Tag: careers

As of next Friday, I’ll be steering the UX and design efforts over at Posterous. That said, I’ve made a posterous site:

As anyone who even slightly knows me could tell you, I’m interested in myriad random topics. At the same time, my main site, Jounce, is pretty strictly centered on web-related topics — design, development, business, etc. So welcome to jackson.jounce.net, where I’ll be making shorter, more frequent posts on pretty much anything I find interesting.

If you’re interested in other topics and my take on them, do check it out.

Seth Godin, making sure you ask yourself the right questions when you’re going out on your own:

If you take someone else’s investment, are you prepared to sell out to pay it back?

How close to failure, wipe out and humiliation are you willing to fly? (And while we’re on the topic, how open to criticism are you willing to be?)

All sixteen are spot-on.

My former colleague, David Eisinger:

…it hit me: I would spend a month trying a new technology every day, and then share my experiences in Chicago.

It’s super important to think about how to learn new things, prevent stagnation, etc. If you want the cliff’s notes version of what David found, check out the Tumblr site, which has nice brief rundowns for each. Good stuff, even though the site should have been on Posterous ;)

From Bob Sutton for the Haaaaahvard Business Review:

1. My success — and that of my people — depends largely on being the master of obvious and mundane things, not on magical, obscure, or breakthrough ideas or methods.

Lots of other good ones. I think Bob is missing two things: the balance of managing up to people above you with the people who work for you, and the importance of accessibility and follow-through.

Harvest is looking for a completely inexperienced UX designer.

They’re tired of:

…designers who are so ingrained with preconceptions of how the internet should work they cannot think beyond tabs and check boxes; who seek approval from fellow designers while forgetting how to make things simple for regular folks; who avoid complex problems and call our non-design “opinionated design”.

I love it. I told a friend to apply.

Paul has a solid writeup and synopsis of the talk Talbs and I gave at SXSW this year, “Jacks of All Trades or Masters of One?”:

This is a good talk. They have loads of humour in it. That always works well.

Thanks, Paul! You can find the slides on Slideshare.

Sage wisdom from The Emmerblue about how to address your next cover letter. Hint: the conventional wisdom is wrong.

A fairly wide-ranging conversation with a Facebook employee about infrastructure, privacy, security, and culture. A lot has changed since the beginning, and none of this should be terribly surprising.

When I visited the new Facebook HQ a few months ago, the receptionist shared a couple stories of people trying to force their way in there, so there’s an element of physical security that is becoming increasingly important around there.

Aaron Swartz:

There are three questions you have when you’re hiring a programmer (or anyone, for that matter): Are they smart? Can they get stuff done? Can you work with them? Someone who’s smart but doesn’t get stuff done should be your friend, not your employee. You can talk your problems over with them while they procrastinate on their actual job. Someone who gets stuff done but isn’t smart is inefficient: non-smart people get stuff done by doing it the hard way and working with them is slow and frustrating. Someone you can’t work with, you can’t work with.

Good advice to start, and he’s got more where that came from. Some of it would be different for designers, but a lot of it holds for any position, at least in our industry.

Oliver Reichenstein at Information Architects Japan seems to define the UX field as the generalist discipline I have been advocating.

Can’t say I’m necessarily inclined to disagree, but many of the UX professionals have a skillset in alignment with information architecture, which is more design-focused. In order to truly be at the center of the process, the person negotiating these concerns needs a background in all of them.

Still, in the end, Oliver takes a pragmatic approach:

On the other side, whether you perceive a job as dull or fun largely depends on your character. Some people love organizing, others, like me, love to create chaos. Some people, for instance, actually hate to think, and that doesn’t mean that they’re necessarily stupid. The trick is to create teams where everyone does what they like most. Making work fun seems to be the same challenge as making different people work together.

The always-smart Seth Godin writes about the two ways to work with talent: giving the blank slate mission, where you have folks do their thing and hope for the best; or the well-baked and defined mission, which is more predictable in its output. On the results:

The strategic mission takes more preparation, more discipline and more difficult meetings internally. It involves thinking hard without knowing it when you see it.

The clean sheet of paper is amazing when it works, but involves so much waste, anxiety and pain that I have a hard time recommending it to most people. If you’re going to do this, you have an obligation to use what you get, because your choice was hiring this person, not in judging the work you got when you didn’t have the insight to give them clear direction in the first place.

Perfect. The client who wants the designer to just do their thing but doesn’t have time for frequent input is an impending disaster.