In an effort to organize my thinking and solicit personal discussions with others, I frequently post blog entries about the manner in which work ought to be carried out. I do this because I think that the West’s relationship towards work could stand to be improved, on the whole.

Lewis Mumford - a historian/philosopher of science, technology, and humanity - thought extensively about man’s relationship to the workplace. In this blog post, I want to briefly touch on a recurring theme fou...

I have been reading Richard Holmes’ Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science, which describes a number of enlightenment era scientific escapades from the standpoint of the inventors and scientists themselves. One of the major scientific figures of this era was Humphry Davy, a British chemist/inventor. Amongst other things, Davy was the first person to discover the effects of nitrous oxide (laughing gas) on human beings. He spent months inhaling ...

I recently read Barbara Ehrenreich’s new book entitled Bright-Sided, which contains a critique of the cult of positive thinking that has swept corporate America.

Corporations spend a good deal of money promoting positive thinking in their workforces. Consider the benefits of positive thinking from a profit perspective: it makes employees work harder; helps employees to cope (however delusionally) with the loneliness and alienation that accompanies the pressures and long hours of compan...

Nassim Taleb’s book The Black Swan has enormous implications for the human sciences, including the psychology of scoping and projecting software timelines. (If you haven’t read my previous post that introduces what a Black Swan is, I recommend you do so (click here) before continuing.) I want to use this post to relate a few additional lessons that this book brings to the table.

1. Watch for the nerd effect.

The nerd effect refers to the “mental elimination of off-model risks, ...

In her book The Female Brain, neuroscientist Louann Brizendine suggests that one of the most significant factors about the kind of career a woman chooses is her hormones.

Women have much more of the hormone estrogen than do men. Estrogen results in making us feel more concerned about relationships, and heightens emotional sensitivity. Says Brizendine: “[A]s estrogen floods the female brain [in the teen year...

In his book The Black Swan, Nassim Taleb describes a “Black Swan” as an unexpected event caused by some unanticipated variable that has a disproportionate impact on things. Taleb cites J.K. Rowling, Christianity, and 9/11 as Black Swans.

Black Swan events only happen under certain circumstances. The example from the book is say you have a thousand people, and that the average weight amongst them is 135 pounds. Now add the heaviest person in the world to this group – a guy who weighs 1...

In the four software organizations I’ve worked for over the years, I’ve found that very few programmers ever take breaks. Some reasons to explain this:

   - Programmers don’t feel the need to take breaks
   - Managers don’t encourage breaks
   - Limited number of suitable break areas
   - Not taking breaks is socially normative amongst programmers

Why take a break? The most obvious reason is to rest one’s eyes and one’s mind. A deeper reason is to get recalibrated with what matte...

Viktor Frankl was a Holocaust survivor, a renowned psychiatrist, and the founder of a branch of psychotherapy called logotherapy. Logotherapy’s core assumption is that man is primarily motivated towards meaning (vs. pleasure, power, etc.), and that meaning can be found even in suffering (e.g., building reports using Report Builder 1.0). Accordingly, Frankl characterizes pathological behavior as that which prevents one from experiencing meaning.

One of Frankl’s more interesting observat...

According to anthropologists, fire was first used as a religious implement, rather than as a tool to cook food, fashion weapons, etc. Fire only came to be used as a practical tool in everyday life when its religious significance died down. Anthropologists think this because they have found evidence that, for quite some time, fire was used in ritualistic settings and in no other circumstances.

Given the obvious practical benefits of fire, it is interesting to consider that man’s first and...

A colleague of mine recently circulated an excellent article (http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/GuerrillaInterviewing3.html) that describes how technical folks ought to approach the interview process. According to Joel (the author), one of the two most fundamental traits to scan for in potential candidates is whether they are smart. He meant a certain kind of smart, and I want to explore that (as well as other kinds of smarts to look out for) in greater detail.

In the world of psychol...