A few of my most recent jobs have been with start-ups. Working with a start-up can be stressful due to the urgency of getting to a product release. Some of the employees of one particular start-up I worked with put in over 70 hours per week. This wasn’t because they were under-staffed. There were plenty of people to do the work but the company leadership was unable to come up with any sort of plan or priorities for the work. What they had was people furiously working on projects that were irrelevant to the company. Some people were working on projects that wouldn’t be needed for years, if ever. One thing I recall about this company is that a lot of things were broken.
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Over the last few years I’ve worked with a few different styles of CEO. Some were great. They cared about employee morale and worked to solve problems created by problematic career middle-managers. They inspired employees and worked to help everyone realize their contribution to the company’s success. Other CEOs I’ve worked with didn’t have a handle on issues in the company. They almost gleefully stifled creativity and smothered morale. I’d like to share a tragic story about one of these CEOs.
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Today I let out a dejected sigh after reading a response to my latest post on the Joel on Software message board. My post was just a reminder about the BostonScalability User Group meeting that takes place next Wednesday the 28th. I post the meeting announcements on JoS and a good number of people hear about the meetings from the JoS board. Every month a few new people tell me they found the group through JoS. So why did I sigh after reading the response to the meeting reminder?
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Not this again. Wired has an article by Daniel Roth pondering the rights we should grant to human-like machines. The article was influenced by Roth’s discomfort watching an Elmo doll giggle when engulfed in flames. He contrasts this with his lack of emotion when the crew from Office Space destroy the office printer. Because of his discomfort seeing Elmo burn he asks about the ethics of interacting with machines.
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It’s 2009, right? As an industry we’ve cast off heavyweight solutions and processes in favor of lightweight software and Agility. Now we create RESTful APIs as part of this push for more meaningful software development. Web applications communicate with each other via RESTful APIs these days. YouTube, Yahoo!, Twitter, Facebook, Google Apps, Digg, everyone has a RESTful API. Integrating two applications has never been easier. Punch a hole in the firewall for a known host on the other side, give their developers an API key and let them get to work. Couldn’t be easier, could it? This is why you’ll never believe what I heard last week.
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