15 programming languages you need to know in 2015

If you’re a programmer, these are good times. Jobs in the segment are projected to grow 8% over the next seven years, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. If you’re a hotshot coder, you can make up to $300 an hour or more.

Those at the high end of the pay scale have mastered the languages that are most in demand. Which are those? We asked Doug Winnie, director of content for online learning platform Lynda. Here’s his assessment:

1. Java

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Java is one of the most popular languages for building back-ends for modern enterprise-web applications. With Java and frameworks based on it, web developers can build scalable web apps for a variety of users. Java is also the main language used to develop native Android apps for smartphones and tablets.

2. JavaScript

Every modern website uses JavaScript. It’s the go-to language if you want to create interactivity for your site, or build user interfaces with one of the dozens of popular JavaScript frameworks.

3.C#

C# is the primary language for developing on Microsoft platforms and services. Whether you’re building modern web applications using Azure and .NET, apps for Windows devices or powerful desktop apps for your business, C# is the quickest way to harness all that Microsoft has to offer. Want to play, as well? The popular Unity game development engine also uses C# as one of its primary languages.

4. PHP

Building a web app that needs to work with data? PHP, along with databases like MySQL, are essential tools for building modern web applications. PHP powers a majority of today’s data-driven websites, and is the foundation technology for powerful content management systems, like WordPress, which you can extend to make your site more powerful.

5. C++

Want to get a little lower level with your programming? When you need to connect directly to hardware to get the most out of your processing power, C++ is the perfect choice for developing powerful desktop software, hardware-accelerated games and memory-intensive apps on desktops, consoles and mobile devices.

6. Python

Python can almost do it all. Web apps, user interfaces, data analysis, statistics — whatever your problem, there’s likely a framework for it in Python. Most recently, Python has been used as a key tool for data scientists to sift through giant data sets for any industry.

7. C

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Why is the C language still popular? Size. C is small, fast and powerful. If you’re building software for embedded systems, working with system kernels or just want to squeeze every last drop of the resources you have at hand, C is lean, mean and ready to scream.

 8. SQL

Data is massive, it’s everywhere and it’s complex. SQL gives you the ability to find the exact information you want in a fast, repeatable and reliable way. Using SQL, you can easily query and extract meaningful data from large, complex databases.

9.Ruby

Want to kickstart your project in record time, or prototype a new idea for your next big web app? Ruby (and Ruby on Rails) can get you there quickly. The Ruby language is straightforward to learn and incredibly powerful, plus it powers tons of popular web apps around the globe.

10. Objective-C

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If you’re interested in making an app for iOS, you’ll need to know Objective-C. While last year’s hype centered on Apple’s new language Swift, Objective-C is still the foundational language if you want to build apps for the Apple ecosystem. With Objective-C and XCode, the official software development tool from Apple, you’ll be in the App Store in no time.

11. Perl

Is Perl esoteric? Yes. Is it confusing? Yes. Is it a super powerful language, and a key component of anyone’s cyber security arsenal? Also true. Perl has powered the web since its early beginnings, and is still considered a key tool for any IT professional.

12 .NET

Although not a language in itself, .NET is a key Microsoft platform for cloud, service and app development that gets more advanced and valuable with each release. Due to the recent open-sourcing efforts of Microsoft, .NET is now coming to Google and Apple platforms. As a result, you can use .NET today with a variety of programming languages to build apps that easily support multiple platforms.

13. Visual Basic

Visual Basic is the language that gets business done. A key language of the .NET platform, it enables you to build applications to support your business, and automate powerful Office applications like Excel to accomplish super-human feats of computation, as well as streamline your most common tasks.

14. R

R is powering the revolution of big data, and is a must-know language in 2015 for anyone in need of serious data analysis. From science and business to entertainment and social media, R is the language to learn for statistical analysis across nearly every field of interest.

15. Swift

Not even a year old, the Swift programming language has captured the eyes and keyboards of developers worldwide as a new, fast and easy way to develop for Apple’s Mac and iOS operating systems. Swift’s broad power and friendly syntax makes it possible for anyone with a Mac to build the next killer app for iOS or Mac OS X.

via 15 programming languages you need to know in 2015.

15 programming languages you need to know in 2015

Why So Many New Tech Companies Are Getting into Health Care

A flood of new health care IT companies has been pouring into the U.S. health care market. The cause of this torrent: the recognition that as market and regulatory forces alter incentives in health care, IT companies will play a powerful role in combating the overemployment and declining productivity that has plagued this industry and in helping providers improve the quality of care.

The dam broke in September 2007, when Athenahealth went public, the price of its shares jumping by 97% on the first day. Since then, the company’s value has risen to $5 billion. Athenahealth proved to entrepreneurs, software engineers, and investors that the health care sector is fertile ground for creating large technology-services companies that use a subscription-based business model to offer software as a service (SaaS).

Despite its size and growth rate, the health care sector was long considered an impenetrable, or at least an unattractive, target for IT innovation — the entrepreneurial equivalent of Siberia. Athenahealth broke the ice by proving that it could sell SaaS efficiently to small physician businesses, get doctors to accept off-premises software, and achieve the ratios of customer-acquisition costs to long-term value that other sectors already enjoy.

As Athenahealth accomplished its goals, several larger forces have dramatically widened the scope of opportunity in the sector:

• The Great Recession led to a loss of 8.8 million U.S. jobs and big declines in demand throughout the economy (including health care services) — yet health care employment grew by 7.2%. That reality increased awareness that a decline in labor productivity was driving much of the excessive spending in health care.


• The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 included the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act, a $25.9 billion program to give doctors and hospitals incentives to adopt electronic health records. EHR adoption has now grown to nearly 80% of office-based physicians and 60% of hospitals, fueling many successful software start-ups, such as ZocDoc, Health Catalyst, and Practice Fusion.


• The Affordable Care Act (ACA) requires that an enormous amount of data on cost and quality be made freely available. In addition, digital health applications, mobile phones, and wearable sensors, as well as breakthroughs in genomics, are creating truly big data sets in health care. These data contribute to greater market efficiency, more consumer-oriented products and services, and clinical care that is evidence-based and personalized.


• The ACA has led to a proliferation of risk-based (rather than fee-for-service) payment models. For example, providers in accountable care organizations are rewarded for generating annual savings, and providers who use bundled payments get a fixed budget for an end-to-end course of treatment. Effectively responding to these changing economic incentives will increase reliance on software that helps providers manage population risk, understand costs and trends, and engage patients.

These macro-level developments set the stage for other SaaS companies to follow Athenahealth’s lead in enormously improving labor productivity and quality of care.

Within the next decade, software tools will eliminate thousands, perhaps millions, of jobs in hospitals, insurance companies, insurance brokerages, and human resources departments. Not the jobs of people who actually provide care — but those of administrative middlemen, whose dead weight contributes to economic loss. Here are five examples:

1. Digital insurance markets, combined with ACA-enacted regulatory changes such as guaranteed issue and community rating, make it possible to price and sell health plans to anyone immediately. These developments will decimate the armies of brokers who act as intermediaries between customers and insurance services.

2. Price transparency, digital insurance products, and tools such as reference pricing make it possible to generate an exact price and instantly collect payment for a health care service. As a result, revenue cycle managers in hospitals and claims adjudicators in insurance companies will be displaced.

3. The inevitable shift to the cloud will render obsolete the costly, insecure data centers that most doctors and hospitals are now building, staffing, and running.

4. Adopting self-serve mobile applications will eliminate the forms, faxes, and excess staffing at many call centers, thereby improving satisfaction for everyone in the process.

5. Centralized clearinghouses that share information across organizations and state lines will eventually replace the byzantine, paper-based process of credentialing doctors, tracking continuing medical education, and keeping licenses up-to-date. That means smaller staffs in hospitals’ medical affairs divisions, health plans, medical boards, and state and local health departments.

Given that wages account for 56% of all health care spending, improvements in labor productivity could generate enormous value. Simply reducing administrative costs could yield an estimated $250 billion in savings per year.

As compelling as the prospective labor efficiencies are, the benefits of SaaS extend beyond direct labor costs. Easier access to data on physician quality, specialization, and adherence to evidence-based care will better match patients with doctors who provide high-quality, efficient services, thereby averting health complications for their patients. Moreover, software can help bring relevant clinical guidelines and personalized risk scores to patients and clinicians as they improve care plans, engage in shared decision making, and avoid duplicative services. Such efficiencies will, in turn, enhance how patients perceive and experience the care they receive. SaaS companies can trumpet all of these advantages, not just the employment savings they yield.

To seize on the new opportunities in the health care sector, SaaS companies can take these steps:

• Attack economic inefficiencies in order to generate immediate, tangible customer return on investment. Witness how Castlight Health’s transparency tools are generating annual savings for employers and employees. And be clear about the source of the ROI, given that in most cases the revenue comes from another health care stakeholder who may be able to undermine the business.


• Focus on building in network effects so that improvements made by one user enhance the product’s value for current and future users, just as Athenahealth does when it rapidly disseminates changes in payment rules at one provider to all other providers. Most SaaS businesses in health care IT cannot protect their intellectual property; so it is important to continually augment the value of the product to achieve scale.


• Use software-enabled service models, rather than pure SaaS. For example, Grand Rounds’ software not only recommends an expert doctor for a patient but also collects, organizes, digitizes, and summarizes the patient’s records — and then books the appointment for the patient. In effect, the software makes it easier for patients to adhere to high-quality, cost-effective care, thereby enhancing the overall ROI for the product.

It took Athenahealth a decade, from 1997 to 2007, to go public on the strength of its SaaS model. It took Castlight Health only six years, from 2008 to 2014, to do the same. Now an array of highly valued healthcare SaaS companies, each worth more than $100 million, is emerging. They include Zenefits, Grand Rounds, Doctor on Demand, Omada Health, Health Catalyst, Doximity, and Evolent Health. Indeed, Zenefits is one of the fastest-growing SaaS companies ever, regardless of industry, surpassing $500 million in enterprise value in its first year.

The success of SaaS companies in health care is thanks, in part, to an influx of leaders from other sectors. They bring with them teams of technical talent that deliver consumer and enterprise software faster, better, and more cheaply than many legacy health care IT companies can do. Witness ZocDoc, founded by first-time entrepreneurs from McKinsey; Grand Rounds, founded by Owen Tripp, who cofounded Reputation.com; Zenefits, founded by Parker Conrad, who cofounded SigFig; and Doctor on Demand, founded by Adam Jackson, who cofounded Driverside (just to name a few). This type of cross-pollination is an essential ingredient of innovative change.

The barriers between health care IT companies and IT in other industries are clearly coming down, and we expect the number of sector disruptions and billion-dollar companies to swell. As each innovation wave generates more data, disruption-cycle times will shorten, thereby forcing all players in the health care ecosystem to address inefficiency as they compete on quality and value creation. Those who fail to act will be washed away by the tide that lifts all other boats to greater productivity.

via Why So Many New Tech Companies Are Getting into Health Care.

Why So Many New Tech Companies Are Getting into Health Care

Retailers" Secret Weapon Lies In Their IT Department

In today’s world, customers are looking for an experience that streamlines the shopping process and caters to their needs. In fact, the quality of their shopping experience is playing a larger role than ever when it comes to making purchasing decisions.

A 2014 study by TimeTrade, for instance, indicated that 90 percent of shoppers leave a store empty-handed if they don’t get the help they need – while 86 percent of those very same shoppers would buy more than planned if they got that help, and 90 percent would be more likely to return to the same store again. In other words, retailers who effectively and efficiently guide customers through the buying process will win sales and customer loyalty.

Today’s technology increasingly plays a role in customer satisfaction. It streamlines the process and makes new forms of customer interaction possible. In fact, as technology begins dominating the landscape, retailers who fail to embrace it will find it hard to compete. And it has positioned IT managers and specialists as vital players in retail strategies.

IT managers must find and coordinate teams of people with different specialties to ensure tech operations run smoothly in the store. Tech systems are growing increasingly complex, often requiring people with different skills and backgrounds, changing the hiring needs of most retailers.

“[IT specialists] have always been important, but with the evolution of technology, just from a home use to a people perspective, companies are looking more and more toward IT to gain a competitive edge,” says Ed Smith, an IT specialist and VP and CEO of Abt Electronics, a Chicago-area electronics superstore which is known for its cutting edge use of IT in a retail environment.

“[Retail IT] is our DNA” he says.

The IT factor

A single store might need someone who specializes in mobile development, another who specializes in supply chain implementation, and another who focuses on analytics or on a real-time data and memory platform. A manager coordinates these efforts so they can actually produce useful results and coordinate actual programs and strategies with a high ROI.

Selling products online and making them available in-store for pickup has made the buying process easier for customers – and it also can save valuable space and resources for the retailer. And the use of beacon technology, such as Samsung’s newly introduced Proximity, enables retailers to reach customers like never before. Beacon technology is a location-based service that allows retailers to provide in-store offers to consumers and can even provide customers with floor plans of a mall. For customers, it’s convenient and appealing, and for retailers it provides a streamlined way to create and manage marketing campaigns.

Another key use of technology that every retailer should consider is making product information and branding available in-store. This may mean using video screens to display product detail, but there are other options. Providing free Wi-Fi is a simple, affordable and extremely powerful one. Shoppers with smart phones and tablets can simply connect to Wi-Fi and research products, or even find sales tailored to their personal interests and purchase history.

Some stores – like Smith’s Abt – equip their staff with tablets or smartphones so that they’re ready to answer any customer question with the click of a button.

Ben Davis is an IT consultant with the British firm Econsultancy, which specializes in using technology to bring together online and offline retail strategies. He notes that while many retailers overemphasize integrating social media into the store environment, mobile technology can be extremely powerful. Giving price comparisons, sales alerts and product information can guide customers through the purchase process. It can also help develop strong customer-retailer relationships while providing retailers with valuable data and analytics.

All of these projects require teams of people with different specialties – mobile technology, programming, analytics – to succeed. Retail managers’ coordination efforts make this possible. These can facilitate every step of the selling process – from stocking stores to attracting customers and driving sales.

“Multichannel customers are worth more than offline- or online-only ones,” says Davis. “It pays to implement tech that allows operational improvement – not just a flashy experience for the customer.”

 

via Retailers’ Secret Weapon Lies In Their IT Department.

Retailers" Secret Weapon Lies In Their IT Department

What"s Driving Greater Adoption of IT Operations Analytics?

With modern business becoming more complex and facing constant changes, unpredictable events, and dynamic demand by the end users – all happening at unprecedented speed – IT Operations & Management is looking to adopt the right tools to optimize operations to handle the complexity and pace of change.

Need to Do More With Less

In 2009, IT budgets fell sharply. According to Gartner, they shrank 8.1 percent in 2009, and another 1.1 percent the year after. Though IT budgets started growing again in 2011, they are only at the level they were in 2005.

At the same time, IT operations teams are running with fewer people and resources, while not only managing an increasing number of systems, but also dealing with the new complexity that comes with hybrid environments and the rapid pace of changes nurtured by agile processes. Increasing productivity while lowering costs seems like a difficult proposition, especially since increased demands are placed on operations staff to manage a variety of rapidly evolving applications across the environment.

Managing Enormous Amounts of Data

Everything from system successes to system failures, and all points in between, are logged and saved as IT operations data. IT services, applications, and technology infrastructure generate data every second of every day. All of that raw, unstructured or polystructured data is needed to manage operations successfully. The problem is that doing more with less requires a level of efficiency that can only come from complete visibility and intelligent control based on the detailed information coming out of IT systems.

Frequent Changes Occur in IT Operations

With the operations staff responsible for the health of the entire business it is in their DNA to resist anything that might introduce unpredictable changes within the IT infrastructure or applications, so much so that IT Ops are rewarded for consistency and for preventing the unexpected or unauthorized from happening.

However, solving business problems requires creativity and flexibility to meet the frequent changes dictated by business requirements. New agile approaches eschew the standard method of releasing software in infrequent, highly tested, comprehensive increments in favor of a near-constant development cycle that produces frequent, relatively minor changes to applications in production. With hundreds or thousands of dependencies, even if the agile iterations are properly tested throughout development, unforeseen problems can arise in production that can seriously affect the stability.

Since every IT service is based on many parameters from different layers, platforms, and infrastructure, a small change in one of the parameters amongst millions of others can create significant impact. When this happens, finding the root cause can take hours and days particularly given the pace and diversity of changes. In many cases unplanned changes lie at the root of many failures. This can create business and IT crises that should be resolved quickly to avoid productivity and business losses.

Traditional Approaches Failed

Problems can be difficult to manage or even identify because so many businesses rely only on monitoring software, which is not sufficient alone to address challenges described above. In fact, problems are often not detected until they have grown out of control. If these issues are not resolved quickly, the result is downtime.

All of the technology infrastructure running an enterprise or organization generates massive streams of data in such an array of unpredictable formats that it can be difficult to leverage using traditional methods or handle in a timely manner. IT operations management based on a collection of limited function and non-integrated tools lacks the agility, automation, and intelligence required to maintain stability in today’s dynamic data centers. Collecting data, filtering it to make it more manageable, and presenting it in a dashboard is nice, but not prescriptive.

One of the holy grails still unresolved in IT management is intelligent IT automation. There are pieces of activities that are automated, targeted at the repetitive, well-known, mundane activities. This can free up people and resources to perform more innovative activities, and offer a more agile, speedy response from IT.

However, while automation is an important tool in the kit, it’s just one of the tools. The effort to automate complex environments is proportional to the complexity. Essentially, automation is just another generation of scripting of those activities that are running as part of operations designed to spawn and manage slave automation gofers.

The Rise of IT Operations Analytics

Given that changes to the operational model are almost guaranteed, a change in perspective is needed where IT operations takes a proactive approach to service management. Applying big data concepts to the reams of data collected by IT operations tools allows IT management software vendors to efficiently address a wide range of operational decisions. Because of the complexity of environments and processes and the dynamics of the environment, organizations need to have automation that is analytics driven.

With all of this data, IT Operations Analytics (ITOA) tools stand as powerful solutions for IT, helping to sift through all of the big data to generate valuable insights and business solutions. IT Operations Analytics can provide the necessary insight buried in piles of complex data, and can help IT operations teams to proactively determine risks, impacts, or the potential for outages that may come out of various events that take place in the environment.

Allowing a new way for operations to proactively manage IT system performance, availability, and security in complex and dynamic environments with less resources and greater speed, ITOA contributes both to the top and bottom line of any organization, cutting operations costs and increasing business value through both greater user experience and reliability of business transactions.

via What’s Driving Greater Adoption of IT Operations Analytics? | Data Center Knowledge.

What"s Driving Greater Adoption of IT Operations Analytics?

Women in Tech You Need to Know

Good news, according to a report released by the Center for American Progress:

The number of women-owned firms in the US grew by 59 percent from 1997 to 2013 — 1.5 times the national average.

Women of color are the majority owners at close to one-third of all women-owned firms in the nation.

African American women are both the fastest-growing segment of the women-owned-business population and the largest share of female business owners among women of color, at 13 percent.

Recently, I asked my folks to contribute names of impressive women in the STEM field who really have their boots on the ground. We got some really good responses, and have compiled an abbreviated list in no particular order. (You can read the full list here.)

1. Bindu Reddy, CEO and Co-Founder of MyLikes

Before starting MyLikes, Bindu was at Google and oversaw product management for several products including Google Docs, Google Sites, Google Video and Blogger. When she first started at Google, Bindu was a Product Manager for AdWords, where she improved the AdWords bidding model by introducing Quality Based Bidding and Quality Score for keywords. She was also in charge of Google’s shopping engine — Google Product Search and designed and launched Google Base.

Before Google, Bindu founded AiYo — a shopping recommendations service. Earlier in her career, Bindu was the Director of Product Management at eLance and a Computational Biologist at Exelixis.

2. Edie Stern, a distinguished Engineer and Inventor at IBM Edie has more than 100 patents to her name, and has been awarded the Kate Gleason Award for lifetime achievement. She received the award for the development of novel applications of new technologies. The 100 patents to her name represent her work in the worlds of telephony and the Internet, remote health monitoring, and digital media.

3. Ellen Spertus, Research Scientist at Google & Computer Science Professor at Mills University

Ellen’s areas of focus are in structured information retrieval, online communities, gender in computer science, and social effects of computing. She was a core engineer of App Inventor for Android, which enables computing novices to create mobile apps. and she co-authored a book on App Inventor.

Ellen has been working to bring more women into computing for decades now. In 1991, while studying computer science at MIT, she published a paper titled, “Why are there so few Female Computer Scientists.” And Ellen tells girls: “I’m sorry to tell you that Hogwarts isn’t real — but MIT is.”

via Women in Tech You Need to Know | Craig Newmark.

Women in Tech You Need to Know 

How To Hire Like Google And Facebook: Evaluating Candidates Beyond Their Technical Ability

In a previous Forbes post, we considered the disconcerting reality that even in the midst of an unemployment crisis, employers across industries are still unable to find the talent profiles they need. How is it possible that even highly educated candidates are unable to find skilled work when millions of open positions go unfilled? Evidence indicates that this talent gap is not due to the absence of technical skills, as one might expect, but rather to the absence of “soft skills,” or what we’ll call 21st century skills, in prospective candidates. These primarily refer to interpersonal and general analytic abilities like teamwork, empathy, leadership, negotiation, adaptability, and problem solving.

As we discussed, this is useful information for students and educators, but lessons from this research could be of particular benefit to employers, as well. The problem is that 21^st century skills are very difficult to assess with any kind of rigor, especially before one can evaluate a candidate on the job. Can a candidate think innovatively? Collaborate with other team members? Assimilate feedback and coaching? Will the candidate be adaptable to new environments and successfully integrate with teams? It is very difficult to reduce these questions to discrete qualifications and quantifiable metrics in the same way we assess recognized degrees and numerical grades.

Certainly some approaches exist. For example, businesses have used “type”-based personality tests for decades in attempts to measure the soft skills of prospective candidates, assuming that certain personality types would correlate with high performance. One example is the Jung Typology Profiler for Workplace™ (JPTW), which purports to measure qualities such as “Power” (leadership potential), “Assurance,” “Visionary,” “Rationality,” and so forth.

Despite the promise of measuring key skills, the reality is that personality tests have serious methodological flaws and lack the statistical reliability to predict performance among prospective employees. For example, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) is a closely-related profiler to the JPTW that also has its origins in Jungian typology from the early 20th century. The makers of the MBTI clearly state in their ethical guidelines that “It is unethical, and in many cases illegal, to require job applicants to take the Indicator if the results will be used to screen out applicants.” Because of their shared methodological limitations, the same restrictions should apply to the JPTW.

It’s clear that we need 21^st century methods to assess 21^st century skills. Unfortunately, that seemingly simple idea proves to be much trickier in practice than it is in theory.

Tools for talent development do not work for pre-employment screening

Part of the problem is that many companies are using the wrong tools for the job.   There is a fundamental difference between tools intended to develop existing teams and tools used for pre-employment selection.

For developing existing teams, there is evidence that “type”-based  personality tests can help managers better develop and deploy the talent they have already hired. For example, Gallup’s StrengthsFinder 2.0 is a tool that helps individuals understand and describe their own talents, and is commonly used by managers to understand and capitalize on the strengths of those they hire. More importantly, it is methodologically sound, and its reliability and validity are backed up by clear evidence.

For example, Facebook uses StrengthsFinder in a clever way to deploy talent efficiently. Regardless of the job openings they have available, Facebook simply hires the smartest people it can find, then uses StrengthsFinder results to understand their talents and create a job tailored to the candidate.

One might naturally assume that the same type of test that helps identify and develop strengths in an existing team could also be used to assess suitable candidates for entry into that team. In the words of Gallup, “Absolutely not… A development-oriented assessment such as StrengthsFinder is markedly different from selection tools because its purpose is not to assess whether an individual is suited for a particular job or role. Instead, it aims to provide talent insights for developing strengths within roles.”

Personality tests cannot be used for the same purpose as pre-employment selection tools because they simply can’t perform the key function: predicting employee performance. For example, two people who have the same set of innate strengths (according to a personality test) could have widely varying job performance. And of course, two people with a completely different set of strengths could do the same job equally well.

Pre-employment selection tools can predict employee performance on the job

Many pre-employment selection tools succeed at predicting performance because they have a completely different design than talent development tools like personality tests. Instead of seeking general traits and preferences, selection tools are tailored to a particular job in a particular organization, and are statistically calibrated to provide reliable predictive results (i.e., candidates who score highly on these tests also tend to perform well after they’re hired). In addition to the StrengthsFinder development tool, Gallup also offers these pre-employment selection tools, which include analytic services to confirm the validity and predictive value of the measures for candidate screening.

Pairin, Inc. is another organization that seeks to combine the personality test approach with specialized testing (for specific jobs, values, culture, etc.) as part of a pre-employment selection system. Using the Job Pairin System, employers can assess the presence of around 100 coachable/changeable behaviors such as emotional intelligence, leadership, attraction of followers, and even character.

A new spin on the behavioral interview

While services from Gallup and Pairin provide strong, evidence-based methods, the debate on using metrics to assess 21^st century skills will certainly continue. For good or bad, it is unlikely that the traditional way to measure 21^st century skills – the behavioral interview – will be unseated anytime soon. (Behavioral interviews are those that include situational questions like “Tell me about a time when you worked effectively under pressure.”)

Certainly, behavioral interviewing has problems of its own – for example, canned and otherwise disingenuous responses are all too common. While most companies still use a behavioral interviewing approach, those with top hiring practices are able to mitigate these issues. First and most importantly: skilled interviewers are often able to weed out rote responses by probing on the details of the situation discussed. This can help get the candidate “off script” and thus generate better insights about their true personality.

The behavioral questions themselves can also be written in a way that yields better insights. For example, Teach for America includes tough questions like “What would cause you to want to dropout of Teach For America if you were chosen?” Questions like these, for which the “obvious” answers might not be the best, could evoke a wider spread between canned responses and those that show more nuance and self-awareness.

As another example of innovation, Google also uses behavioral interviews, but structures them in a way that allows HR to perform analytics and prove that certain responses reliably predict employee performance.

Beyond the interview

Whatever method companies use to assess 21^st century skills in prospective employees, it’s important that they reflect on the key principles behind the assessment approaches. Findings from research on 21^st century skills provide an extremely valuable lens through which companies can view all interactions with candidates. Consider: What can you teach a new hire on the job, and what can you not teach? With information now abundantly available to us, almost anyone can learn basic Photoshop skills, for example, via online seminars. But what about skills like adaptability and empathy – can they be taught on the job?

via How To Hire Like Google And Facebook: Evaluating Candidates Beyond Their Technical Ability – Forbes.

How To Hire Like Google And Facebook: Evaluating Candidates Beyond Their Technical Ability

Data-Driven Marketing Holds the Key to Sales Says Linkedin Exec Russell Glass

The rising importance of data to companies (organizations in general and marketing departments in particular) is changing the perception of marketing’s value. In fact, marketing is now so important that CMOs will make the best next-generation CEOs—thanks to their understanding of data and the customer.

Meet Dan Siroker, a new kind of marketer.

As the Obama campaign’s director of analytics in 2008, one of Siroker’s key responsibilities was optimizing the campaign’s website, a critical fundraising tool. Using sophisticated A/B testing, which involved comparing the results of 24 combinations of visuals, copy and calls-to-action, Siroker and his team identified the most effective combination for raising campaign funds from Obama supporters. Not only did this winning combination raise an extra $60 million for the campaign, as Siroker explained in this blog post, but the A/B testing also generated the data to prove it.

Marketing teams have historically found it hard to be considered a revenue center vs. a cost center. But when you generate $60 million—and show exactly how you did it—there’s no longer any doubt.

Now the CEO and co-founder of Optimizely, Siroker is just one of many pioneering, data-driven marketing executives who have become CEOs. Former marketing executive Paul Pellman was the CEO of Adometry before it was bought by Google earlier this year. Audi, Royal Dutch Shell, and Gilt Groupe have all recently named former marketing executives to CEO roles.

Here’s why this is a big deal

Only the marketing department has a clear window on the behavior of the prospect during 90 percent of the buyer’s decision making—the time spent doing research via visits to websites, reading online reviews, connecting with peers on social media and conducting online searches.

With the data created by this online behavior, marketers possess tremendous insight into their companies’ potential customers. “When I tell people that we can know, in real time, every single visitor when they arrive on our site and know what company type they are from and that we can target specific titles or regions or individual companies, they’re blown away,” says Bill Macaitis, former CMO of Zendesk, describing the company’s ability to understand their prospects in real time.

Marketing now holds the key to sales commissions

Marketing’s possession of this insight into the customer represents a huge shift from the past when the sales department played a much larger role in shepherding the prospect through the sales process. But now, the sales department has little direct knowledge of 90 percent of the buyer’s journey. It is now the marketing department, using data gleaned from the digital footprints left by prospects, that has the insight into this major portion of the sales process. And marketing can supply salespeople with exactly what they need: the qualified leads that are their lifeblood.

So data brings marketing and sales together. And because data can also identify deals that were marketing-sourced, the finance team also gains a new respect for marketing and its contribution to revenue. And finally, these changes have brought marketing closer together with the IT department, which helps install the marketing automation software, analytics tools and dashboards it needs to read the digital body language of customers and prospects.

Marketing is now at the nexus of business

The CMO’s team has the clearest window into customer and prospect behavior. To sales, the CMO delivers the leads most likely to buy to sales. To finance, the CMO shows his or her team’s revenue contribution. And with IT, the CMO helps built out the marketing technology stack that mediates critical interactions with customers and prospects.

The winning companies of the future will be data-driven and customer-focused. No one is in a better position to lead this kind of company than the CMO—the executive who is eminently qualified to be your next CEO.

via Data-Driven Marketing Holds the Key to Sales Says Linkedin Exec Russell Glass | Adweek.

Data-Driven Marketing Holds the Key to Sales Says Linkedin Exec Russell Glass

Don"t Rely On Salary Data To Pick A Programming Language To Learn

You can get paid a lot of money to code COBOL, but that’s probably a career-limiting choice. The less popular a language, the more an employer will be likely to pay. It’s a simple matter of supply and demand—or, as MongoDB’s Kelly Stirman defines it, “revenue potential and adoption [are] inversely proportional.”

Which is why Quartz’s list of the “most valuable programming skills to have on a resume” is wrong-headed and deceiving. Which programming language is “best” depends on a host of factors, perhaps the least important of which is how much that skill will pay you today.

Popularity Contests

After all, the best programming language may well be the one that is most likely to help you consistently find a job, not necessarily the one that pays best.

By that metric, Redmonk’s quarterly list of popular programming languages (culled from matching data from GitHub and Stack Overflow) may be a better place to start when figuring out which language to learn next:

Source: Redmonk

In this ranking, Java and JavaScript remain neck-and-neck for the top spot, with Google’s Go language rocketing up the charts to #21. So is one more important than the other?

Maybe.

As Pivotal’s chief scientist Milind Bhandarkar stresses:

Bhandarkar is correct, but while there may not be an objective way to evaluate the importance of programming languages across the industry, there is absolutely a subjective way for each developer to determine the best language for her. Namely, pick the language that matches where you see the future going.

Defining The Future

So, for example, cloud expert Simon Wardley notes, “If the Internet is the operating system then JavaScript is its language.”

And if you believe cloud is the future, well, Go should be high on your list, as it’s the “most interesting [language] in the cloud era” because it “solve[s] hard problems easily,” according to Red Hat’s Paul Lundin.

Mobile? Hard to argue against learning Swift (Apple) or Java (Android).

And if you don’t trust your own judgment, programming language popularity rankings like the one Redmonk assembles can provide a cheat sheet on the future. Just watch for big spikes in popularity like we’ve seen with Go.

Or look for relative popularity with employers, not ranked by salary but instead by volume of jobs. By that metric Ruby is waning, Python is relatively constant and Go is exploding, according to Indeed.com data. But if you really want to see hyper-growth, Node.js may best them all:

Source: Indeed.com

The Web, presumed dead, seems to be doing quite well.

Getting Paid To Code What You Love

Not that developers must always choose between future relevance and present salary. Quartz’s list sports a number of languages that both pay well and are popular, like JavaScript and Python (an excellent all-around language that doubles as a Big Data heavyweight):

Source: Quartz

Indeed, it’s unlikely that learning any programming language could be considered a bad investment these days, what with developers becoming market makers. Enterprises are falling all over themselves to hire and motivate developers, a trend that won’t diminish anytime soon.

With this in mind, do what you love. And code in the language that best expresses the future you most want to see. There’s never been a better time to be a developers, whatever the programming language you choose.

via Don’t Rely On Salary Data To Pick A Programming Language To Learn – ReadWrite.

Don"t Rely On Salary Data To Pick A Programming Language To Learn

2015 technology predictions for CIOs

As we approach 2015, we asked a few Enterpriser IT executives what they see on the near horizon: trends, watch-outs, and best practices that will make their lives better – and more interesting – in the coming months. Here’s what they had to say:

1. Mobile exploits will rise sharply

“I think whether it’s next year or next week, we are due a major round of weaknesses and security breaches in the mobile space. At the moment, from what I’ve seen in the past and the development cycles of these things, the opportunity for the bad guys to create havoc in the mobile space has barely started.” – Cliff Tamplin, Consultant and Former Vice President of Technology Support & Risk Management, Hyatt Hotels Corporation

2. Docker will live up to the hype

“Docker will largely avoid the ‘trough of disillusionment’ and continue its growth as a cloud-enabling technology.” – Lee Congdon, CIO, Red Hat

3. SaaS and cloud growth will continue to spiral upward

“I see a continued migration to SaaS and cloud technologies that were previously considered premise-only concepts. I think that prices for cloud technologies will continue to drop as well. Amazon Web Services will see increased competition from Google and Microsoft, which will cause prices to drop, and price is one of the last barriers for traditional colocation-focused companies. – Aaron Stibel, Executive Vice President of Technology, Dun & Bradstreet Credibility Corp

4. Execs will schedule more time for work (not meetings)

“In the spirit of leading by example, one thing I plan to do in 2015 is leave my schedule open for at least 50 percent of the time. I’ve noticed that even if a meeting scheduled for an hour is over in 30 minutes, it will still stretch to take all of the hour. I think that’s waste, because most of these things can be done by email. Leaving my schedule open will allow people to walk into my office, talk to me, tell me what they are thinking, share their ideas, and have productive conversations. I plan to make it a point to leave my door open when my schedule is open, too, to create an environment where you can stop by and talk about ideas.” – Venki Rao, CIO, GE Digital Energy

5. Streaming video chips away at traditional TV

“Video streaming over the Internet will continue to make gains against the more traditional television business model in the United States.” – Lee Congdon, CIO, Red Hat

6. Higher digitization will move into every corner of life

“Think screens and sensors on mobile devices and on wearables, so the sensors in your clothes are starting to report into your Fitbit or whatever you own. This will drive interest around personal analytics and allow you to start drawing conclusions about the effects of an extra hour of sleep on your ability to keep off weight, and so on. I’m curious whether this will be a slow progression or whether it’s going to feel so far away and then suddenly cross over a tipping point. Sensors and beacons in retail are still far from common adoption, for example, but you have certain retailers trying things out, and I know there’s much more to come in that area.” –  Peter Buonora, Enterprise Architect, BJ’s Wholesale Club

7. Goodbye laptops, hello mobile devices

“The long-term decline of the laptop computer will continue as more applications move to the cloud and mobile devices.” – Lee Congdon, CIO, Red Hat

8. The customer will be king (even in IT)

“One thing I see becoming prevalent in leadership is to make customer service everyone’s job. In the past you could say we have a customer service team, we have a marketing team, we have a commercial team, and it’s their job. Right now, it’s everybody’s job. So no matter who does what, the customer comes first.  And your job is to service your customers.” – Venki Rao, CIO, GE Digital Energy

9. Cross-platform development will become the norm

“I can’t say I think the web per se is going to go away, but I would see a lot more cross-platform development, where all the things blend together. There are many new development tools out there, including some that enable you to develop once and deploy across iOS, Android, NativeWeb, everything else. So this blurring of the interface will continue to run the gamut.” – Cliff Tamplin, Consultant and Former Vice President of Technology Support & Risk Management, Hyatt Hotels Corporation

via 2015 technology predictions for CIOs | The Enterprisers Project.

2015 technology predictions for CIOs

3 Myths about Engineering Talent in China and India

Conventional wisdom holds that the typical engineer or scientist in India or China might work for an outsourced service provider doing low-end computer programming in return for meager wages. Similarly, it’s thought that the main reason Western companies hire offshore engineers is to supply markets in China and India with stripped-down versions of American products at rock-bottom prices.

The remarkable reality is that many big American R&D spenders have undergone a quiet transformation of their product development capabilities during the last decade that includes embedding Asian capabilities much closer to the core of their operation. Offshore engineering centers have become central to businesses such as Microsoft, Abobe, and Synopsys. But there are just as many companies still stuck in outdated ways of thinking about their R&D. In our experience, there are three myths that keep companies from realizing the potential of offshore engineering talent:

Software only: R&D centers in emerging markets shouldn’t be viewed solely as places to develop low-cost software. Forward-looking companies use Asian R&D for a broad range of product development.

In July 2014, FMC Corporation, which makes agricultural products to increase crop yields, ingredients to enhance food texture and stability, and lithium products to improve battery performance, opened an R&D Center at Zhangjiang High-tech Park in Shanghai, China to undertake process research in organic and organo-metallic chemistry for the company’s global agrochemicals and specialty chemicals markets.

Mylan synthesizes active pharmaceutical ingredients in Mumbai and Hyderabad, and Air Products runs an advanced gas applications laboratory in Shanghai. And one of us (Bagla) has advised a consumer products company to design home care appliances and a medical devices company to develop dental consumables—both using Asian engineers.

Low-end, peripheral work only: The reality is that Asian engineering centers are now central to the success of many American companies. One measure is head count. Cadence, Infinera, Microchip, Microsemi, Synopsys, Teradata, Texas Instruments, and VM Ware are among the companies to state their second largest R&D teams are located in India or China. Some companies have more engineers in India than in the United States. Without the Asian teams these companies would be unable to design new products anymore.

Some time ago, Adobe said that over 200 patent filings for its products had originated from its engineers located in Noida, outside of New Delhi and that 20 of its products were run completely from India. The company has invested well over $300 million in India. In an interview with ZDNet, Niranjan Maka, managing site director at VMware India’s research and development unit revealed that engineers in Pune had created 47 invention disclosure filings in one year.

Cadence has over 900 technical employees in Noida and also maintains staff in Bangalore, Pune and Hyderabad. The India operation works on electronic design automation software and Intellectual Property. Synopsys shared, “Initially, our site here [in India] did mostly quality checking of products; now we have advanced R&D in simulation and testing here, and we have direct support for a number of customers from here that is quite advanced. The fact that in the semiconductor domain today we have the largest Synopsys Users Group Conference in India is quite remarkable.”

Executives who are willing to stick their neck out to better integrate offshore teams into the mainstream product innovation pipeline are often able to minimize employee turnover and truly leverage Asian talent fully. On the other hand enterprises that globalize their engineering teams purely for cost reduction often tend to battle fear and loathing on the American side while their best Asian talent moves on quickly to competitors.

Local markets only: The most pervasive myth is that offshore engineers cannot design products for American markets. This may have been true a few decades ago. But modular product design, object-oriented programming, and sophisticated global supply chains have largely rendered these objections obsolete.

For example, console video games such as those played on Sony PlayStations or Microsoft Xboxes were virtually non-existent in India a decade ago. Yet the erstwhile Midway Games had testers in India perform much of the Quality Assurance for games such as Mortal Kombat. “We installed a video game lounge, so testers could familiarize themselves with the various genres and game-playing techniques,” Paul Sterngold, who sponsored the program remembers in a personal interview with one of us (Bagla). “We trained a team of engineers first to play these games and then to test them robustly. After a somewhat painful training curve, the offshore team was actually able to match California-based testers in productivity.” Today most large video game product development includes significant contributions in art, animation, engineering and QA from Asian teams.

Casino gambling is only permitted in two tiny Indian states and revenues are miniscule by Las Vegas standards. Despite the absence of a local market, Bally Technologies, which spent over $111 million on R&D in 2013, maintains two of its four major R&D centers in Chennai and Bangalore India; the other two are in Las Vegas and Reno, respectively. It leases 128,000 square feet of space in India according to a 2013 filing and earlier reports stated that the company (now merged into Scientific Gaming) had over 700 employees in India, almost a quarter of its global workforce at the time.

These three myths no longer reflect reality. Companies increasingly rely on engineering talent in China and India to drive product development across a wider range of new products and for a wider range of markets. Perhaps the Taiwanese-American CEO of graphics chipmaker NVIDIA Corporation, Jen Hsun-Huang, put it best when he visited Bangalore to inaugurate their R&D center there: “We know from experience that India is home to some of the world’s brightest engineers, as many of our top employees today are originally from there.” The company also runs a similar center in Shanghai.

via 3 Myths about Engineering Talent in China and India.

3 Myths about Engineering Talent in China and India

Tech companies are hiring ‘perks managers’ in a fight to woo talent

The fierce competition for top talent in Silicon Valley is giving rise to a new job category — the perks manager — as tech companies scramble to be the best at keeping their employees happy.

The Wall Street Journal, in chronicling companies’ growing reliance on these perks providers, reported on Friday on workplaces such as the Pinterest headquarters, where a team of employees provide their colleagues with perks ranging from martial-arts classes to an event where employees make Jell-O shots.

Whether they are startups looking to gain a foothold in the tech industry or members of the old guard, tech companies keep raising the stakes when it comes to talent-attracting perks, the Journal says. An employee at Adobe Systems ADBE 1.21% is planning a whiskey tasting and software company Asana gives employees several thousand dollars each in an allowance to go toward personalizing their computers and workspace.

Google GOOG 0.38% , which topped this year’s Fortune list of the Global Best Companies to Work For, is a well-known purveyor of perks. The tech giant offers a wide range of food options, all for free, to its employees, along with meditation and fitness centers. Coming in right behind Google on the list is software company SAS, which offers employees access to an in-door pool and yoga classes.

Other tech companies, such as eBay EBAY -0.06% and design software company Autodesk ADSK -0.42% , are also known to allow employees to take weeks-long paid sabbaticals every few years.

Obviously, all of these companies believe the cost of such perks is worth spending if it keeps their employees happy and productive. Now, tech companies may also be more willing shell out money to the perks managers who dream up those perks and put them into action. At Pinterest, the Journal reports, such a coordinator could make anywhere from $40,000 to $80,000 annually.

via Tech companies are hiring ‘perks managers’ in a fight to woo talent.

Tech companies are hiring ‘perks managers’ in a fight to woo talent

These programming skills will earn you the most money

If you want to provoke an argument among computer programmers, ask them to pick their favorite coding language or framework. But even more contentious in an environment where engineers literally have agents, is which is the most lucrative.

Quora threads on the subject have inspired dozens of essay-length answers debating the merits of C, Javascript, Python, and Ruby on Rails.

We looked at data, compiled by Burning Glass with Brookings Institution economist Jonathan Rothwell in July, from thousands of American job ads. We separated out programming languages from a broader list of tech skills we looked at in an earlier piece.

The dataset isn’t perfect, it’s missing newer but increasingly popular languages like Erlang and Haskell, likely because they don’t turn up all that frequently on job ads and resumes. A large number of the ads also don’t list salary. But this gives a good sense of what employers are paying for different skills:

 

There’s some pretty prescient advice on Quora for aspiring or early career computer scientists. Though a language currently in high demand like Ruby might get you the best salary, it might not be the best way to make a career, and might peter off over time. It’s better is to focus on being well rounded, with a firm grasp of algorithms, design principles, and the ability to pick up new languages and concepts rapidly.

Others emphasize starting with something like C or C++, a language that you probably won’t work with every day, but helps you learn others more quickly and understand the structure behind systems.

Correction (Nov. 20): An earlier version of this article incorrectly referred to HTML5 and Ruby on Rails as programming languages.

via These programming skills will earn you the most money – Quartz.

These programming skills will earn you the most money

CIOs: Be the author of your own disruption

We are in the midst of a perfect storm of technological change. The user experience has been transformed for the first time since the graphical user interface was introduced more than 20 years ago. Now it’s all about the touchscreen interface.

IT delivery is changing, too, and is happening increasingly via browsers and mobile apps. The rapid growth in tablet computing means there is no doubt that the tablet will eclipse the PC by 2015, if not sooner. And we’re seeing most CIOs taking mobility from somewhere in their top 10 to their number one most pressing issue, as executives and the rest of the business demand service delivery on these devices.

When user experience and IT delivery change together, then the ways we design and deliver IT must change, too. For example, if your IT isn’t extremely easy to use, or requires training to be able to engage with it, then you’re in big trouble.

Yet the real issue we’re facing is not with mobile devices, but mobile data. App stores are creating a new conduit for users that is disintermediating corporate IT. This is probably one of the most disruptive threats: users get access to an unlimited number of tools in seconds, use them for work and then discard them (and the information they contain) when they’re no longer needed. It’s hard for traditional IT to compete with that speed of delivery and keep track of how those apps are being propagated outwards.

“Every CIO has to look at how to stay relevant. It’s time they disrupted themselves before the world does it for them.”

But smart mobile is about much more than just devices. Today’s models are bristling with functions such as microphones, video, GPS, gyroscopes and accelerometers, which are enabling some very interesting business applications. So smart mobile is also a way to revolutionize how we do things in our companies. At many organizations, however, there’s still this attitude: “We didn’t invent these technologies. They’re being imposed upon us from outside. They’re not designed by us, for us. This isn’t how we do IT.”

But technologies are now being designed elsewhere for consumers and then brought into the enterprise — and that’s how we need to do IT from now on.

For example, the CIO of a large US media company realized he had a major challenge with consumerization. Employees were going out, getting their own IT, doing their own outsourcing and implementing their own “bring your own device” policies.

He said to them, “Look, I want to be a solution provider. I understand our organization and our architecture best, and I understand you users better than anyone on the outside. So I want you to let me bid on everything you need in terms of IT, but I also want you to go out and see if you can find anyone that can provide it better. If you do, and I can’t match them, then I’ll work with that service provider and make it work for you.”

What we see here is an IT leader placing himself directly in competition with the whole world — a trend that is happening anyway — and making an opportunity out of it. Like him, every CIO has to look at how to stay relevant and avoid being completely disintermediated from the service delivery process.

It’s a challenging time for IT leaders, but it’s also a time filled with opportunity. They can do more than they ever could before, but they’ve got to move forward and respond differently. It’s time they disrupted themselves before the world does it for them.

via CIOs: Be the author of your own disruption – I-CIO | I-CIO.

CIOs: Be the author of your own disruption

How To Get a Job at Google, Facebook or Apple [INFOGRAPHIC]

Jobs at Google, Facebook and Apple are the most sought-after careers in the Silicon Valley. 1 in 4 young professionals want to work at Google, but fewer than 1 in 250 applicants will ever work at the company. Knowing what types of skills and expertise these companies are looking for will somehow give you an idea whether you stand a chance to enjoy the perks that these companies provide to its employees.

In an infographic published by Masters Degree, aspiring applicants may now have an idea on how to land a job at these tech giants. It also highlights the best paying tech jobs, the biggest tech hotspots in the US, the top in demand developer skills, and reveals the current openings. Furthermore, it provides jobseekers tips on what some subjects you can study to help you land a job with one of them. Since Google, Facebook and Apple use recruiters, the infographic also shows how you can better optimize your resume.

With the country still deep in recession, the jobs situation seems to be worsening with each passing day. Americans are seriously hurting, and with through-the-roof unemployment combined with stagnant wages, large-scale economic recovery seems a long ways off. A few industries, however, seem impervious to decline, and tech is one of those industries.

via How To Get a Job at Google, Facebook or Apple [INFOGRAPHIC].

How To Get a Job at Google, Facebook or Apple [INFOGRAPHIC]

10 Characteristics Of A Bad Software Engineer

1) The StackOverflow bot: This person ran into an error, did a quick Google search, and applied the first solution they found. The problem here is not that of copying from Stackoverflow. I think there are more solutions on Stackoverflow than any reference guide or manual. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a wonderful resource, if not the best. The problem is the robotic application of it without understanding the consequences. The problem is the application of it without fully understanding the context of it and whether it really applies to the current problem at hand. More often than not, I have seen people believe more of what they see on online forums than the code/system in front of them.

2) The I-am-not-a-tester: I don’t need to test the code, that is the job of the testers. I don’t think that even in this age of mature Agile methodologies, this attitude has waned. There is still an inertia against testing their code. Part of it comes from lacking the interest to set up a testing environment and partly from lack of coherent knowledge of testing. (Is it also partly due to an unspoken stigma against testers in the developer community.)

3) The I-hate-documentation: Some people believe that code documentation must be poetic and hence they lack the skill to do it, ergo not their job. In my opinion, these are the #1 foes of sustainable software. Good software is not software that provides a million cool features. Good software is one that has a few good features that are used consistently by many people and read/updated/modified by a thousand. This brand of developers who believes less in technical communication and precise and detailed documentation is the greatest weed to a company’s success.

4) The ugly: My code works, but:

• I have variables named x, flag, str, arr, etc.


• Most of what I write is in one giant method.


• There is no indentation.


• No consistent coding convention or style.


• Global variables spewed all over the place, etc.

This is the most annoying thing for me personally. It’s not the issue that the code is bad. It could potentially be the greatest piece of code written. But if a diamond necklace is buried in the debris of the Titanic, nobody will find it, and nobody will want to clean it, wear it, use it.

5) The short-term investor: He codes. He deploys. He moves on. No attempt to learn the problem. No interest in the domain. Just give this guy a piece of code, he will slog on it overnight and hand it over. You got a fix/working software. Nothing more achieved from it. Sometimes, it’s important that you have certain selfishness in the developer, one who not only cares about the deadline, but also cares about what he/she got to learn from it.

6) The protester: “I didn’t do this”. “This looks bad”. “Not my problem”. “This isn’t related really to my fix, but someone way over there made a mistake”. “I hate this (loop this sentence 10 times a day)”, “I can’t fix this, get the person who made this code to fix it”.

The person who coded that mistake has moved on, when will you?

7) The dictator: My way or the highway is their motto. It’s their “ideas” vs “your ideas”, not “project ideas”. It’s their solution vs your solution. I bet there will be an argument for sure. Somehow they will keep coming back to a part of code that you implemented. It somehow discomforts them even if it works, tests, and looks perfectly fine. This person is a big bottleneck to productivity and will be the first person to crumble under pressure and start pointing fingers. This person is not good for the team, however experienced/good a developer he may be.

8) The overcautious: The Java developer who just froze when he learned that he would have to write a Python script. The developer who panicked on learning that something in the registry needs changing. The developer who cringes at having to input things in the database. These people will do anything to avoid getting out of their comfort zone. They have weird superstitions related to having to touch certain parts of the system. I have learned, from personal experience, that this phenomenon is common with new developers. Good developers show a tendency to slowly/swiftly move out of their comfort zone in exploration.

9) The careless: Forgets to take a backup, snapshots, has multiple working directories of code, leaves system out, prints in production code, etc. Again, this is a newbie tendency and gets better with more professional exposure.

10) The lazy pseudo-hacker: They pride themselves at being able to trick the system into working. They find magical solutions to seemingly complex problems. My experience says that 9 out of 10 times, it’s just a facade. The hack is bad and will crash sooner or later and will cost much more than having to deal with it, with extra time right now.

via 10 Characteristics Of A Bad Software Engineer.

10 Characteristics Of A Bad Software Engineer

Exposing Hidden Bias at Google

Google, like many tech companies, is a man’s world.

Started by a pair of men, its executive team is overwhelmingly male, and its work force is dominated by men. Over all, seven out of 10 people who work at Google are male.

Men make up 83 percent of Google’s engineering employees and 79 percent of its managers. In a report to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission last year, Google said that of its 36 executives and top-ranking managers, just three are women.

Google’s leaders say they are unhappy about the firm’s poor gender diversity, and about the severe underrepresentation of blacks and Hispanics among its work force.

And so they are undertaking a long-term effort to improve these numbers, the centerpiece of which is a series of workshops aimed at making Google’s culture more accepting of diversity.

There’s just one problem: The company has no solid evidence that the workshops, or many of its other efforts to improve diversity, are actually working.

In some ways Google’s plan to fix its diversity issues resembles many of its most ambitious product ideas, from self-driving cars to wiring the country for superfast Internet.

Photo

Credit Stuart Goldenberg

As in those efforts, it has set a high goal in this case: to fight deep-set cultural biases and an insidious frat-house attitude that pervades the tech business. Tech luminaries make sexist comments so often that it has ceased to be news when they do.

Google is attacking the problem with its considerable resources and creativity. But it does not have a timeline for when the company’s work force might become representative of the population, or whether it will ever get there.

“I think it’s terrific that they’re doing this,” said Freada Kapor Klein, an entrepreneur who has long studied workplace diversity, and who is the co-chairwoman of the Kapor Center for Social Impact. “But it’s going to be important that Google not just give a lecture about the science, but that there be active strategies on how to mitigate bias. A one-shot intervention against a lifetime of biased messages is unlikely to be successful.”

Google says its plan isn’t one-shot. It points out that it has been trying to improve its diversity for years by sponsoring programs to increase the number of women and minorities who go into tech, and meticulously studying the way it hires people in an effort to reduce bias.

In May after pressure from civil rights leaders, the company published a report documenting the sex and race of its employees “to be candid about the issues,” Laszlo Bock, Google’s executive in charge of human resources, wrote at the time.

Google’s disclosure prompted a wave of similar reports across the industry, with Facebook, Apple, Yahoo and other tech giants issuing similarly dismal numbers about their work forces.

Continue reading the main story

A Man’s World

The tech industry has a reputation for being a boys’ club, and recent diversity reports from several companies illustrate how men dominate their global work forces.

 

Company	Total Employees	Pct. Male Employees
Apple	98,000	70%
Facebook	7,200	69%
Google	48,600	70%
Twitter	3,300	70%
Yahoo	12,200	62%

Sources: Company reports, S.E.C. filings

Google’s diversity training workshops, which began last year and which more than half of Google’s nearly 49,000 employees have attended, are based on an emerging field of research in social psychology known as unconscious bias. These are the hidden, reflexive preferences that shape most people’s worldviews, and that can profoundly affect how welcoming and open a workplace is to different people and ideas.

Google’s interest in hidden biases was sparked in 2012, when Mr. Bock read an article in The New York Times about a study that showed systematic discrimination against female applicants for scientific jobs in academia. The effect was so pervasive that researchers theorized the discrimination must be governed by unconscious cultural biases rather than overt sexism.

Mr. Bock wondered how such unconscious biases were playing out at Google. “This is a pretty genteel environment, and you don’t usually see outright manifestations of bias,” he said. “Occasionally you’ll have some idiot do something stupid and hurtful, and I like to fire those people.”

But Mr. Bock suspected that the more pernicious bias was most likely pervasive and hidden, a deep-set part of the culture rather than the work of a few loudmouth sexists.

Improving diversity wasn’t just a feel-good goal for Google. Citing research that shows diverse teams can be more creative than homogeneous ones, Mr. Bock argued that a diverse work force could be good for Google’s business. Could Google investigate how biases were affecting people’s work — and, more important, could it change its own culture?

via Exposing Hidden Bias at Google – NYTimes.com.

Exposing Hidden Bias at Google