Archive for the 'Work' Category
Posted August 10, 2007 at 7:46 AM | Tagged as: Business, Career, Web Standards, Work | 4 Comments
Karl Dubost’s recent post on the craft of HTML coincided with the launch of the first round of Web coding standards at work. Why did we need coding standards? Karl answers that for me in his first paragraph:
HTML is a practical art. In a professional context, it requires precise and extensive skills. As with many popular crafts, the vast majority of people do it on their own, but only a few do it for a living. The quality of products varies a lot.
When you have a team of developers working on a product, you need to set quality requirements… but to meet those requirements you also need to set the expectation that the developers will work in a consistent manner. Sometimes this can be achieved by having the team lead set the direction for the code by crafting templates and doing code reviews. But what happens as team members rotate on and off the project — how do you retain the knowledge about the coding direction without taking time to bring each person up to speed? What happens as your development team grows to 10, 40, 100 people? This stuff doesn’t scale without spelling out the rules and setting expectations… thus the need for coding standards.
But standards alone won’t create consistency, of course. When Karl says that “HTML is a craft”, he implies that there are techniques that one can only learn through study and practice. When practicing a craft, there are skill levels that reach into the realms of mastery that only few will ever meet. Out of that team of 10, 40, or 100 developers, how many will truly become those masters?
My experience over the past 8 years of working in industry has led me to find that only a few will ever commit themselves to the craft of Web development, and that worries me as a developer and as a manager. We all want job security, and dedicating oneself to excellence in a field implies we’re in that field for the long haul. But what career path can a Web developer expect to have today? What opportunities will be available 5 years from know? There are many unknowns and I think that this may be one big reason I don’t see more talented developers taking the plunge and committing themselves more fully to Web development as a craft and career.
Karl points to another problem: the “majority of people do it on their own, but only a few do it for a living”, which to me implies that most people think anyone can be a Web developer (how many times have you heard someone state that their kid could build a better site?) and therefore they don’t take the craft of Web development seriously. I’ve found that most Web developers who didn’t emerge from computer programming backgrounds have serious complexes over whether or not they’re “real” developers… and a lot of this is due to snarky computer programmers who put Web developers down because they make the same, stupid assumption that “anyone can do Web development”. How is that encouraging to anyone looking at committing themselves to this work as their career? (Nevermind how irrational it is for a computer programmer to dismiss part of their larger discipline.) How is that encouraging to anyone who has hopes of using Web development as a basis for a career that could include programming in other languages?
So what’s a developer to do? And what’s a manager to do? I’ll post my ideas at another time… right now, tell me yours.
Posted August 7, 2007 at 3:16 AM | Tagged as: Business, Meeeeeeee, Women!, Work | Just 1 Comment
In this recent study, a Yale post-doc has found that a woman who shows anger in the workplace is likely to be seen as incompetent and out of control. In order to achieve status at work, women may have to behave calmly in order to be seen as rational. In fact, an “angry” woman is also likely to make less money than an “unemotional” woman, though in either case is still likely to make less than a man.
No wonder why so many women end up adopting a “nice girl” approach in business. But you know what? That doesn’t work either — at least not for the woman trying to always be so nice. That’s why I’m glad to see that Erica wrote up her 5 steps to stop being too nice. I was also pleasantly surprised by the book Ambitchous by Debra Condren, which promotes embracing ambition as a virtue, standing up for one’s self, and being authentic in order to be achieve success on one’s own terms and to be happy with one’s life.
I could go on at length about the “nice girl/angry woman” paradox, but I won’t because I resolved this internal conflict a long time ago. Ultimately I only care about being authentic, because when I’m not true to myself, everything else in my life goes to hell.
Sure, I try to be nice, and yes, I get angry. I don’t let people step all over me, but I also don’t run around yelling and screaming (much — hey, I’m Italian!). Some people will think of me as the crazy lady but really don’t care. I simply hope that others will remember that I behave the way I do because I care about myself, my work, my people, or whatever the issue is at hand. It’s in expressing some emotion that I am (and I think most women are) most comfortable demonstrating my commitment to my work, by showing how much I care about what I do. An unemotional response might help a man better understand my point, but wouldn’t be an authentic expression of myself.
To those that know me and work with me, I hope the above is either already apparent to you or is now clear. To everyone, here’s what I ask of you: The next time you encounter a “nice girl”, ask her if she’s being true to herself by always being so nice. And when you butt heads with an “angry woman”, acknowledge her commitment to the work and doing what is right. Encourage people be themselves, to be authentic. I bet that you’ll find that you can then do the same, and everyone will be all the happier for it.
Posted June 26, 2007 at 10:28 AM | Tagged as: CSS, Web Standards, Work | 2 Comments
Head over to PayPal and check out the redesign beta! Only the main pages have been redesigned, but you can go through the whole site with a new header/footer for a feel of what’s to come.
Feedback on the code welcome here!
Posted June 14, 2007 at 1:03 AM | Tagged as: Industry Events, Meeeeeeee, Web Standards, Work | 2 Comments
I owe some thanks to colleagues and friends in the Web world for recent highlights and opportunities, so here goes…
Kudos to Meri Williams for setting up the Make Me a Speaker site and thanks for interviewing me for it! Meri set up this site after the topic of women speakers at conferences came up back in February. A lot of the hype has died down, but I hope that the information and resources on the site will continue to be useful for anyone seeking to start or improve their career as a speaker/presenter.
Kit Seeborg and I met at SXSW last year, and this year she invited me to speak at WebVisions in Portland. I was grateful for the opportunity to start speaking about how I’ve made process the driver behind integrating Web standards, but I was even more grateful for the chance to finally visit Portland (having heard so much about it from Ben Henick) and to meet some great people, like Erica O’Grady (yet another woman who does so much for the Web industry, and just so much in general!). Sadly, I didn’t get to spend any time with Kit, but Erica and I did have a good heart-to-heart while perusing the shelves at Powell’s Books. It was a great conference and a great weekend, and next time, Kit, we’re doing dinner — work be damned!
Then I was absolutely bowled over when Rob Dickerson invited me to give the closing keynote at the Penn State Web Conference. I’ll admit that, at first, I wasn’t sure how I’d translate my industry experience for an audience that was supporting academia… but then I realized that that’s how I started out, and academia actually helped prepare me for much of what I encountered in industry! I just hope that all of my ‘how to be an evangelist and advocate for processes and roles that support standards’ mumbo-jumbo translated well, and that attendees will find it useful. I was thoroughly impressed by the other presenters, most of whom were from the university system, and I had a great time at Quaker Steak and Lube (a restaurant… really!) with Jared Spool, Dan Frommelt, and company. And I got to have ice cream at the PSU Creamery! Mmmm!
Posted May 23, 2007 at 10:30 AM | Tagged as: Business, Just Sayin, Work | Just 1 Comment
Robert Scoble alerted readers to Jeff Barr’s post about Google recruiting. I had to laugh out loud here, because I’ve also been subject to some strange Google recruiting crap myself.
Most recently, I got an e-mail from a Google recruiter (who clearly did look at my Web site, because she commented on the pink-ness of my blog) with regards to a technical solutions engineer position. The first thing that struck me as odd is that, if you actually read my resume, you’ll learn that I’ve been in management positions for a while… so why would I be interested in an engineering position? The next oddity was the requirement that I complete a self-evaluation before discussions could proceed. Uh-huh. No thanks.
Of course, when I got that e-mail I was laughing pretty hard, because in the many years I’ve attended the Grace Hopper Celebration I’ve talked to Google folks many times about job opportunities there — and was basically told again and again that “Google doesn’t recruit Web developers because that’s not important to [their] business”. Whatever.
I have some friends that have gone to Google, but honestly, the more I learn about them, the more suspicious I am of them. I feel like they’re one giant social engineering experiment, and we’re all their guinea pigs.
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