Are you Serios?

I have just read “Addressing Information Overload in Corporate Email: The Economics of User Attention”, a white paper by The Radicati Group. Their motivation makes a lot of sense: we receive a lot of email these days, and there is not way to quickly tell the wheat from the chaff in your inbox. The “urgent” or “low priority” flags are often overused or not used at all, so they means little. And even for those who use them consistently, they only give you three levels of importance.

Once you remove all the marketing babble, what these guys propose a continuous scale to grade the importance of an email. The sender states how important an email is in a scale from 0 (zero) to potentially infinite, and the sender sees it when she received the email. It’s easy to sort your inbox on the importance column and prioritise emails with higher importance values.

I know, I know. There is the issue that email importance is modelled as a currency. Every time you compose a new email and state how important it is (using an importance unit called Serios), your “balance” is reduced accordingly. For example, if I send an email valued in 20 Serios, my Serios balance is reduced by 20. Since my balance is finite, I must think twice before allocating very high importance values to an email.

Wrong priorities?

My Nokia 6288 has been acting up for some time now. It resets randomly a few times a day, which is quite annoying if you happen to be in the middle of a conversation or typing a text message.

So, when Vodafone came up with the BlackBerry Storm, I thought I would have a look at it. It starts at 19 € if you sign up for the top flat rate voice and data contract, which may be a bit over the top for me. But I am still willing to pay a bit more for the machine if I like it. What I would really like to own is an iPhone, but there are two reasons why I can’t: first, only Telefónica sells the iPhone in Spain, and I will not enter into business with Telefónica under any circumstances (well, maybe I would if my life and the life of my loved ones’ were depending on it); secondly, my colleague Sara Atán owns one and she says it’s got a few glitches and functionality shortcomings that I am not ready to live with. So, no iPhone for me. Shame. It’s pretty. So Apple.

Wirfs-Brock responsibility model, ISO/IEC 24744 and organisational roles

This is why I love my job. I get to do all this experimental stuff and I get paid for it!

Okay, let me explain.

We are undergoing some reorganisation at work. In case you still don’t know, I work at a research lab of over 40 people where I try to apply software engineering to cultural heritage. Most of my workmates, however, are archaeologists, historians, anthropologists or soil scientists. Anyway. A few weeks ago we decided that we should define a few key roles that people should be playing at the lab. How do you define a role? Mmmmm… Well, ISO/IEC 24744 says that a role is a collection of responsibilities that a producer can take, where a producer is, usually, an individual in an organisation. I like ISO/IEC 24744 because I believe it can be applied to much more than software development methodologies, and the definitions are quite good. The fact that I was a key contributor to it has nothing to do, of course.

But we work in summer

More on the August paralysis. El País, today, full-page ad. An oncological hospital in Madrid advertises its services using the tagline:

We work at normal pace in summer

This is not a small note at the bottom of the page. Rather, this sentence is in large type, at the top of the page, acting as what we could call a marketing differentiator, i.e. a fact or property that makes this product (the hospital) unique from its competitors and hopefully attractive to the potential clients.

Isn’t this sad? This is not a video shop, for Pete’s sake. It’s an oncological hospital! And they use a full-page on the Sunday El País (imagine the cost!) to make the proud statement that they work at normal pace in summer.

This country just sucks.

Laetril

I have started another blog. Yeah I know!

I named it Laetril and it’s in Spanish. My goal is to discuss a variety of topics on the way we knowledge workers carry out our jobs, and I decided to start it after a few (Spanish speaking) friends and colleagues asked me about related issues that I have been mentioning here and in some informal chats.

I am aware that by writing in Spanish I am making it hard for some of you out there; however, writing in English would make it as hard for some others. And since NEH is already in English, I thought that a Spanish-language forum would make sense.

So here I am. Have a look at Laetril!

Consultoría artesana en la red

I’m so used to the mediocrity that surrounds us, and so ashamed to admit it, that dropping by Consultoría artesana en la red, Julen Iturbe’s blog on IT consulting services, is like climbing up a ladder from a revolting, glum and humid belowground cellar and coming into a crisp and sunny winter day.

What’s even more surprising is that Julen and I are so geographically close to each other!

Promoting engineers

When I was younger and more naive, many years ago, I used to believe that one would be promoted in his/her job over time, getting ever bigger salaries and tackling ever more complex and challenging problems as years passed by. I used to think that this would happen, more or less, for any profession that one would choose. Junior doctors would start helping more senior supervisors and, little by little, start adventuring into their own diagnostics, to eventually be brave enough as to prescribe medicines without supervision. After some years, perhaps, they would be able to detect some health issues of patients by expert judgment, using a well-balanced combination of lab tests, on-the-fly checks and gut feeling. Even later, perhaps as a mature person, our doctor would lead a team, supervising junior doctors who would start the cycle again. Until retirement.

Over his/her professional lifetime, our doctor went from being an inexperienced, passionate, almost amateurish youngster, to being a seasoned, has-seen-it-all, hopefully still passionate leader. But always a doctor.

I was wrong.

Software factories

Some time ago I read the book by Jack Greenfield and Keith Short on software factories, and I liked the overall idea. I even got involved with a workshop at OOPSLA on this topic, kindly invited by Greenfield himself.

Since then, I have been reading papers, opinions and news related in various degrees to the concept of “software factories” as described by Greenfield and Short. A few days ago I attended an event where different Spanish government and corporate parties presented their ideas and objectives about software factories, and I was surprised to hear that everybody is into software factories now. Every single company talking at the event told tales about how they have created a software factory with 300 or 500 engineers in some low-tech, rural area of Spain. It was unclear why everybody used the term “software factory” to refer to a large building chock full with “engineers” developing software; we have always had that kind of place. It seems that development shops become now “software factories”, developers become “engineers”, and software development is not software development anymore but software manufacturing. So chic.

My salary

As a Research Project Leader, I am currently paid 39,000 euros per annum plus up to 12% bonus depending on results.

How much are you paid?

Indicators

Over the past few years I have worked in and visited many different organisations, small and large; government, private and academic; IT and non-IT. And I’ve always wondered whether there is a magic formula that would allow me to assess the quality of the work done there from simple pieces of evidence that can be gathered by quick observation.

I have some candidate indicators.

The first one is the up-to-dateness of door name plates. I can understand that an organisation has no name plates on doors. Now, if doors have name plates on them, they must be current. If they are misplaced, misspelled or incomplete, in my experience, that is a good indicator that the quality of the work done there is poor.