Real Offers

These days the well known online job board pages are often loading slowly because of the unusually high traffic. Among others LinkedIn is listing many office workers open to work, from junior graduates to senior engineers.

My unpopular opinion is that in the EU the recession is here to stay, and in the USA it will end after they manage to reshape the current salary expectations. As always, the bubbles burst and the companies surviving the hard times are going to offer new work opportunities.

In a rapidly changing economic environment innovation and experimentation are essential. Even the most established companies need to adopt the startup iteration approach for some of their projects, because we are facing new problems which cannot be resolved by adjusting the solutions elaborated for old problems.

It's very possible that the purchasing power and the nature of our income sources will change significantly in the near future, but the projects will always have at least three elements: a requirement list, a budget, and a timeframe. Who has a real offer for you will always tell you about these three elements, otherwise he or she is just enjoying a business trip meant to identify opportunities.

Of course there are countless tactics and strategies out there for finding out your "last price" or tricking you, but fair treatment is a nice to have, and the negative experiences are as necessary as the positive ones. One never get too old for growing as a person. 

Fake Offers

They are part of the reality surrounding us. It takes us many years of learning and experiences to make a difference between real and fake service offers, and there is no bulletproof method for identifying all the scammers. 

The fake job offers are even more complicated, because they can appear in multiple contexts. Two formulas I've read recently on LinkedIn are about keeping a list of vacancies in order to polish the company's image in front of the shareholders, and respectively to have a pool of candidates in case a specialist leaves the organization unexpectedly.

The games of the corporate world might affect the freelance job listings as well. Ultimately the companies backing those listings have a market share, a reputation, and more often than not they have a stock market quotation. In other words they have to demonstrate stability in their activity and income flows despite of the impacts of the technology, economics, and geopolitics on the job market.

The daily count of new offers on a concrete job listing is publicly obtainable, but the daily count of contracts actually concluded and their values are trade secrets. About 10-15 years ago the market of freelancer platforms was not yet saturated, and it was possible to grow such a business despite of committing errors in a row. 

At present specialized job marketplaces are concurring for a reduced number of buyers (project owners), and a suddenly increased number of sellers (workers hired during the epidemy and then fired). In my opinion some of these platforms will probably be sold, and until that we cannot expect major changes in their policies.

The fact is that a freelancer looking systematically for projects needs to get trained for filtering out a huge volume of suspicious offers and increasingly sophisticated fraud schemes. 

When being between two bigger projects I'm taking up smaller ones, and over the years I've learned to avoid several types of offers, but following carefully selected conversations on social media is priceless, it keeps me informed about the newest tricks exploiting the flaws of this or that platform.

Go Real!

Several months ago I revisited a couple of online job listings, and at first it's been funny to read a new  requirement: "we ignore applications created by generative AI". 

Then I've stumbled upon the flip side of the coin: the job descriptions copy pasted from chatbots. And it feels more like a tendency than a couple of isolated cases. 

Think about a company led by an owner willing to make money by riding the generative AI wave. He or she is hiring rapidly some assistants good at prompting, so to acquire projects and temporary workers meant to complete the projects. Obviously the temporary task force also needs to be great at prompting, because that's the core value of the business.

In such a company all the personnel is sucked into a bubble, where the lack of technical expertise is okay, and low quality is not a problem while there is sufficient market demand for their product or service. In my opinion the basic use case of chatbots will contribute to the retooling of the companies producing for the soho market.

Recently I've started to use an online service for checking the job offers, and to filter out those authored by a chatbot. It's risky to argue with a client eventually outsmarted by an assistant tasked to publish a project-based job, which looks a good fit to my expertise, but down the road it turns into an unexpected challenge for both of us.

The companies offering text analyzers for identifying contents authored by generative AI are serving the needs of the middle market. Stopping people from doing all kind of experimentations with chatbots is not a good idea, but preventing the improper usage of generated contents is a matter of common sense.

Everything Is For Sale

I'm living in a zone, that had experienced tough times during the WW2, from deportations, shelling, and hunger to hyperinflation. In 1944 in public places you could see people selling artwork, rare books, or even household objects, because there were no jobs.

Major natural disasters, civil unrests, or devastating wars are reshaping the local society. Depending on the cultural and educational backgrounds of the community members, the spontaneously emerging market-based relationships may degrade into command-and-control based relationships, or continuous warfare between rival groups.

Either way, the market continues to operate, and in zones with electricity and Internet coverage the online market will connect people. 

In the 90's the former COMECON countries went through major economic restructurings, and in certain former Soviet states the barter was the king, many factory workers received products instead of payment. In addition to supplying their friends and families with goods received as salaries, people were placing announcements into free advertising brochures - the predecessors of the online marketplaces.

The proliferation of the Internet has brought with him the more and more specialized marketplaces, complementing the web-shops, and local advertising websites. 

It's not a new thesis, that the structure of a given population's supply and demand is characteristic to the state of their local economy, but the job market looks to me even more interesting, because it says a lot about how people controlling significant resources are thinking about the future of their industries and/or geographic zones.

As a long term telecommuter I've seen the rise, consolidation and restructuring of various freelancer marketplaces. After 2015 the numerous junior and middle level programmer job offers have been replaced gradually by a reduced number of offers for senior level specialists in development, QA, and cloud infrastructure. 

Currently there is high demand for marketing wizards, sellers, and managers expected to run smaller companies or teams. It looks like business people aren't into investing in jobs, they are mostly after cash. Since less jobs does mean less purchasing power, the "everything is for sale" psychosis looks like a signal of upcoming changes in the macroeconomic landscape.

Domain Knowledge First

 Since the appearance of computer software there have been ongoing debates about software development approaches.

When I started to use MS Visual Studio, the product has already offered support both for  the "database first" and the "code first" approaches. 

The proliferation of websites, web applications, and then the mobile apps have created demand for rapid software development tools, and have contributed to the acceptance of the "UI first" software development approach.

While the "database first" approach is still relevant to industries with slowly changing technological and business processes, the "UI first" approach is the best bet for agile teams.

Interviewing users, keeping in touch with the aim of refining the user interfaces, and then getting the client's approval require both soft skills and specific domain knowledge. 

When I was collaborating with an agency specializing in bespoke software, I was encouraged to ask questions about the business logic, in order to uncover possible gaps in the UI drafts and flows.

Missing a task, a parameter, or a criterion from the user's processes leads to issues during software design and implementation. Catching and resolving those issues as early as possible is important, fixing them later in time requires more resources (waste), and produces frictions between developers and users.

"Domain knowledge first" is about preventing the mentioned waste and frictions. Whatever software a team is going to develop, at least one of the team members needs to take up the business analyst's role, to learn about the business processes, to stay in loop with users, and to review the UI drafts and flows.

10-15 years ago the high demand for websites and apps have produced high demand for front-end developers, and in short time a diversified market offer of education in the field of front-end development. Up to a point, the newly certified or graduate task force has been absorbed by the job market. 

Then the second generation cloud technologies have contributed to the proliferation of the SaaS products. Due to the competing offers of cloud-based office tools, visual designers, and other utilities, these products have become affordable to most companies. 

Consequently, these days a front-end developer needs to diversify his/her skills to stay employed, and learning more about the company's processes (domain knowledge) might be a perfect starting point.

Dream Big?

Most business, career, or personal development books are encouraging the reader to dream big, and the authors do exemplify their advice with presenting the histories of well-known people, who achieved their dreams against all odds.

Those presentations rarely depict the numerous failures interwoven with lessons learned and changes applied, and the years of "stand up and fight" exercises teaching us that success is a by-product, gathering and keeping nearby the right team is the biggest value we can be proud of. 

Last year, in a podcast a freelance reporter stated that in his opinion there are two types of community cultures: "mantis" (searching for resources, and using up everything found), and "cautious" (capping the consumption, so to assure the renewal of resources for future needs).

I think the same mentalities are driving one's actions when we are working on finding our way in life, transforming our dreams in projects, and shaping our human relationships.

Mantis individuals are easygoing when it comes to using, learning from, and stepping over their colleagues and partners. They aren't necessarily greedy or malicious, just all their trips are business trips, and you need to have a developed sense of humor to enjoy their company on the long run.

Cautious individuals are slow in building relationships, and the other party is usually feeling enriched by some useful know-how, an achievement, or a nice friendship resulting from their interactions.

The history is showing that both mantis and cautious people may become well-known professionals, influencers, company leaders, or even presidents. The difference is in how they've touched the lives of others.

The cautious versus mantis mentality may decide the fate of a relationship, a startup, a business, or even a country. Dreaming big is great, changing our own mindset, attitude, and priorities is hard.

OODA Is the New Agile

 As a student in a communist country I was not taught about budgeting - the mysteries of resource management were reserved for a reduced number of people tasked by political leaders with the elaboration of the famous five-year plans.

Even the director boards of the biggest companies were receiving fixed funds, fixed salary levels, and strict limits on import goods. The lead economist of each entity was sending periodically a budget plan to the appropriate ministry or local authority, but he/she received approval only for the amounts of resources considered necessary by the "higher forums".

This enormously long and slow decision loop has created the false perception of economic stability in simple people, and the illusion of infallibility in the dominant class. And the regime was disintegrating slowly but surely, each bad decision contributing to the process.

The poverty produced and/or maintained by inadequate governances is affecting numerous countries, which have never experienced a communist dictatorship. So a low standard of living per se does not seem to lead to the replacement of this particular social contract, rather the incapability of the decision process to operate adaptations to the changing environment.

The agile way of managing resources is giving adequate results in the realm of a globalized market dominated by rapid technical and economical changes. While self-management, and regularly hunting for  temporary contracts is a pill hard to swallow for many people grown in a country offering generous financial aids, for billions agile is not a new lifestyle, and in most private companies the manager's role comes together with a money fund for hiring/firing people and purchasing goods, and a calendar with goals to achieve and milestones to add in.

In a fast-paced world the director board is great for defining strategic goals, but excessively controlling the other decision makers would hinder people from adding value to the company's product. It's not a coincidence, that soft skills like team work and good communication are highly appreciated in agile companies, that's the way how they work.

Last but not least, the army for a society is like the immune system for the human body, a necessary evil operating with the best possible technology. That's why OODA was developed by an air force colonel, and it was borrowed by the IT&C industry. When a small team of flying units are patrolling half of Europe, then their mutual respect and trust are making history.

Free Lunch

 The latest happenings in the realms of the crypto business and social media giants are confirming the thesis that "the free market will always regulate itself". The IT&C people with some business acumen or analytical skills were aware that changes were around the corner in both noisy domains.

In my opinion using crypto does make sense for exchanging currencies in certain unusual situations, but neither for regular shopping nor for savings. In general, supporting a cult of tricky guys at the expense of creative and hardworking people is leading to a non-resilient society.

In contrast to the web3 projects absorbing numerous juniors, the big social media companies were trying to attract seasoned workforce and retaining top talents. The novelty of digital marketing technologies and user tracking produced a hype around the AI algorithms developed and maintained by social media giants, and it generated a big number of jobs.

The data collected by user tracking can be used for showing personalized content to the user, for market analysis, and various predictions. As most people won't pay a membership fee for using social media, these companies are making money with adverts.

Over the years Facebook reinvented itself as the main global facilitator of local businesses, but Twitter was trying to keep an acceptable balance between offering a great experience to their unique mesh of communities and showing targeted adverts. 

While Facebook has been growing an algorithm focused on precisely targeted adverts and content of the user's liking, Twitter was building an algorithm meant to bring together people interested in similar ideas, activities, or projects. In this respect Twitter's algorithm was offering a unique social value - at least until the company's recent acquisition.

In 2016 LinkedIn was acquired by Microsoft and repurposed as a hiring & carrier building site. I consider that for the time being their social media features are not really relevant. 

In 2019 the free tier of Google+ was shut down. They concluded that they got too many challenges for the existing user base. In other words, running an average social media site needs paying subscribers. In order to get the economies of scale necessary for supporting a freemium package (free lunch) the minimum number of unique users could be around 200 million - that would explain E.M.s great interest in counting the bots.

Enterprise vs Commercial Apps

 From the user's point of view there is no clear difference between them. The marketing narrative has always been that an app used in various big companies is a safe choice for small-medium businesses. You know.. if this or that cool-looking app is used in X company by thousands of executives, then it must be great for your shop.

From the developer's point of view the landscape has changed drastically during the last decades. In the 80s the hardware and software were not too sophisticated, it was possible to draft a compiler in a couple of weeks. Nowadays in a couple of weeks we may get ready the first demo of an app based on existing frameworks, third-party components, and services.

Over the years the software development tools have grown in complexity, have gone through differentiation and specialization processes in order to serve a rapidly growing number of domains and use cases.

As a result an IT&C student willing to work at an enterprise needs to acquire experience in specific ERP or CRM software. Configuring and administering standardized cloud-based solutions, and creating workflows with their designer extensions require a significant learning curve.

In case our IT&C student is willing to work in a software shop, he or she needs to acquire experience in  scripting languages, tools, and procedures came into existence for growing and maintaining commercial apps. Mastering all that also needs much time and dedication.

A specialist in enterprise software needs professional reconversion and years of experience to become specialist in commercial software, and vice versa, because both domains are evolving and changing rapidly.

And who is the winner? The infrastructure guys. Always. We all need a well functioning network infrastructure. That's why the software giants are investing in data centers, submarine cables, satellites, and security.

Relativization

Two years ago many millions of jobs have disappeared practically overnight, and people facing eviction or living on welfare were pushed to start shifting towards a new economic structure.

At present my zone is covered by half a dozen of delivery networks, and some of their agents are using  handhelds with great software - so where there is a will, there is a way.

The employees required to work from home have faced a more or less tough accommodation period. While telecommuting is not a new invention, it's an entirely different story if you've chosen that lifestyle as a good fit for your personality, or you were required to stay at home against your wish.

The protagonists of the big resignation are people with sufficient financial reserves to carry out successfully a professional reconversion, or their skillsets are currently in high demand. These guys have  experienced the pros and cons of their work environments, and have decided that they have enough.

The big quit is not a phenomenon in the Silicon Walley but a general tendency, including my country. People facing the passing away of a loved one are experiencing high stress levels, even if not entirely consciously. In most cases this process is determining them to reconsider their goals, plans, and priorities.

Working from home is great while we can meet in person whenever we want, because those water cooler conversations have always been the best quality food for our brains. The undesired isolation made us understood that we are social beings, we need each other to become our best selves.

The too frequent and too  long virtual meetings have triggered debates about how good or bad is agile,  Jira, and many other productivity tools. Is the wire or software the culprit for someone loving to listen his/her own voice, or not ready to organize his/her ideas, or pushing for nonsense processes? 

Quitting is about following our own calling without hurting others. The pandemic taught us to relativize the importance of money in our lives, and to value people more than processes.

Hello PWA!

 About 20 years after the advent of the World Wide Web Google presented a new concept of web application: the PWA. This young cousin of the classic web applications has more capabilities than an ordinary website, but its access to features originally reserved to native applications is limited by the host OS.

The "cross platform and cross browser" characterization is not realistic for any kind of software application, not even for static websites. And more power comes with more responsibility: the PWA programmer has to elaborate a cache management strategy, has to get familiar with IndexedDB or one of its wrappers, has to keep in mind that LocalStorage and SessionStorage cannot be accessed by the ServiceWorker, and implementing certain features on Apple devices is not a walk in the park, or it's not possible at all.

Developing and maintaining a PWA is more demanding than working with a web application - that's why I've avoided so far to try out this genre. Now, after learning more about the subject matter I  understand that the automated services offered for converting websites into PWAs might generate app icons, splash screens, error pages, a manifest, and some broilerplate code for the ServiceWorker - which eventually won't error out from start, but JS code development and refactoring are needed to get it right.

The evolution of browsers and operating systems is going against hybrid apps - programmers using Ionic or similar tools are pushed to diversify their knowledge bases. The general tendency of the software giants to improve support for PWAs, and the spreading of PWAs as website replacements are pushing web developers to get familiar with this technology.

PWAs have been designed to enhance the user experience, and the designer's vision has met the user's real needs.

Installing Jupyter Notebook with PIP

After spending years with online office solutions I've felt nostalgic for some desktop number crunching, and I've managed to install Jupyter Notebook on my old desktop with 32-bit Windows 10 and Python 3.8.

It took me some rounds of Internet research to troubleshoot the issues I've gotten during the process, but  doing a couple of ML home-works does not require the latest and greatest client machine. 

For interested visitors: below are the steps.

1. Update your PIP (the package manager is updated frequently, and getting the latest version might prevent certain issues).

pip install --upgrade pip

2. Install "wheel" in order to prevent a possible failure in step (3).

pip install wheel

3. Install the Jupyter Notebook module.

pip install notebook

4. Check the installation, (if you've gotten nonfatal errors during the installation process, the software might work as expected).

jupyter --version

5. Start the notebook server - your notebooks will run in the browser, this is the server module, and its command window indicates its status (be patient until the "home page" gets displayed in a browser tab).

jupyter notebook

6.  The "home page" is a folder view of your local machine, from there you can manage your notebooks, and shut down the notebook server.

7. Adding modules (libraries) to your notebook server, for example "numpy":

A. Create a new notebook or open an existing one.

B. Add a cell, and type in the following command:

%pip install numpy

C. Execute the command (run the cell content) - be patient, the log is displayed only at the end of the installation process.

Execute step (7) whenever you need to add a module, which is not recognized by your Jupiter Notebook installation. For example:

%pip install matplotlib

%pip install pandas

%pip install seaborn

%pip install sklearn

Enjoy the journey!

Cables Into the Cloud

 The first undersee telegraph cable was laid in 1850 between England and France, and then TAT-1, the first transatlantic telephone cable with repeaters was inaugurated in 1956. It took more than a century to develop an economically feasible technical solution for preserving the signal quality.

Nowadays 99% of the intercontinental communication traffic is carried over by submarine cable systems, including 95%-98% of the global Internet traffic. Taking into account that most datacenters are located in buildings, "the cloud" is about sets of terrestrial systems dependent on a multi-vendor undersee cable infrastructure.

Starting with 2008 portable modular datacenters have been offered by IBM, Google, and Sun (pods built into standard shipping containers), and in 2020 Microsoft announced a successful experiment with an underwater pod, but all those still depend on the undersee cables.

Google and Facebook are the biggest investors in undersee communication cables - it's estimated that they own about 29% of the intercontinental cables, followed by Amazon and Microsoft with significantly less percentages.

In 2019 AWS and IBM Cloud announced plans to deploy satellite-based connectivity, but there is a long way to go until that technology will be able to take off the pressure of the underwater network.

The quantum technology is in its early childhood, currently used in cryptography as an alternative to resolve the key exchange problem.

In an epoch dominated by economic and social challenges we can't take for granted that the underwater backbone of the high-speed Internet will stay untouched by bad guys, having alternatives is of key importance. 

Going multi-cloud looks way better from strategic point of view, and on the job market there is already an increasing demand for network infrastructure and security specialists.

The Catch-22 of Certifications

 There are countless options for enhancing your CV, from proctored certification exams to diplomas for completing MOOCs. Some employers are considering your strengths, determination, and achievements within your economic context, others are looking only to your papers.

It's understandable that in construction, transportation, medical or other highly regulated areas maintaining the required study points is a must, but in several countries the certification mania is a cultural thing.

The globalization has increased the demand for internationally recognized skill assessments - numerous multinational companies and startups have been considering the certified task force more attractive for their staffing needs.

As always, the market demand has brought onto the scene the good, the bad and the ugly: from middle priced exams and expensive weekend trainings to a question bank selling industry flourishing in the grey area.

Developed analytic and synthetic thinking, spontaneous reasoning, experience, good time management and prioritization skills, focusing on problem solving under pressure are all needed for getting highly qualified jobs done well. A bank of multiple choice questions elaborated by seasoned practitioners  may mock more or less common situations, but  real-life experience is key for growing professionally.

Between others the Microsoft and ISTQB certification exams have only syllabuses, and the candidates are supposed to acquire significant practical experience and to do research for readings, trainings, study groups for covering the subject matters mentioned in their syllabuses. Then the intentionally tricky exam questions are trying to measure the candidate's skill level and preparedness to act in unexpected circumstances.

Their exams have been taken by millions and consequently they have been receiving a lot of criticism. For example most software developers are avoiding a closed book exam, because dealing with code written by others is essential for doing their jobs, and memorizing too much details is considered a bad thing - due to the millions of objects and features present in their tools.

While I agree with the developers, I consider that the other IT&C specialists many times need to act rapidly in unexpected situations, so memorizing intelligently a considerable amount of information is crucial for diagnosing and solving problems on time and on budget.

With regard to pricing I consider that Microsoft has a very good understanding of the globalized market. Their tiered pricing model is suitable to many countries, and their price level is rather inclusive than exclusive.

The bottom line is that answering correctly 70%, 80% or more of a set of quiz questions does not transform anybody in a skilled professional, and pushing juniors to take exams demanding diversified experience won't add value to the company.

Outsourcing Patterns

 The online work marketplaces are clear exemplifications of the saying "good things come to those who wait". Just like in case of starting a new business, an employee needs to work hard on dozens of smaller and bigger projects until after getting noticed by employers applying best practices in field of outsourcing. 

These best practices are as diverse as the technologies and the customer needs they serve. I'm going to describe a few employer types proven themselves as successful outsourcers during my years spent as a freelancer.

The Craftsman: skilled worker with sound portfolio, good resource management skills and sufficient soft skills to build a team and maintain a positive working atmosphere, even if his or her business is limited by its nature.

The Consultant: highly skilled specialist with a proven track record, who has chosen to start a boutique consulting company, being many more interested in the technical aspects of his or her area of activity than the business aspects. He or she usually hires a complementary team of 1-2 assistants who are able to take care of the administrative tasks.

The Middleman: is usually starting his or her career as a worker with more or less technical skills but great people skills and interest in growing to take up the role of an agency manager. He or she is perceiving the problems as opportunities to acquire the right human resources to solve them, being a magnet to tasks and workforce.

The Scrum Master: a tenacious, constructive person with a rare combination of technical and people skills, acting as a mediator between executives, managers and customers in order to get the job done on time, on budget, and on spec. My personal experience as a member of various scrum teams is verifying the general opinion that performing well as a scrum master is hard, and "many called, few are chosen".

The Growth Hacker: his or her job history is listing managerial roles. None of those roles mentions explicitly the mission of upsizing the business, but the company was growing and its results were improving while he or she was making decisions. Scaling a company is a big challenge and be grateful if you have on your team someone who has the skills to do it right.

Outsourcing Anti-patterns

Beyond the marketing buzz of "getting your job done in one click" (for employers) and respectively "working online makes your life a walk in the park" (for employees) outsourcing is more like a new genre to be mastered both by managers and executives, since getting a job well-done is both art and science.

An online job intermediation company like Freelancer (and many others) is a great place for a youngster to gather experience in human resources, because in a couple of years one can meet a big variety of collaborators - both managers and executives. It's neither easy nor smooth, but the steel is hardened by heat. 

The virtual job markets are very attractive to startups, because this informal work environment with flexible costs is ideal for doing experimentation, the core process for shaping a successful business. Unfortunately the below approaches are rather anti-patterns:

The Brainstormers: if they have a good sense of time management, then you will have to sit too many hours of meetings; otherwise you will be the target of instant text or voice chatting sessions day and night. They have difficulties setting goals and directions, and are expecting the employees to keep the boat floating - in general not a realistic idea.

The Scientists are building experiments and are learning from the outcomes, being more interested in elaborating new experiments than in their product. They have good technical skills but little or no people skills, and the contractors are running away because of the random requirements or an improper manager delegated to drive the business.

The Magicians are promising persistent work hours, consistent bonuses, good business outcomes against the odds. They are funny and charming, it's a pleasure to spend your time with them, but after some time you will need to step back to continue with your life, just like their customers.

The Gold diggers are risk-takers, the first who are taking action within commercial conditions reshaped by political, technical or other changes. They have the necessary people skills to attract work force, but will always avoid to sign a win-win type agreement. Ultimately they are good guys, because they are offering you the chance to get out of some hopeless situation, but on the long run you need to look for opportunities elsewhere, because they are always focused on short-term gigs.

The Godfathers might maintain a familial and caring atmosphere, or an uncertain "divide and rule" environment, or a combination of both. Either way they are expecting employees to listen and execute, and you will never know the differences between their words and thoughts - not a good working recipe on a rapidly changing market.

The Blessed Requirement List

It's surprising how many managers have difficulties expressing their expectations when comes about work processes. As a debutant business analyst I was advised that whenever I'm dealing with a team leader having trouble defining their requirements, the best thing I can do is to encourage them to note down their needs. Then after a series of discussions with their documents and the software at hand the puzzle will get resolved.

Nowadays this methodology is called agile, the requirements are collected in a written backlog during multiple iterations, attended by techies, and compared with the written definition of done. It's a common misbelief that scrum is about ignoring documentation and real team work, since the KPIs are focused on individual productivity.

Thank goodness I've had the chance to work between others in a few well-driven scrum teams. I can say that scrum is about optimizing the amount of written papers (what a new team member would need to know when joining the project), and the daily meetings are not only about educating people on the task but also about supporting them to grow. 

Who is not demanding database diagrams, commented code, trackable tasks, written backlogs and priorities, is growing impediments. While a semi-structured environment offers sufficient flexibility and support for dealing with new challenges, shooting in the dark is expensive from financial point of view and toxic from HR perspective.

Since hundreds of years is known that writing down one's thoughts is a good exercise for clarifying and organizing them. Teachers and coaches engaged in developing various skills are advising people to keep a journal.

The right written document flows are battle-tested tools for making us efficient and happy, and putting down a requirement list is the best point to start from.

The Poor Man’s AI

Sometimes I have fun with checking the logs of my website. Over the years I’ve changed domains, hosting providers, and technologies, but certain script attacks keep coming in the exact same style. If I’m looking up a couple of IP numbers they are originating from, most of the time I’m finding them reported by admins. 

A few weeks ago I’ve discovered a new phenomenon: an IP reported and blacklisted by a bot. In other words a webmaster with passion for coding, and pissed off by WordPress hackers has invested some time and effort to automate filtering the access logs for common WP attack patterns, and blacklisting the originating IP numbers.

Taking into account that various hosting providers are scanning sites for discovering WP vulnerabilities, and the script kiddies might use IP rotator, it’s hard to tell that blacklisting a particular IP number is always a good idea.

For me the remarkable thing is that people are starting to teach their scripts to identify an unknown script  (bot, crawler, you name it) after its behavior. The first intelligent antiviruses adopting behavior analysis have lifted the software security to a new level, and in my opinion the main utility of AI is offering new possibilities as a tool.

Since the advent of online shopping, travel tickets, sports betting, trading, and property listing there are countless crawlers sent day by day, hour by hour or even more frequently to gather data. While the high-end and middle-market companies are already hiding their data sources behind paid APIs, and using refined AI solutions for blocking the undesired bots, the low-end markets are dependent on the cheaper and less sophisticated software automations.

A small family shop or local business are not losing money by serving a hundred of bot visits per day via a classic hosting package, but a regional online business hosted in the cloud usually has a big database and it's  paying a quantifiable price for the outgoing traffic generated by bots, and the slower response time of their servers might be noticed by their clients.

Many times the velocity of getting the latest data sets, or a specific projection of a big amount of data are the keys of the success of a business. Ultimately knowledge is power, thus for a commercial entity at some point it becomes profitable to erect a fence against bots. 

In a hi-tech country you can buy whatever data you need. In a non-hi-tech country it depends on the local culture, how much is the price-quality ratio of the data you can collect. In the grey area of partially digitized data AI may be used eventually to analyze sound tracks and videos in order to rate the protagonist's objectivity.

Hiring Ceremonies

 The hiring strategies are culture and industry-dependent, even if the final decisions appear to be dominated by the daily mood or delusion of a manager.

According to unofficial estimates in Spain 60% - 80% of the jobs are taken by family members, friends, or their recommended acquaintances. Based on the discussions I've followed over the years in various social networks I believe that the estimate is representative to the neo-Latin communities - I mean more hundred millions of people living in a Romance-language speaking country, city or neighborhood.

People belonging to communities with English-Saxon origins seem to have more appetite for experimentation, and for instance in the USA or Germany a bigger proportion of the work opportunities are taken by newcomers (outsiders, new faces) than in a neo-Latin country. 

In fact the whole telecommuting movement and the specific PM methodologies are based on the Yankee approach of handling multicultural teams and organizations. Their respect of diversity is manifested in the multitude of project types thriving in virtual spaces. 

As a freelancer I've seen both small software boutiques and companies with siloed departments; team leaders making hiring choices based on textual answers to a couple of questions, and CEOs hiring HR experts, or running automated video interviews.

Many hi-tech companies are using multistep pre-screening interviews for hiring. Even if the records of those conversations are analyzed with AI tools, the entire process reminds me of an age-old movie scene, where a mature lady was interviewing jobless youngsters, and selecting the right candidates in minutes.

25 years ago I told my manager of that time that I was not afraid of the future, because the tendencies can be calculated, but I was afraid of the individuals who are unpredictable. Since then  I've learned to deal with the uncertainty, and to appreciate people for the good things they've done so far, not for the mistakes they might make in the future.

Free Source with Upselling?

It has never worked as a business model. Although you can find many companies using free source tools, none of them has made years in a row at least zero profit from selling paid add-ons targeted to enhance free source packages.

From a marketing point of view it sounds promising to label a service offer as based off of a community driven tool, which is meant to focus on the user’s real needs as opposed to an abstract enterprise leader board’s considerations. 

Presenting a business entity with employees making a living from and contributing to the free source ecosystem sounds like declaring the company as part of the sharing economy, and it may attract talent from the Z-generation, there’s nothing wrong with that.

The real problem is with those guys confusing the marketing tactics with a business strategy, and funding startups insisting on such a strategy. It’s never a pleasure to work for a service condemned to fail - it’s a high-stress environment, where the initial success moments are followed by an endless loop of “whatever I do it’s the wrong thing to do” moments.

The history of long and respectively short-lived free source projects demonstrates that the need for paid software add-ons is scarce and/or random, and the revenues collected from selling would eventually cover the spending with hardware and hosting for upkeeping such activities.

This happens because most people and companies using free tools don’t have sufficient resources to pay for the commercial alternatives of those tools, or cannot keep their offers competitive on their markets in the eventuality of using commercial software tools, consequently they are focused on avoiding operative spending as much as possible.

The long-lived free source projects are backed by strategic users, or are funded as side projects by financially stable organizations.