Dominique Vermeulen
htt://www.vivaldisoftware.com

BRAINS – obvious prerequisite (but not alone sufficient – e.g. a violinist won’t code)

ATTITUDE – envision & actualize success

DRIVE – start, continue and persist through to the finish line, with evident enthusiasm feeding your motivation (see a problem, work with it, hammer on it to solve, or just drive around it)

the Wendman modifiers are
( not a jingo TLA – sorry )

SKILL – do you know what you are doing in the required domain of expertise (not necessarily transferable across various domains, and not the same as BRAINS – ie the smart violinist)

INSIGHT – you effectively problem solve in the required solvable challenges [see the Force/(path) LUKE]

JUDGEMENT – know what challenges you can win, and understand and identify the unwinnable – ie enthusiasm does not compensate for the less possible

http://mark-nano.blogspot.com/2005/10/wisdom-of-paolo-gargini-process.html

Excellent Article !!!

Instead, he just blamed the executives above him. That is lame.

As a woman, I know I wouldn’t want to work for someone photographed while arm wrestling…who then proudly posts the photo on the web site…and stands by while borderline sexist comments are posted to the company’s web site.

Maybe he will do what he always does, which is blame the CEO. Maybe he should try founding his own company and take the heat of the CEO job. Or maybe he just can’t so he needs to finder point.

It is hard enough being taken seriously as a woman developer in the valley, but jerks like this just make it harder.

Thanks but no thanks.

“9. There are those who look for problems and those who look for solutions. This becomes clear in interviews very quickly. Hire people who look for solutions.”

This is a variant on the old “don’t come to me with a problem unless you have a solution” drool. There are problems that are so small they should be called inconveniences, and for those you might rationally apply this approach.

But for anything that’s an actual business PROBLEM, you need to think about it a while, and you need more than one perspective on it, you don’t need an analysts’ idea of what to do about it either. Let the analysts analyze but make them discuss amongst themselves, and if you can get analysts you aren’t paying to do that hard work, great. But most companies are going to need at least a few internal analyst types or they’ll spend a LOT of time going down dead ends.

I’ve come up with solutions to difficult design problems in interviews, and I can do it any time in any interview. But I’d never work for a clown who thought he could pigeonhole me as a “problem finder” just because I am in fact aware of many problems (orthogonal persistence, semantic link consistency, naming conventions) that are so open-ended that they defy solutions of any general nature at all. I know where not to step… and the “quick solutions” guys are constantly falling over cliffs I know to avoid.

It’s sad because there’s a lot of useful stuff here including the banking on competition.

But anyone who thinks they should be rooting out people who ask difficult questions and admit not having answers, at the interview stage, is only interested in placing more and more people in jobs they can’t do. After the poorly-thought-out “solutions” fail again and again, and the incorrectly-framed “problems” recur over and over again in different forms (because no one got to debate them in depth in the company or outside), and there’s an endless circle of hires and fires,

There’s a name for people who ask lots of questions and try only those relatively few things that weem to fit all the constraints: scientists.

There’s another name for people who ask few questions but try to come up with something that “works”: tinkerers.

Inventors and innovators always have some of each type of DNA.

No scientist DNA? Hey, I’d call them lemmings. They might get lucky but they’re unlikely to have any idea when they’re opening a can of Pythons.

The same guy who then blamed Java and fired the developer who blogged about their perf problems. Um…yeah…what a superstar leader!!

Maybe he should have spent less time drinking and blaming the CEO/Board, and more time on performance of his site.

Good luck Spock. He seems like a real winner.

This is a great article. I will pass this to many of the young technology companies I work with. Anyone starting a new company should read this.

Let’s catch up when it’s time for you to move out of your space.