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Before the interview, I read over the candidates resume and jot down an interview plan on a scrap of paper. That’s just a list of questions that I want to ask. Here’s a typical plan for interviewing a programmer:

Introduction
Question about recent project candidate worked on
Easy Programming Question
Pointer/Recursion Question
Are you satisfied?
Do you have any questions?

I am very, very careful to avoid anything that might give me some preconceived notions about the candidate. If you think that someone is smart before they even walk into the room, just because they have a Ph.D. from MIT, then nothing they can say in one hour is going to overcome that initial prejudice. If you think they are a bozo because they went to community college, nothing they can say will overcome that initial impression. An interview is like a very, very delicate scale—it’s very hard to judge someone based on a one hour interview and it may seem like a very close call. But if you know a little bit about the candidate beforehand, it’s like a big weight on one side of the scale, and the interview is useless. Once, right before an interview, a recruiter came into my office. “You’re going to love this guy,” she said. Boy did this make me mad. What I should have said was, “Well, if you’re so sure I’m going to love him, why don’t you just hire him instead of wasting my time going through this interview.” But I was young and naïve, so I interviewed him. When he said not-so-smart things, I thought to myself, “gee, must be the exception that proves the rule.” I looked at everything he said through rose-colored glasses. I wound up saying Hire even though he was a crappy candidate. You know what? Everybody else who interviewed him said No Hire. So: don’t listen to recruiters; don’t ask around about the person before you interview them; and never, ever talk to the other interviewers about the candidate until you’ve both made your decisions independently. That’s the scientific method.

This morning, I was struck by this nice write-up about how the Hungarian railway accurately geo-located and inventoried their assets:

The work was done entirely by MAV employees which made it much less expensive than if external contractors would have had to have been used. Overall it is estimated that as a result of using internal resources and a GPS/GLONASS-based approach the project was 16 times more efficient than a traditional survey. And the project generated a lot of pride among MAV employees who carried out the work because it was such a remarkable achievement from a data collection, management and quality perspective.

Here's is an incredibly stupid thing for a consultant to say, but nonetheless: if you can do it in house, why wouldn't you? Even if it's a bit of a stretch, your in house resources:

have a predictable cost structure
already understand your core business
have a feel for the historical reasoning behind business processes

New IT infrastructure is strategic almost by definition. Why would you outsource your most important strategic initiatives? If you're anticipating failure, perhaps it's a good idea. But if you succeed, you've just invested in building intellectual capital in a population of people outside your organization. And you've lowered the engagement of your core staff in the future of the organization.

Familiarity breeds contempt, and it's all too common that management is most contemptuous of the people they are most familiar with: their own staff. Hence the lure of the shiny consultant (love me! I'm shiny!).

A couple years ago, a friend (can't remember who, perhaps Lane Becker? Anil Dash?) said the next big wave in business was "becoming the Zappos of anything." What they meant was even though there may be a crowded market for whatever is sold online, the market is ripe for someone to come in and provide the absolute best experience possible backed by great customer service.

It's from our favorite Giant Robot Dinosaur and it's about Minimal Viable Personality, something I have referred to as "voice" in pior posts. The Grimster is so right that this is critical to building a successful product.

Call us crazy, but it looks as if the people at Great Harvest have managed to pull off what the rest of us only fantasize about. They've built an organization that practically runs itself

Fetch is the easiest way to sell digital goods such as music, videos, photos, e-books, PDF's, or software from any website, blog, social network, Goodsie shop, or Shopify store.

Nearly every company relies on the written word to woo customers. So why is most business writing so numbingly banal?

"(..) This shows where the real money is. Not in quality reporting, but more in a product for a massive audience that translates into eyeballs (what a term) that, in turn, will be monetized — especially if you add a good layer of software algorithms to the product. (..)"

Wal-Mart, a retail giant, handles more than 1m customer transactions every hour, feeding databases estimated at more than 2.5 petabytes—the equivalent of 167 times the books in America’s Library of Congress (see article for an explanation of how data are quantified). Facebook, a social-networking website, is home to 40 billion photos. And decoding the human genome involves analysing 3 billion base pairs—which took ten years the first time it was done, in 2003, but can now be achieved in one week.

All these examples tell the same story: that the world contains an unimaginably vast amount of digital information which is getting ever vaster ever more rapidly. This makes it possible to do many things that previously could not be done: spot business trends, prevent diseases, combat crime and so on. Managed well, the data can be used to unlock new sources of economic value, provide fresh insights into science and hold governments to account.

But they are also creating a host of new problems.

Track how millions of fans interact with online music everyday.

The European Commission's Digital Competitiveness report published today shows that Europe's digital sector has made strong progress since 2005: 56% of Europeans now regularly use the internet, 80% of them via a high-speed connection (compared to only one third in 2004), making Europe the world leader in broadband internet. Europe is the world's first truly mobile continent with more mobile subscribers than citizens (a take up rate of 119%). Europe can advance even further as a generation of "digitally savvy" young Europeans becomes a strong market driver for growth and innovation. Building on the potential of the digital economy is essential for Europe's sustainable recovery from the economic crisis. Today the Commission has asked the public what future strategy the EU should adopt to make the digital economy run at full speed.

Do you have one? Some folks are going to eight hours of meeting a day. At Ford, they used to have meetings to prepare for meetings, just to be sure everyone had their story straight.

Most of management theory is inane, writes our correspondent, the founder of a consulting firm. If you want to succeed in business, don’t get an M.B.A. Study philosophy instead

The experience of growing up online will profoundly shape the workplace expectations of “Generation F” – the Facebook Generation. At a minimum, they’ll expect the social environment of work to reflect the social context of the Web, rather than as is currently the case, a mid-20th-century Weberian bureaucracy.

One of the paradoxes of early 20th Century management was the observation that companies are best run as dictatorships, while countries are best run as democracies. Why was this?

A recent report has revealed that France's national police force has saved an estimated 50 million euros since 2004 by adopting open source software and migrating a portion of the organization's workstations to Ubuntu Linux. They plan to roll out the Linux distro to all 90,000 of their workstations by 2015.

Consider Google. When people focus - predictably - on the almost childlike simplicity of their ad driven revenue model, lost in the shuffle is perhaps Google’s greatest asset: its data. The kind of data volume that allows them to predict disease. As Nick Carr puts it, “He with the most data wins.”

One of the best things any movie, book, or music can do is permanently change you. Tim Ferriss’ #1 bestselling book, The 4-Hour Workweek, changed my life.

At some point in your life, you will wake up and discover that you have more money than time. And you will then realize that you should start doing things differently, which means not walking four blocks to find an ATM that doesn't charge a fee, driving f

Op 28 augustus 2008 gaat de eerste gespecialiseerde rechtswinkel op het gebied van technologie, media en communicatie (TMC) van start: de Clinic. De Clinic zal gratis eerstelijns juridisch advies geven aan (minder vermogende) particulieren en kleine, star

So we're trying something new: we're going to list some of the ideas we've been waiting to see, but only describe them in general terms. It may be that recipes for ideas are the most useful form anyway, because imaginative people will take them in directi

We all know déjà vu—looking at an unfamiliar situation and feeling like you’ve been there before. But what’s valuable to innovation is vuja dé—looking at a familiar situation with fresh eyes, as if you’ve never seen it before, and with those

With Glom you can design database systems - the database and the user interface. The design is loosely based on FileMaker Pro, but with a separate database server. Its simple framework should be enough to implement most database applications.

Breakthrough ideas are around the corner, says the Google co-founder. But most of us are failing to take a chance on them.

Head's argument is much like that of David Noble in Forces of Production: we had a choice about how to use new technology. We could use it to turn employees into ever-more-skilled craftspeople, allowing them to be more effective and creative in their jobs

Whether you're headed off to a business meeting, a university lecture, or a conference session, taking effective notes is a necessary skill to move your projects, your career and your education forward. Today I'll go over a couple of my favorite note-taki

Here it is: I like to find (a) simple solutions (b) to overlooked problems (c) that actually need to be solved, and (d) deliver them as informally as possible, (e) starting with a very crude version 1, then (f) iterating rapidly.

The internet is a copy machine. At its most foundational level, it copies every action, every character, every thought we make while we ride upon it.

In short, I can describe my GTD system in eight words. Make three lists. Revise them daily and weekly.

a product/business idea by Philip Greenspun in September 2005

iContact allows businesses, non-profit organizations, and associations to easily create, publish, and track email newsletters, surveys, blogs, autoresponders, and RSS feeds.

Bambooinvoice is free open-source invoicing software intended for small businesses and independent contractors. Our number one priorities are ease of use, user-interface, and beautiful code.

Amie Street is the most fun way to discover and buy music online because we have a social network that facilitates music discovery and because we price music right - all songs start free and rise in price the more they are purchased. Our dynamic prices al

Veel Nederlandse consumenten stellen geen prijs op ongevraagde reclame. Vooral niet, als die persoonlijk aan hen is gericht. Via deze website kan iedereen zich kosteloos laten blokkeren tegen ongewenste post, telefoontjes en onaangekondigd (telefonisch) m

At the end of every interview someone inevitably asks “Where do you see 37signals in five years? Ten years? 20 years?” My answer remains the same: “Still in business. Beyond that I have no idea.”

Hoe pas je een weblog toe in je marketing/media mix?; Welke bedrijven kunnen beter niet gaan bloggen? Het zijn enkele vragen die aan de orde komen tijdens de 4e Business Blog Meeting, die op vrijdag 29 juni gehouden wordt in Utrecht.

Microsoft claims that free software like Linux, which runs a big chunk of corporate America, violates 235 of its patents. It wants royalties from distributors and users. Users like you, maybe.

A one day conference with a focus on the near future of the web and how new technology, business models, innovation and culture-changes affect the direction of the web and the way we do business. The Conference for web industry thought leaders, leading co

"[.] if you’re reasonably intelligent, getting a job is one of the worst things you can do to support yourself. There are far better ways to make a living than selling yourself into indentured servitude."