My Zite reader recommended an article from Shanley called “Building techincal literacy in business teams” — and I have to say, this really hits home as a critical advantage for technology companies.
There’s a trend in the technology industry these days that “everyone should code”. It goes so far that at some startups, the business guys are given access to the codebase and told to check things in — if you care so much about a bug or feature, then go fix / build it yourself. One friend of a friend is a biz dev guy in an internet startup, but he’s learning Python desperately and actually helping engineer the web presence.
In my opinion, this is all wrong. That biz dev guy is going to be WAY slower at coding then a full-time engineer, and while he can certainly learn to code, he simply doesn’t have the experience under his belt. Why have him learn the hard way on the job, as opposed to putting him in front of clients and going after the biz dev job with 100% of his brain?
All of these skills, whether engineering or business, are learnable. Nothing should stop anyone who wants to do a task from doing it. However, I want the guy with the most passion and most experience to do a job. We don’t typically ask engineers to learn key business skills (e.g. forecasting, procurement negotiation, etc.) even though they certainly could — we want the experienced negotiator or the eagle eyed accountant to go for these tasks.
Yet specialization is only good if there is a common language between teams. And that’s where I 100% agree with Shanley’s assertion that you need to build technical literacy in business teams. It’s simply not smart to have engineering decisions get made by someone with no technical literacy; either the business person needs to learn to be technically literate, or else delegate the responsibility to someone who is.
There are 3 examples of where this can be applied:
1. A biz dev guy who is working to get partnerships that result in technical integrations needs to be aware of what/how a technical integration works — e.g. be able to address scope questions from actually knowing what needs to be built. I don’t think the biz dev guy needs to be able to actually do the work, but they should be able to competently answer simple questions (e.g. where is data going to be, what are the tradeoffs between different types of connectivity, etc.).
2. A business-background COO looking at optimizing the new product development lifecycle needs to understand at a granular level what it means to build software. In other words, it’s impossible to select agile versus waterfall unless you’ve actually seen how these processes work, or else trust someone else who has seen them both in action.
3. A business-background product manager cannot make good product requirements if they cannot envision how a system will work. Again, no need to be able to actually build the system, but awareness of certain engineering tradeoffs can have a massive impact on scope, quality, and features.
There are certainly many more stereotypical examples that everyone’s heard about (the PR person who doesn’t understand what they are pitching, the designer who creates uncodable mockups, the Marketing person who promises unbuildable features, etc.).
The technical literacy of a business person is really a way to help bridge the gap between two different disciplines. When there is a conversation between an business person and a technical person, and the goals of the two parties aren’t necessarily aligned, then the ability for each party to lean on the other through knowledge of either business or technical concepts can be the only successful (conflict-free) pathway to actually getting something done (and resolving that misalignment).
You can get around this problem with one of those few individuals who are really good at both disciplines (e.g. the application architect who has the MBA, or the VP Marketing who had spent a year fresh out of college building websites).
What’s interesting to me is why I haven’t heard a lot about this problem in other disciplines. I know that when I did a research internship at Gilead Sciences (a pharma company), the business leaders all had originally earned PhDs in science fields…
Closing thought: how can we ensure technical literacy amongst business folks? Well, I think rotating into a project team and shadowing folks for a couple days might help? Codeacademy seems like the wrong direction (again, don’t need to actually code / waste time with the debugger — rather, learn less by doing and more by concept). Sitting in on a data design mtg, moving on to a QA test plan review, attending a PRD review — all of these things help show how the sausage gets made. The key is to make sure the business person is there to “learn” and not to “lead”.
I’m not sure if I should be slightly offended or not when filing out this lead form for a potential vendor we might use. Why does title even matter all that much … especially to this degree! How do I stack up? Do they not respond to lower ranked employees? What?
I just changed my address for E-Z Pass, the highway toll system in Massachusetts. I’m blown away by how hard it was to login.
Not only is the login an arbitrary 7 digit account number, but the password has to honor these rules:
Passwords must contain at least eight (8) characters.
The password must contain at least one of each:
- upper case letter (A-Z)
- lower case letter (a-z)
- number (0-9)
- special character (~,!,#,%,^,&,*)
This is insane. There is no way that someone can easily remember an arbitrary login plus a password with 4 different types of data. It’s just impossible. What are they thinking??
Twelve days ago, I received an unexpected email from Comcast: “Important Service Announceme
But what they didn’t say in the email is that my bill is also going up.
That’s right — apparently there is a price hike effective December 22, 2011. Turns out that Performance Internet is going up in price from $59.95/month to $62.95/month. While Comcast was willing to send an email announcing the (not requested) feature improvement, the price hike was first mentioned on page 3 of my monthly bill.
What bugs me is that I pretty much never read Comcast monthly bills — and I’d bet many other people don’t do it either. I have “eco-bill” turned on, which means that an email is sent to me each month with a link to login instead of sending me a paper bill. The email doesn’t include any billing information (although it should!); and, after logging in, I have to download a PDF. That’s quite a lot more work than simply opening an envelope… And if I’ve made it this far, I still have to get to page 3 of the bill in order to learn that there is a price increase coming.
Like many others, I have “auto-pay” turned on, which makes me even less likely to want to login to check a bill that ostensibly is the same each month.
Seems like Comcast is being a little inconsistent here with when they decide to email customers…
The other odd thing about my November Comcast bill is that it went up by $1 for no apparent reason. Last month, I was charged $44.95. This month, I’m being charged $45.95. The $1 increase seems to be coming out of a “service discount” — but no explanation is given on last or this month’s bills.
Seems like bad business to increase a bill by $1 with no notification/justification, and disclosing another $3 price increase only on page 3 of an eco-bill — all while proactively telling the customer that they are receiving “25% faster” internet.
Frankly, I’d rather pay $4 less and stay on the original plan (you know, the one I signed up on?). I don’t feel like the difference between 12 and 15 mbps will make a real impact (especially since we’re talking about “PowerBoost” temporary speeds), but now I’m paying $48 more per year.
After realizing I have 100+ gb of online storage ready to go, I’m planning to backup all my digital photos. Today I have an external hard drive and some DVD-Rs with these backups, but I’m pretty sure all of my backups are still in the same physical location. Given that 19 fire trucks showed up for a fire drill at my apartment building a few weeks back, I think it’s time to do a little more robust backup-ing.
To get started, I’m backing up my iPhone photos — 2049 mb apparently across iPhone 1 and iPhone 3 GS. Unhappily, it looks like it will take a bit over 4 hours on my Comcast cable modem; the upload is running at ~77kb/sec.
Also, it occurs to me that backing up on multiple cloud providers is going to be pretty expensive in terms of time. Let’s say I have something like 15 gb of photos (I’m not even sure how much I have, to be honest — stored across 3 different computers and an external NAS). That’s something like 32 hours of uploading per cloud provider if all goes well.
Since I don’t really trust either 1and1 hosting (horror stories) or box.net (giving out free 50 gb personal plans — look at prior competitors like AOL’s Xdrive, which gave out 5 gb free in ~2007 or 2008, but then shut down), the most prudent thing is for me to upload all files to both providers; doubling my time to upload at 64 hours now!
Three further problems encountered tonight:
Comcast limits to 250 gb per month combined upload & download. This isn’t great, since the last few months I’ve used between 50 gb to 100 gb per month; so far this month, I’ve hit 140 gb about halfway through the billing cycle. I don’t use BitTorrent or anything; I just constantly have streaming music running, watch Netflix HD a lot, and am an overall heavy internet user from morning ’till night. Now adding in another ~30+ gb of backups for the next few months, I should still be fine with Comcast, but it’s annoying to have to think about limits. Comcast state that the median user within the 99% segment of their users consumes approx 6 to 8 gb / month, which is pretty low given that a single HD movie on Netflix takes 2.3 gb per hour.All of these issues existed years ago when Streamload and Xdrive were popularizing online backups originally. I think we’re all more comfortable with this practice now, but I’m not sure we’ve substantially changed anything for personal users. (For companies, we’re talking about completely different mechanics — higher bandwidth available, servers are always running so no worries about the girlfriend shutting the laptop lid, and it’s less of a “once in a while” user-driven behavior as much as an always running mandate to keep data replicated.).
I’m wondering if the best recommendation for home bulk-file backup is still to go with a NAS at home, plus periodically dropping off an external hard drive at a friend or relative’s house.
PS: I’m aware there are some 3rd party software solutions out there which can interface with Box.net and also do multiple-cloud redundant backup, but I simply don’t want to do that. The basic tools provided by the service should be good enough to handle my genuinely simple & common use case.
Update (10/21/11): A PM at Box.net posted in their support forums that free personal accounts are using SSL for file transfers, which is great! Other users seemed to be similarly confused about the state of SSL on Box.net, so I’m glad it is resolved now. More details
I still think it’s odd they don’t make a bigger deal about this on their website — it’s such an easy thing to say (Security is important to us. That’s why we always use SSL for file transfers, and have tons of great security features, etc.). Also, they could consider putting the whole website under SSL for added piece of mind. To me, online file storage can be of similar importance to banking — if the file weren’t important, I wouldn’t be backing it up. As a competitive note: the entire Google Docs and Dropbox websites are https.
I understand SSL isn’t the end-all of security, but since I’m on (private) wifi in a large apartment building, I like to think we’re at least making it a little harder to keep bad guys out.
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I’m not even sure what the name of the industry is these days: online file space, cloud storage, hosted backup, elastic storage… but it’s free and it’s everywhere now. At work we rely on Google Docs (25 gb), with some limited Dropbox (2 gb) usage as well. I’m eligible for Apple’s 5 gb of iCloud, and through my webhost I have 50 gb. My personal Google account has a bit less than 8 gb space, and I’d guess that I have another handful of gigs through my alumni association.
All-in-all, tons of space, none of which do I really use for personal backup.
However, I saw a Slickdeals.net post for 50 gb free at box.net if you use the iPhone app, and signed up. To be honest, I thought the deal was for Dropbox, so I was pretty excited (and confused when my Dropbox credentials weren’t accepted — took me coming back a day later to realize it was a completely different service!).
Anyhow, I have 50 gb there now as well. However, the features page for box.net personal accounts seemed a little questionable: apparently, you only get SSL file transfers if you are on a business or enterprise plan. I don’t really understand — why does the personal plan on box.net not have secure file transfers?
256-bit SSL encryption for file transfers with Box Business. Enterprise accounts also include server-level encryption.
It’s actually baffling to me. I’m not an expert in this area, but isn’t using SSL considered a best practice for this kind of application?
Is there any cost to putting all file transfers behind SSL? Since each file is probably new/unique to box.net, I’d assume there are no caching implications, and I can’t imagine there is a huge CPU cost given that, well, it’s supported by default for business/enterprise users, and SSL is supported client-side with browsers and server-side with, well, all modern web servers (right?).
It seems to me that with pretty major hacking incidents reported on a daily basis, security should be baked in as a part of the infrastructure of any product — as opposed to used as a feature differentiator between billing plans. Why be reactive to some box.net hacking incident instead of proactively try to protect customers?
The oddest part about this is that Dropbox uses SSL for their basic (free) plan, so you’d think that box.net would do it too just to be on a level playing field with their competitor. Box.net must have justified (internally) some reason why it makes sense not to offer SSL for everyone. Weird.
I’ve been in Boston for over a year now, and somewhat surprisingly, haven’t been to the doctor’s office yet. This actually marks the second job where I’ve not used health insurance in the first full year of employment… Good to be healthy, bad to pay quite a lot for healthcare that wasn’t used!
Here’s to having another year of good health.
I’m working remotely in Boston for two months, and had a weird moment with Kaiser Permanente today. It turns out that I’m outside of Kaiser’s “zone” — it sounded like they have no coverage in Massachusetts at all — and so therefore I won’t be covered for anything other than emergency or urgent care (and only partially, at that). In other words, I basically don’t have full health insurance while working remotely.
Also, working in a different state for 2 months isn’t considered a “life event” either, so I’m pretty sure my work won’t let me change insurance provider. I think this situation might be some sort of insurance loophole that needs addressing.
Was driving home and thinking to myself, if intelligence were plotted against inclination to compete, would it be a normal distribution? Or is there no correlation at all?
A quick Google search didn’t really turn up much.
