Be wary the company you keep.

I heard a saying once. A level people will hire A level people. While B level people hire C level people. Why is this? A level people get to their standing by constantly getting better at whatever it is they do. Understanding that they just can't do everything on their own. While B level people are just worried about themselves and not looking bad at their job. That is why they hire those that are worse than they are. Makes yourself look better, without getting better.

Same goes for your friends. You find that people who are successful tend to stick to their own. But you know at one point, they had that good for nothing stoner friend. What happened? They realized that they were becoming an A level person while their friend was sticking to B or C level. Yeah I know that this sounds very dickish, but think of it this way.

A bunch of us from work are getting ready to compete in a hackathon. We have separated into three teams; Team LiveWire, Team MajorLazerKittens, and Team WubWub. We did this to compete against each other, as well as the rest of the competitors. B or C level teams might not even have gotten this far. And just waited until the day of to figure something out. We used to be those guys. Now we are one our way to A level. In just 12 hours, each team had a website, twitter, and mascot. Once again this was driven by each team's willingness to compete and put in work to win. Since we are all working to be A level teams, it will only make the other teams better.

So back to your friends. You always compete against your friends, in your head or in real life. Somehow you try to find a way to prove who is the best. If you have A level friends, you will constantly be doing something to win this battle. Getting that better job, learning something new, making that awesome project, etc. Just to show who is superior. Yet if you have B and C level friends, you realize that you are already doing more. This will cause you to not try as hard, since you are already doing better than they are. Your point of reference is skewed. And pretty soon, you become a B or C level yourself.

Be wary the company you keep.

To Tweet or not to Tweet?

I know a lot of you are on social media, but this will be about Twitter in general. Recently there has been a few incidents in the news where people get in trouble and lose their jobs due to tweets. You have the recent Pycon incident and then most recently an employee got fired for his actions on twitter. Let's take a look at each of these incidents and look over the details, then go over some tips to save yourself future embarrassment.

Story one took place at Pycon, which is now stupidly being called "DongleGate". Whoever comes up with these names needs a take a close look at an ice pick. Adria Richards works for SendGrid, an email delivery company. While at Pycon a couple of guys who making some jokes about forking and who's dongle was bigger than who's. Adria then felt it was her duty to tweet a picture of these guys. This in turn led to these guys getting fired. Of course there was a backlash against Adria at this point because these guys did nothing to her directly, other than be sitting in earshot of her. Once these guys got fired and people were asking for her head, Richards went on Twitter to boast that SendGrid had her back. She was fired shortly thereafter.

Story number two. Adam Orth works for Microsoft and tweeted about how the new XBox will have always on DRM. People starting asking questions and citing examples as to why this is a bad idea. Orth began to make fun of those who didn't live in a big city, and laughed at the misfortune of those without broadband internet. Just showed a general lack of care to his customers. He was fired.

Now let's take a look at some of the details here that make these two cases stand out. Let's start with Richards, she was a SendGrid Evangelist. She is the face of SendGrid and therefore is expected to be an example. Instead of doing the right thing and minding her own business asking the gentlemen to speak softer as she was trying to listen to the lightning talks at hand. She instead tried to flex her power as an Evangelist and get these guys in trouble. She knew that not only did she have a lot followers, but a lot that listen to what she says. She abused this power and it blew back on her. Orth was just an employee in the sales department, Orth thought he was safe. The problem is that when you are associated with a company like Microsoft, you are going to be noticed. Especially if you topic of conversation is the latest gaming system to come out. His story probably only got really noticed due to sites like Reddit, and that made it go viral.

So how can you avoid a situation like this yourself? There are actually a few simple steps.

Step one, understand your power on the internet. You may think that nobody is watching you, but trust me, somebody is. All it takes is one person to see your tweet, and then they will tell a friend and so on and so forth.

Step two, make sure you know your company's social media policy. You need to ask whoever is in charge of your relations if there is such a policy. Are your tweets your own? Will you been seen as a face for your company? Richards was very much the face for her company, Orth, not so much. Ignorance of the law has never worked, and it won't work in your company either if there are people pitchforks wanting you dead.

This leads us to Step three, don't assume that your company has your back. You might think that in your position that you are safe. But if you say something that is damaging the companies image, your value will be evaluated. A good way to look at your value is as follows. Take your salary and divide it by 12. An example would be say you make $60,000 a year. Do you bring $5000 of value into the company? Now how much value do you bring if PR is now being involved to clean up your mess? Trust me, if it doesn't break even, firing you looks a lot better than any kind of spin you think of.

To take away from this, if you have a twitter and it is personal, keep it that way. The moment you mention your job(name of your company, not just what you did), it is now a professional twitter, whether you like it or not. So be careful out there folks, and don't lose your job because you thought you were being funny on twitter.

What is the rush?

I just recently purchased Bioshock Infinite. I have been waiting for this game for a couple years now. But delay after delay after delay caused me to think this was never coming out. But when it finally got released, it was better than I could have imagined. The graphics were amazing, the gameplay was a great improvement to the prior games, and the story. The story alone could get its own blog post. I mean seriously look at the image below.

The creators of this game took their time to get it right. Seeing at how well this works, look at Valve also (Just mention Half Life 3, and watch excitement followed by sadness in every face) So seeing as how time can make things better, why do we seem to always timebox projects in writing code? I understand that people have urgency for contracts or legal reasons. But who let this happen? 

Should it be the project manager or the sales team, that doesn't matter. As a developer we need to prove that given all the time you need, a better quality product can be made. Let's look at it this way. I have a project that needs to be finished in 3 days. I know it is going to take me 9 days, but I have to finish in 3. So I rush and staple together something that looks like a finished project. Sure it works, most of the time. But it does have its bugs. We can just hotfix them later. So we find a few bugs, each takes 2 days to get fixed and tested. Surprise, we are at 9 days. Just like I said it would take, only this time I had new features to work on because nobody planned time to fix bugs. So we are behind even more, rushing faster gaining even more bugs as we go. 

All of this could have been avoided had you just said it will get done when it gets done. As long as it is done right, people will allow you to do this. I understand that some things need to get out relatively fast, these things will happen. But if you are pushing out a new feature or project, why rush it if you don't have to? 

Taking your time makes all things great. Look at Duke Nukem Forever.....