check; we spent the time talking over the years (he’s a ten year Apple, in two stints). we had a nice, long talk about Apple, and what’s happening moving forward.

He also asked me if I had any regrets, to which I said no. I”m now really looking forward to whatever’s next.

tomorrow is my last dance with the Reality Distortion Field as an employee; I’ve decided I’ll probably catch the broadcast at Caffe Macs instead of my building, just to see it in a larger audience, and to soak in being on campus. maybe see some folks I’ve known over the years.

then I’ll spend the afternoon, probably the evening, making stuff look easy, one last time.

On the “rest of reality” front, I have a phone interview with a new company wednesday, and got called out of the blue by someone about another place, and there are a couple of others in “pre-phone-screen” mode. all of the old opportunities are still in play, also, so stuff continues to bubble.

Last week, the vacation week, went well. nothing really out of the unexpected broke, and that makes me feel better about stuff. I’d originally planned to work on the house a bit; that, of course, was a silly though. What I really needed was as break, so I spent two days out on the coast (one at Fitzgerald, one at Pescadero), and then up at the SF Zoo for the first time in years, and then a day just sort of wandering the salt marshes out by Alviso. 800 pictures later, I have some work pending in Aperture, and some interesting blogging material.

And over the weekend, the “I feel like writing” switch flicked back on (as people reading this blog probably noticed); that’s nice, an indication that I’ve stopped being so tired. And yes, bunches of stuff in various draft forms now…

But, you know? when I said no regrets, I lied. I do have regrets about this.

First, I regret never having a job where I worked and lived on the Apple Campus. I always was off in an outlier building for some reason. It would hvae been nice to be a bit closer to the social scene at times.

Second, one of the things I wanted to do when I came to Apple was — learn to program the Macintosh. Here I am, 20 years later, and I’m still a Unix programmer. Which, actually, is not such a bad thing in Mac land any more, but — I still haven’t touched xcode, much less done any significant coding for the mac. Maybe some day. (maybe not).

I never got to shake Fred Anderson’s hand. I did get to thank him for his role in saving Apple.

And I won’t get the chance to shake Steve’s hand, for that, and for changing our world more than I think even we hard core Mac Geeks realize.

for 17+ years of duty here at Apple, that’s a rather short list of regrets. And that — I don’t regret.

here’s hoping that whatever gets announced tomorrow, it puts a notch in my wallet before friday…

news @ nature.com - High-protein diet reduces appetite - Eggs, meat and cheese trigger a protein that makes us eat less.

news @ nature.com – High-protein diet reduces appetite – Eggs, meat and cheese trigger a protein that makes us eat less.:

Eating a high-protein diet can boost the release of a hunger-suppressing hormone, according to new study on mice. The research suggests that a diet rich in protein may be a good way to lose weight and keep it off.

This is an interesting finding — not one I’m surprised at, either.

Note: we’re NOT talking Atkins, although they feel this is part of what allows Atkins users to lose weight, until they get sick of the diet and slip off of it again (as pretty much everyone does). We’re talking about 30-30-40 type diets with a protein bias.

I’ve really come to like the new “100 calorie pack” snacks various food manufacturers are coming out with. They’re very useful ways to reinforce rational portion sizes. The problem with them, though, is they tend to be mostly carbs, and I find I tend to keep snacking if I’m not careful; carbs just don’t whack the appetite.

So I’m going back to what works for me — the deli packs of Sargento sliced cheeses, and the sandwich packs of meats (turkey, ham, etc). a couple of ounces of turkey or 2-3 ounces of cheese does wonders to take the edge off an appetite, I find, a lot better than 2x or 3x the calories in carbs. And as long as you get things that encourage easy use and reasonable portion sizes (like packaged string cheeses, or the happy cow stuff, too, for that matter), it’s nothing but good stuff.

I find it amusing, in a sad and painful way, that basically everything folks were taught in the 70′s about health and nutrition (or, as Laurie likes to put it, the “rice cake, salad and bagel” diet) is dead wrong. Woody Allen’s characters in Sleeper are giggling today…

Jeffrey McManus: Launch Day is “Fun”. Sorta. Well, Not Really.

Jeffrey McManus: Launch Day is “Fun”. Sorta. Well, Not Really.:

A while back ninja sysadmin Martin Kelly dispensed some pertinent advice: the first task a sysadmin should perform when faced with a crisis is to go outside and have a cigarette. Unfortunately, this morning I had no cigarettes and haven’t ever smoked one, so rather than adding a new learning task to my plate, I had a brief conversation with my four month old assistant sysadmin. He gave me a big smile which made me realize that everything was going to be OK, and then I went down and fixed the problem in like five minutes.

Oh, definitely. I have solved more problems by going out and taking a walk, or by kicking everyone out of my office that’s screaming or crying about a down system and pulling up a copy of (some game that my director would freak out over if he ever knew that’s why I kicked him out of my office) and playing it for five or ten minutes while I relax and mull over my options.

The worst thing you can do while stressed out and freaking and dive in and start pushing buttons. you will, almost guaranteed, make it worse, possibly much worse.

There is no worse feeling than having been fighting a down system for four hours, trying to fix a crashed database, and while you’re reconciling some data inconsistencies with one hand on one screen while typing in an update to the business in email with the other hand and talking to the help desk on your cel while five people are in your office aksing why it’s not fixed yet — and then suddenly realizing that you just typed:

mysql> update subscriptions set subscribed = “N”;

and you didn’t notice that because so much was going on and so many people taking so much of your concentration that you forgot the fucking WHERE clause. On your production database. Not that I would ever, ever do that.

(hint: this is why it’s ALWAYS a good idea to have a MODIFIED timestamp column on a table that auto-updates when the record updates; because you know the ones already set “N” won’t update, so you can take the rest, and flip them back. Of course, in the two minutes BEFORE you figure that out, you’ve written both your resignation letter AND your suicide note….)

ESPECIALLY in stressful situations like this, you HAVE to slow down, take a deep breath, and concentrate. And make sure everyone and everything around you is contributing to that, or out of your face. And that includes telling everyone around you “this has to wait 20 minutes while I take my kid to kindergarten, or I’m expensing out the cost of my divorce lawyer”. Another hour of downtime sucks. any company that puts itself THAT far ahead of your real life, even in a situation like this, deserves only your letter of resignation and laughter when they wonder why….

O’Reilly Radar > Rewarding Users for Contributing Data

O’Reilly Radar > Rewarding Users for Contributing Data:

Users should contribute data for a reason other than “Nat’s business model is predicated on collecting user-generated data”. The best reasons give a reward that’s related to the data. BitTorrent gives you fast downloads if you are in turn offering fast uploads; you’re rewarded in bandwidth for offering bandwidth.

Community is a good reason: my theory is that Amazon reviewers and list makers are passionate book-lovers contributing data because it builds their place in this community. I’m not particularly enthusiastic about Yahoo! Local Reviews because it’s not a site that has a community and so I have trouble finding incentives, rewards, or reasons for contributing reviews other than you feel particularly passionate about a particular restaurant. End result: I predict Yahoo! will get only extreme reviews from a minority of the population. A quick check of restaurants in my area show extremes in ratings, despite there being a lot of mediocre restaurants around.

Self-interest is a good motivator: eBay feedback began as a way to weed out the fraudsters making life miserable for marketplace participants, and by contributing information on whether they were good traders you were helping to promote good trading. Now the feedback’s more of a ritual (“AAAA+++++!!!!! BEst sellerr evaH! !!!”).

on the other hand, that feedback mechanism has been corrupted. It’s gotten to the point where ANY negative feedback on a seller’s or buyer’s record can be death on eBay — and buyers and sellers have both used that as a threat. the feedback mechanism seems to be missing an important piece: data on the reliability of the feedback. And increasingly, feedback issues are ending up in court.

The worst kind of reward is money, I think. There was talk of MSN search paying people to use them. That’s completely disconnecting the reward from the behaviour. The best reward for searching is relevant results. And guess what? The site with the most relevant results is also the top search site.

Money, and any other type of reward that substitutes for money such as vouchers or access to powerful site features (e.g., features that would otherwise be subscription-limited) encourages deceit and gaming.

I disagree. Look at one of the most successful implementations of this: Amazon Affiliate program. It was, in many ways, the first serious implementation of what became Web 2.0 data sharing and may have in practice created the concept of the sharing API.

If you pay me to search, I’ll search when I don’t need to (just to make money), advertisers will be getting impressions that aren’t useful to them, and it’ll drive the price of impressions down. Because you can’t reward people for the quality of the data they contribute, you have to settle for the act of contributing something. And once the reward is worth money, you’ll get people contributing crap just to get the rewards. Your reward system is now paying people to piss in your data pool. That hasn’t happened yet for Chris Sells’s offer to share royalties in return for Amazon reviews, but that’s only because of the scale he’s operating at. Needless to say, the rules are also different for intranet applications rather than public Internet applications.

And that’s because in these cases, you’re paying people based on the wrong metrics. Don’t pay them for CREATING CONTENT. Pay them based on the positive revenue impact that content causes. you want to review your GOOD reviewers, not your prolific ones. Unless they happpen to be both.

So anyone can write reviews — but the payouts go to people based on the advertising revenue from the page views of reviews; why NOT give them a cut of that money for the ads on the pages showing their reviews? You can also use the “usefulness” feedback aspects of the site to determine the best reviewers adn best reviews, and give them featured placement. (you still have possible fraud problems here, similar to click-fraud issues, but they’re more manageable). You now have a system that allows anyone to contribute, new, good contributors to be discovered, and the best contributors to be rewarded and given special status, while all good contributions have some ability to reward their creator.

This is the financial model of the new reality: it’s not the creation of content that rewards someone, it’s the value of that content in the market. In the old traditional ways, an editor had limited space to publish stuff in, and therefore culled the less interesting material to make the best stuff available (based on how much room they had to print it); in the new online world, we can (in theory) publish EVERYTHING, but it doesn’t really imply that everything deserves to be rewarded the way published material now is.

Instead, what this new publishing model does is allow the ability for the good stuff to be found and rise to the top; instead of one editor making publishing decisions, you have infinite editors doing so. The new systems not only have to figure out how to publish all of this — it needs to figure out how to enable that infinite row of editors to raise the cream into visibility, and then reward the creators of that cream appropriately. The new publishing model won’t turn all that previously unpublished crap into great material. It’ll still be crap, and it doesn’t deserve to be rewarded. What it DOES do is change the model from the fail/success decision being made by one person, or a tiny pool or people into one being made by the collective decisions of the pool of self-defined editors.

Leaderboards are similarly problematic. Competitions as motivation for contributing data are workable, but only if you can validate the data cheaply. Otherwise you’ll have people submitting bogus data just to get a higher position on the leaderboard. See any Orkut profile with >300 “friends” for an example of this in action.

A big problem I always had with slashdot was that their karma system became a game in itself. Gaming the system became a goal unto itself, leaving the underlying purpose of karma pretty meaningless. But karma-like systems are still necessary. I think the trick is to build it such that you don’t turn the act of dealing with karma into it’s own system to manipulate (that probably means USING karma information in ranking and rating, but not makgin those rankings public or explicit. But it’s still important to identify the “good stuff” and give it priority in publishing and placement. Newer systems, like Digg, are doing a better job of this, but there’s still work to do.

O’Reilly Radar > The Medium Changes the Preferred Format

O’Reilly Radar > The Medium Changes the Preferred Format:

I think we’ll see this phenomenon all over publishing: the rebirth of short-form content and collections, with the user in charge of the playlist.

It’s already happened on the iTunes store, and it’s the essence of “Rip, Mix, Burn”. In music, the labels had turned the market into one forcing users to buy an album for one or two good songs and 50 minutes of filler. iPod and MP3 players that let you burn your own playlists simply let you edit out the filler, and the iTunes store let you avoid paying for it in the first place.

I’m not so sure this is going to be AS viable in the “text” market. In music, replaying music is a standard part of the experience. you expect to listen to a song many times. In video — rental is more normal, where you only expect to view a movie once and then return it. Text, I think, leans more towards the rental aspect, but it depends on what market segment. For technical stuff, O’Reilly’s Safari system works wonders, because you many times have a need for SHORT-TERM but repeated access to some technical stuff, but then once you’re done, it gets replaced by data for the next project.

For fiction? I’m not so sure. And the trend in fiction has been to longer books, and book series. Fans enjoy revisiting created worlds (just ask Robert Jordan). Does that model work in this new environment?

And to me, the biggest part of this is still missing: how do people FIND the good stuff, once we move to a model where everything is out there and available for browsing? This is the key problem: all of this is data; how do we turn it into information? How do we find the high-value and high-quality information?

All bits are equal — but what the bits make certainly aren’t.

News – Jamison’s Comment On Accident – San Jose Sharks

News – Jamison’s Comment On Accident – San Jose Sharks:

Sharks winger Mark Bell was involved in an auto accident this weekend and Sharks President and Chief Executive Officer Greg Jamison released the following statement.

“We are aware of the incident, and it’s not one that our organization takes lightly. Mark is an excellent young man who was just last season selected as ‘Man of the Year’ for being ‘the player most heavily involved in the community’ by his former team, the Chicago Blackhawks. Our organization has always believed in accountability and responsibility for your actions. We are in the process of finding out the details of the situation and will treat this as an internal matter moving forward.”

Greg Jamison has issued a statement on the Mark Bell accident. Unfortunately, it really comes across as “take this very seriously…blah.blah…hey! a puppy!… blah. blah… now we’re going to shut up until you forget about this….”

Which is being unfair to Jamison (even though, basically, it’s true). I know from my dealings with him and talking to people who know him well that this sort of thing really, really pisses him off, and the Sharks as an organization aren’t a “boys will be boys” type of organization. But this is one areas where I tend to have issues with the Sharks organization: just about everything that comes out of the team (except for Dan and Randy’s play by play) tends to sound like it was written by a depressed lawyer with a case of paranoia. So careful. So crafted. So — staged. I sometimes feel like they don’t issue a press release without at least two focus groups (and I never get invited……)

(but to keep this in perspective, would you rather root for a good team that have mastered corporate-speak, or, well, the Blackhawks?)

Seth’s Blog: The end of the job interview

Seth’s Blog: The end of the job interview:

Let’s assert that there are two kinds of jobs you need to fill:

The first kind of job is a cog job. A job where you need someone to perform a measurable task and to follow instructions. This can range from stuffing envelopes to performing blood tests. It’s a profitable task if the person is productive, and you need to find a reliable, skilled person to do what you need.

The second kind of job requires insight and creativity. This job relies on someone doing something you could never imagine in advance, producing outcomes better than you had hoped for. This might include a sales job, or someone rearranging the factory floor to increase productivity. It could also include a skilled craftsperson or even a particularly skilled receptionist.

There is a third type of a job — one with factors of both. Joining a programming team, for instance, requires you have become one cog in a group of cogs; but in a way that requires a degree of innovation and creativity at the same time. It’s a much different beast than, say, line manufacturing (necessary job skills, little to no innovation).

If you’re hiring for the first kind of job, exactly why are you sitting a nervous candidate down in your office and asking her to put on some sort of demonstration in her ability to interact with strangers under pressure? Why do you care what his suit looks like or whether or not he can look you in the eye?

The interview serves multiple masters. Going beyond the “can this person do the job” is “does this person fit in to our organization? (or culture, or ethics, or….).

And if you’re hiring for the second kind of job, the question becomes even more interesting. Would you marry someone based on a one hour interview in a singles bar? And how does repeating the forced awkwardness of an interview across your entire team help you choose which people are going to do the extraordinary work you’re banking on?

Well, for one, getting more eyes on a problem makes it more likely you get the right answer to it. It also makes it more likely that the team has some idea whether this person is compatible with the team or not, and honestly, I think the group dynamics are more important; you can usually find multiple candidates for a job, but the chore is finding the one that’ll fit in and improve your team (or at least, avoid the ones that’ll make the team unhappy and miserable).

There’s a second, more important reason for running a candidate past the team. Not only is that candidate selling themselves to you — you’re selling yourself to that candidate. And they should be able to meet enough of the team to get a feel for whether this is a place THEY want to work. Interviews are (or should be) a bi-directional sales job.

At least half the interview finds the interviewer giving an unplanned and not very good overview of what the applicant should expect from this job. Unlike most of the marketing communications the organization does, this spiel is unvetted, unnatural and unmeasured. No one has ever sat down and said, “when we say X, is it likely the applicant understands what we mean? Are we putting our best foot forward? Does it make it more likely that the right people will want to work here, for the right reasons?” [tell the truth, do you test your job interview spiel the same way you test your web results or even your direct mail?]

Please, god, no. The more “professional” the presentation is, the more I wonder what they’re hiding; I expect that from someone trying to get me to sell vitamins, not an engineering manager talking over a technical position. You make me feel like I’m at a presentation for a vacation timeshare, I’m outta there. Sorry, I’m trying to get a feel for a job and the people I’ll be working with; not investing in the company’s stock.

So, what should you do instead?

Glad you asked!

Every applicant gets a guided tour of your story. Maybe from a website or lens or DVD. Maybe from one person in your organization who is really good at this. It might mean a plant tour or watching an interview with the CEO. It might involve spending an hour sitting in one of your stores or following one of your doctors around on her rounds. But it’s a measurable event, something you can evaluate after the process is over. If you’re hiring more than a few people a week, clearly it’s worth having a full-time person to do this task and do it well.

Good Lord, you’re taking the kind of thing done when a company interviews a half dozen ad agencies to see which one gets awarded the account, and trying to roll it out to all job interviews. (hint: ask the board of directors at Burger King how well agency reviews work….)

There are no one-on-one-sit-in-my-office-and-let’s-talk interviews. Boom, you just saved 7 hours per interview. Instead, spend those seven hours actually doing the work. Put the person on a team and have a brainstorming session, or design a widget or make some espressos together. If you want to hire a copywriter, do some copywriting. Send back some edits and see how they’re received.

If you want me to do REAL work — then hire me as a contractor. contract-to-hire is a time-honored tradition. but asking a candidate to come in and contribute to a real project? I don’t think so. And honestly, I think in the technical area, most corporate lawyers would have a cow, interview-NDAs notwithstanding. For good reason.

And then good luck finding any team where you can get a majority of the members together for a significant block of time; I happen to think the group interview (2-3 members vs. a candidate) has some practical use as well as 1 on 1, but the primary reason I think most teams do the sequence of individual interviews is that it’s the only way to get people to see the candidate and work it in around the rest of their schedule. Real life doesn’t stop just because someone’s coming in for an interview.

This also seems to preclude another kind of common interview: peer group and dotted-line group interviews. Unless you’re in a monastery, whatever group you go to work for is working with other groups on projects; it’s very useful (in a bi-directional way) to spend time talking to people from these other organizations and get a feel for the larger picture (and personalities).

Now, these kinds of brainstorming sessions and discussions are great — in more general terms. One of the interviews I’ve had recently was with the manager of one of the groups the position would be working with; it turned into an hour about HIS problems and challenges, and some serious technical geeking on how my technical challenges were going to make his life better (or more miserable). I came away with a much wider appreciation for the situation and how it fit into the bigger picture. It got very technical, but ultimately, it was a sales job on why working well with his systems was crucial; he, hopefully came away with both a feeling that I could do it, and that I understood why he was so worried about it…

If the person is really great, hire them. For a weekend. Pay them to spend another 20 hours pushing their way through something.

First, this probably isn’t practical on any number of levels; Right up front, people employed by another company may well have no-compete or no-contracting/consulting clauses in their work agreements. There are tax issues: are you going to W-2 them? 10-99 them? Pay them under the table? At what rate? I’m guessing right now Seth’s lawyers and HR people want him dead; he’s taken the “come work for us” dance, and moved it to the front of the interview sequence where you dance it with every serious candidate, not just the final one.

This may well work for the kind of environment Seth lives in — small, focussed office. It fails horribly at larger companies. Imagine Yahoo, or Apple, or Microsoft. Imagine having to hire 1,000 people in a quarter, and having to work out the 10-99 paperwork on 4 people per position, along with NDAs and all of the legal requirements that go for hiring someone for, oh, 20 hours. Your HR person will spend that much time just getting stuff ready. Now imaging how happy Apple would be finding out that a current employee is also working at Microsoft (even if ti’s a long weekend, while on vacation — Seth, exactly how do you propose these things be made to work for people who actually try to find a new job before leaving their old one?)

Ultimately, Seth is putting new and really unreasonable burdens on the job seeker. I know what I’d do. I’d walk. Seth’s new model seems to assume people are basically in contractor/consultant mode anyway. In the real world, most people grab a few hours here and a few hours there to interview around their real job — taking out 20 hours to sit with a team and “do real stuff” isn’t gonna happen; their CURRENT employer’s likely to notice and get honked. Frankly, I’m not sure it improves the process for the hiring company, either; it really DOES feel like he’s simply trying to take the advertising agency design review model and move it into individual hiring; and if you want how often companies hire (and then get pissed off at and fire) advertising and design agencies, it’s a horribly flawed process as well.

Yes, people change after you hire them. They always do. But do they change more after an unrealistic office interview or after you’ve actually watched them get in the cage and tame a lion?

The reality is, some people can game the interview system; companies need to be aware of that, and when it happens, recognize it quickly and cut their losses and move on (unfortunately, most companies seem really unwilling to do so, making a small mistake a much bigger one over time by letting the problem sit there and fester).

Seth’s making a few mistakes in assumptions here: first, that the current system is broken (it ain’t perfect, but nothing is). Second, he seems to not notice that he’s asking a hiring team to commit a LOT of time to the hiring process; can you imagine any team taking 5-6 people, and committing them to 4 or 5 20 hour blocks working with candidates? (and we’ll ignore the meta-resources his setup requires, like HR, payroll, admin staff, etc, etc).

And what’s in all this for the prospective employee, anyway? why should they even remotely want to play this game? And how does it help the prospective employee decide this is the job they want?

(linkers to here:

Gregbo: Note for usenet fans: Chuq von Rospach, one of the major contributors to usenet source code and newsgroup organization back in the day [[boy, I haven't been called THAT in a long time....]]

)

The Mysterious Traveler Sets Out: Caught in the glare

The Mysterious Traveler Sets Out: Caught in the glare:

I’d like very much to say something to them about the lights, except I can’t imagine what I could say that would discourage them from using what is obviously an extremely expensive professional security system.

I’d simply ask them to adjust their lights to not turn on to movement in your yard, since you like to step out at night and look at the stars and the moon, and every time their lights kick in when you’re on your own lawn, it ruins your night vision and makes star watching impossible.

There are possible legal issues here, too, if you end up needing to push the agenda. Light trespass is growing concern. This is probably a good place to plug the International Dark Sky organization, who’s web site has lots of interesting info and resources on lighting and light laws and the like. you might want to point out to them that in reality, very bright, badly aimed lights like that increase glare and REDUCE visibility; it’s been shown time and time again to reduce security, not increase it, because it creates strong shadows for people to hide in.

Heck, if nothing else works, do what astronomers do: create a light shield. for something like this, a small piece of plywood (say, 2′x2′) or outdoor fabric placed up so that it blocks the light at the property line; you probably don’t need a huge “spite fence” to block the sensor to keep it from tripping, and you do have the right to prevent that light from spilling out onto your yard unless you want it there….

On the Downhill Side…

We are now clearly on the downhill side. Her eyes were a shade of gray between onyx and miscalculation, and the unicorn has arrived.

Friday was my last “normal” day at Mama Apple, if normal ever applies to the last few weeks. It’s been this unending stream of discussions and meetings, of trying to identify and document, hand off, lecture about, fix, or script it into submission. I’m a couple of projects short of where I want to be; both of the things I wanted to get done (but won’t) are rollouts, though, that I wanted to take care of before I left; instead, the code is in someone else’s capable hands to do the rollout. That’s not bad, all things considered.

I have a few small things left to do, another 100 lines of Perl to script a few minor things, a couple of short docs. the bug database has been handed over, and the issue database is empty (whew). tuesday, the new support team crawls behind the steering wheel, and then it’s their turn.

All in all, we ended up with over 60 hours of taped lecture, with generally 4-8 people in lecture at any time. it’s all been put up on servers, too (I’ve asked for copies for the blog; somehow, I doubt I’ll get them…). I spent some time with one of the people at Apple that I’ve worked with on a number of projects and who’s been a bit of a mentor to me on the marketing side the last couple of years, and the first question he asked me was “exactly how many people are they replacing you with?”

which is a weird question I’ll defer to later (or never), since things I’m doing are being dispersed all over various groups in IS&T, more in the classic IS setup. If you replace 1 person with 10 people each giving 1/16th of their time, that adds up to…

nothing worth thinking about, actually. I haven’t taken a photo in almost six weeks, and it’s been a few long weeks of mostly grinding away to make sure that when Pumpkin Day comes it’s a non-issue. I’ve been meaning to do more blogging and writing, but there just hasn’t been a huge amount of spare energy left (and there’s that copy of Civ IV on the mini….). After friday, when I finally let it go, I found myself both a bit stressed (“it’s really coming to an end”) and exhausted (“what do you mean, I snored through the first four innings? again?”), and I spent most of my waking moments saturday napping, or fighting the urge to nap. gah. I hate that, although a nap does wonders. Makes me feel old when I do it, for some reason. I finally hit the point today where I had to get out of the house and off the computer, so I grabbed the gear and ran out to Radio road, where it was way too windy for the birds to cooperate, unless you like taking pictures of huddled bundles of feathers. I did spend some time looking for the elegant tern, and thanks to a couple there with a much better scope than my binoculars, we got pretty good looks at a lump that looked suspiciously like the elegant. It would have been even nicer if it’d actually pulled its head out (from under it’s wing, perv!) just once, but beggars can’t be choosers. Still, the journey is the reward, and just getting out of the house was great.

This next week is vacation time for me — or more correctly, on-call-on-vacation. My job is to touch nothing, do nothing, handle nothing, be nothing, unless someone else needs help and brings me in to consult. The idea is to “go black” and see if we missed anything in the lectures and training. I am sincerely hoping for a few days of absolute quiet — and expecting some really funky, weird thing that has only happened twice before in the project that scares the crap out of everyone and takes me 3 minutes to fix…

Then one more week in the office, doing follow-ups with the dev team and ops teams to see what we need to talk more on, and then — the cell phone gets powered off, the laptop and computer gets packed, and Laurie and I go into exile, somewhere off the islet of Langerhans.

More interviews this week; a second round that I thought went pretty well. In our group, the 2nd round interviews are the “meet the director sniff test”; this one was three+ hours of fascinating technical interrogation. All very friendly, very intense, very impressive. Left me exhausted but encouraged, so we’ll see. It gave me a bunch of thoughts on skills maintenance and enhancement I want to talk about, but it’ll have to wait until I have a little more time AND energy together.

Oh, one other thing was decided this week — I”m definitely leaving Apple. The one group I’d been talking to about maybe staying on board and I hashed it out, and we all agreed that we really wanted it to happen, but the timing sucked. It’s just a bad time to try to make something like this happen (we’re late in fiscal Q4 at Apple, which of course means everyone’s budget and headcount are spent and committed and hired, and nothing’s going to spring free until October when the new fiscal year kicks in. If it kicks in then….)

I keep cycling between “you’re leaving a place you’ve been for almost 20 years for — um, what again?” and the whole fear of the unknown thing, and a growing anticipation of making a fresh start and moving off in new directions.

Sometimes, you have to reach out and grab the chance, before it gives up on you forever. I’ve only been unemployed for about six weeks since the age of 12, so not having a job in hand is a bit scary — but I also realize that I’ve let my job define who I am too much, this is a perfect time for me to put that back in better balance, and that wasn’t going to happen at Apple. So it’s a bit scary, but it’s good-scary. mostly. The coffee is brewing down at the Cafe. Lagniappe.