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Archive for October, 2008
Happy Halloween
Friday, October 31st, 2008Respectful Interviewing
Monday, October 20th, 2008Andrew Duffy is working on creating a software company in Dublin that respects its employees. I agree with almost everything in his article describing his ideal company, and today he posted another interesting article about respectful interviewing.
It doesn’t seem like Andrew should even have to write about this stuff, but it’s true. I’ve personally been in job interviews that felt more like interrogations, and I’ve heard anecdotes of even worse treatment. I try to give interviewers some slack; a lot of times the interviewers have never had any formal training or education on conducting interviews. I’ve been on the hiring side of the interviewing table enough to understand how difficult it is. But some interviewers are downright adversarial!
In any case, it’s nice to see another software developer trying to build a great place to work. My feeling is that unless the founder focuses on this as an explicit goal, the default tendency is for companies to get lazy and lapse into mediocrity (this is true about almost anything that isn’t given conscious attention). Even the companies that say they want to provide a good working environment generally get caught up in day-to-day chaos, or flinch at the expense (trivial, in the long term) of creating such a workplace, and everything slips into the doldrums. So I’m glad to hear that Andrew is giving a lot of thought to this!
Optimism and Realism
Monday, October 6th, 2008Yesterday I went on a tour of an abandoned railway station in my city. It’s now secured from trespassers and the elements by a volunteer group working towards restoring it, but during the years it was left unprotected it suffered badly at the hands of former owners, vandals, and the weather.
The tour guide (one of the group’s volunteers) was far more optimistic than I am about the future prospects of the station. The estimated costs of just physically repairing and restoring the station are staggering - on the order of $50 million. And honestly, that’s probably the easier part: the neighborhood surrounding the station has seen much better days and is a couple of miles out from the downtown core, so it’s a difficult sell to developers for conversion to apartments or condos, or even for restoring train service.
But these volunteers just keep chipping away at it, cleaning out debris, patching the holes in the roof, sprucing up the main concourse so that events and conventions can be held there, and they’ve done an amazing job so far. I don’t know if I can believe in the tour guide’s hope that in 10 years the station and the neighborhood will be thriving again, but his optimism was inspiring, and I went home feeling hopeful.
Then today I was talking to a colleague about this, and he was far more negative than I expected. It will cost far too much to restore the station. This country doesn’t invest in passenger rail. No one will ever want to live in that neighborhood - it’s too far from everything and you’ll get mugged when you’re walking your dog. The only hope for the station is to bulldoze the surrounding neighborhood flat and start from scratch.
What a cold shower, but there’s a grain of truth in all of that.
So today I was thinking about the relationship between optimism and realism.
There’s a new restaurant opening downtown soon. It’s going to be mostly vegetarian and vegan cuisine, and will also feature music and art and community classes and events. The owners look young and idealistic. I wish them the absolute best. I just hope that in addition to being idealistic, they have a solid foundation of realism, with the business savvy to figure out how to make their dream work.
Sometimes people perceive optimism and realism as mutually exclusive worldviews. “Jack is an optimist.” “Jill is a realist.” I disagree. I think it’s important to possess both traits. Optimism without realism leads to pie-in-the-sky plans that never had a chance, and businesses that fail because the numbers could never work out. But realism without optimism leads to nothing ever changing, because it makes you unable to see beyond what something currently is to what it could be.
Somewhere in the middle is where truly great things get done.