Below you'll find a list of all posts from 2010
I spent some time perusing the programming stacks at Seattle’s main library today, and skimmed through some texts on software architecture. Perhaps the most interesting was 97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know: Collective Wisdom from the Experts (ed. Richard Monson-Haefel). It’s a collection of various two-page thoughts from people who do software architecture from across the globe. Think Chicken …
Sometimes when you’ve been the Hidden part of “Hidden High Potential” for way too long, you just want to find something that pays the bills. You look for a job, any job.
This is hard to do, even when times are good. When times are hard, it seems impossible.
Just ask Julie Neidlinger. She knows all about how hard it is to get a job when you’re grossly overqualified. The story she tells is an excellent example, because it’s such a common one to so many of you Hidden High Potentials. She went looking for an office job in the state with the lowest unemployment rates in the nation, lower than my region had during the good times.
I was looking for something Monday through Friday, normal business hours, regular paycheck, nothing retail or selling — I just want to be able to put aside money and rebuild my savings.
For some reason, in this type of work, I am not hireable. I do not know why.
So I’m going to tell her, and give some hints as to how she might be able to pull this off, and close with the core truths that are more useful.
For those of you who care, I’m spending the summer in Seattle at the behest of a fellow (much larger) investor in a Green startup up in Vancouver. He thinks it’s in the best interest of both the startup and my family to bug out to the Northwest. Where I am currently enjoying a “sunny” day that seems to be …
Research published last month in the International Journal of Epidemiology shows a link between being bored at work and dying early. Back in the late 1980s, 7,500 civil servants in London — aged 35 to 55 — were polled about their jobs. Thirty years later, Annie Britton and Martin Shipley of University College London went looking to see what happened …
Hidden high potentials (2HiPo’s) have a significantly higher risk of being scapegoated by teams than do normal people. People with too much going on are irritating and usually seen as a threat, which is why 2HiPo’s also adopt some strange behaviors that serve to obfuscate their high level of capability. There’s not much that I can see you can do …
If you are a subscriber, the latest Secret Rules of Career Success newsletter deals with how your unconventional paths to achieving more than other people can actually destroy your career and even get you fired. It’s a big topic, so there should be more coming about it. What? Not a subscriber? Now that’s just plain wrong!
The cobbler’s children go unshod. — Old Russian proverb I’ve told you for years (if you’ve been paying attention) that you can’t force people wanting what you have to offer. That you can’t change certain parts of who you are. That when people don’t want what you have to offer — either due to working below your worklevel, fighting …
In your personality, tweaking one thing will change several others. Did you ever think that you could learn something about your career and personal development from chicken breeding? ‘Tis true! Read on, true believer: [Chicken] Breeders working over several decades chose the most productive birds to reproduce, resulting in white leghorns that each year can lay 300 to 320 of …
List of what I have been reading so I can keep track. Possibly less than interesting.
Brief quotation from an 1996 article by by Lawrence, Bain, and Gould (“The Fifth Basic Assumption”, Free Associations Volume 6, Part 1 [No. 37]: 2855)
