- The first rule of career planning: Do not plan your career
- “The world is an incredibly complex place and everything is changing all the time. You can’t plan your career because you have no idea what’s going to happen in the future. You have no idea what industries you’ll enter, what companies you’ll work for, what roles you’ll have, where you’ll live, or what you will ultimately contribute to the world. You’ll change, industries will change, the world will change, and you can’t possibly predict any of it. Trying to plan your career is an exercise in futility that will only serve to frustrate you, and to blind you to the really significant opportunities that life will throw your way. Career planning = career limiting. The sooner you come to grips with that, the better.”
- “Four Principles of Interpersonal Communication”
- “We don’t actually swap ideas, we swap symbols that stand for ideas. This also complicates communication. Words (symbols) do not have inherent meaning; we simply use them in certain ways, and no two people use the same word exactly alike.”
- Yahoo revival meeting features Steve Jobs
- “Among the key focuses of this ecosystem mentioned Friday was: the building out of Yahoo’s ad network, taking advantage of its ‘consumer insights’; the creation of a healthier corporate culture where fresh ideas could bubble up more effectively and be launched with less agony; and a new move to create a more open network a la Facebook on Yahoo for third-party developers to publish on and create more robust offerings.”
- NASA on using color in info display graphics
- “The process sketched below is intended for design of color usage in complicated graphics that support high-information-load, high-threat decisions, as in aerospace applications. Design of the color scheme must take into account the overall design of the application’s functionality—what the user is trying to do and how.”
- Life as a barnacle on Facebook’s hull
- “Last month, there were reports that Microsoft was considering a $500 million investment that would value the three-year-old company at up to $15 billion. Now it appears that such exuberance has infused the expanding Facebook universe, even though no one has yet proved it is possible to build a profitable business with sustainable revenues on the site. Some developers report earning tens of thousands of dollars in advertising with the applications they have created. Yet their applications are mostly running ads promoting other Facebook applications — a situation that recalls the earliest Gold Rush miners, who earned a living selling shovels to other miners. And developers must cover the cost of hosting the applications on their own Web servers.”
- Interview with Khoi Vinh about his role at the Times
- “That is number one on the top of my list when I hire someone: Will I be able to work with this person day in and day out, and would my peers feel comfortable working with these people? I’ve been very lucky, we’ve been able to find really good people who really believe in the brand and who have the character makeup that allows them to work efficiently and positively with their peers.”
- "Click Here" works better than other terms
- “Marketing Sherpa recently tested click-through rates for anchor text links in email. They found that ‘Click to continue’ works far better than ‘Continue to article’ or ‘Read more’. But why? Copyblogger’s Brian Clark concludes, ‘Not only should you use actionable anchor text if you really want someone to click, but you should also tell people to take the exact action you want them to perform in order to get the best response.’”
- A look at how two companies boosted conversion rates on landing pages
- “Take a look at the lessons both companies learned from the process. The changes on display may seem small and subtle, but the effect on conversion rates has been anything but.”
- Threadless’ retail store
- “It seems to be an odd move for Skinnycorp to take on the added costs and management overhead of a brick-n-mortar store. It makes more sense when you remember that Threadless is built on community. Having a physical space lets them give back to the community in ways a website never will. It helps them expand the brand beyond their current internet-found customer base, while maintaining the personal and respectful relationship with their t-shirt artists—something that they couldn’t do with many partners.”
- Radiohead to Let Fans Set Price of Downloads
- “Fans are free to name their own price for a digital-download version of the 10-song album, ‘In Rainbows.’ ‘It’s up to you,’ a message reads when a user clicks on a question mark next to a price box that has been left blank. A subsequent screen adds: ‘No really, it’s up to you.’”
Joshua Kaufman
on 05 Oct 07“Career planning = career limiting” That’s not always true.
Seven years ago I worked as a demonstrator at a science museum. Now I’m doing interaction design for Radar, a social media service. That didn’t happen by accident. I think it’s always a good idea to have some basic vision for where you want your career to go, and with each new job, always ask yourself “what’s next?”
Tony Mars
on 05 Oct 07“Life as a barnacle on Facebook’s hull”
This article in The New York Times strikes right at the heart of a recent debate that has erupted among Web 2.0 leaders and bloggers about whether web services can or should be ad supported or fee supported.
Jason Fried has weighed in on the debate but what do you think: Should web services be entirely free and ad supported or are services like 37Signals worth the fee?
Jared F.
on 06 Oct 07Is “Click here!” a dirty word to anyone else? I can’t count how many times I’ve asked a copywriter to rewrite a promo to make the link contextual. Is this the modern equivalent of “Leave a message after the beep?” We all know what to do. Do we just crave being told? Is that the idea?
Anonymous Coward
on 06 Oct 07“Career planning” – like it says in the article, you can still have a strategy. And the part near the end is so true:
“Working for a big company is, I believe, much riskier than it looks. I’ll talk about this more in the next post, but people who work at big companies are subject to impersonal layoffs at any time, and often forego the opportunity to develop skills and gain experiences as rapidly as they would at someplace smaller and faster growing. And then five or ten years pass, and you realize your skills and experiences are only relevant for jobs at other big companies—and then you have a real problem.”
It’s even worse at big government contractor firms. I worked at one for a few months and got the hell out. I’ve seen people at these places who have been there 25+ years and have still not made it to a first level manager. They joined as a new grad, learned “the big process” (as written in the 1980’s) and are now stuck there – talk about career limiting. I don’t get why you would want to do that.
Americo
on 06 Oct 07“RRRRRrrrrrr” The largest section of the Pirate encyclopedia, and a good friend of barnacles. Fine post, but more on priates next time. Rrrrr!
Jesse
on 06 Oct 072nd Rule :: Keep it brief, silly.
(KIBbleS & bits & bits & bits…)
brad
on 07 Oct 07@Jared F. —one of my clients forbids the use of “click here” and this sometimes forces us to go into awkward gyrations to avoid it in situations where “click here” would actually be the best message. I agree that contextual links are often better, but I believe in flexibility and mixing it up. Left to my druthers, I’d use “click here” sparingly, but I’d never outright ban it.
Nic
on 08 Oct 07@Anon: It may seem strange to you, but there are people who are quite content to live a relatively stress-free, consistent existence as a cog in a big corp. No much to think about, just the go to work 9-5, get your salary, live just goes on… What you may call boring.
Bryan Eisenberg
on 08 Oct 07I wouldn’t go as far as forbidding “click here”, but it should not be left as the default choice. Most of the time something smarter and more effective would work.
Simon
on 09 Oct 07Re: Facebook barnacles.
I wonder if Facebook will start releasing its own versions of its most successful 3rd party widgets (i.e. in the same way that Mozilla sometimes borrows the best features of those building their businesses around Firefox)?
This discussion is closed.