Ability to delay gratification

This is what has prevented me from achieving potential. Is it too late?

Thoughtworks questions

Whats a typical career path for developers. How often reviews take place?

Do you concentrate on software development projects or design as well?

What kind of Laptops are provided

Allow conference attendance (OOPSLA, Semantic web, usability etc.)?

Do you also do hosting or is it mostly consulting? Could I put together a sandbox environment to replicate some of client's environment we needed to work on?

Total 1100 employees?

What products does Thoughtworks studio work on?

Typical size of your team, typical length of a project

Onsite/Offshore distribution, process

If I find a useful tool, whats the process of procuring it

Books

Internal Knowledgebase?

Collaboration

Travel - International? What percent long distance vs, say on west coast? I would like to travel internationally, although not all the time. I think travel provides growth, with learning to handle the unfamiliar, taste of surroundings, cultures, people, food etc.

Do you work with any sub-contractors?

Benefits

Expenses

Ramblings

Its not really a merito-cracy. As long as you are able to speak about your skills and techs like evangelists speak about "religion", meaning you speak with conviction even though you are not convinced inside that you know the topic, its fine. Or maybe delude yourself into believing that you know something when you don't. So people will ask if you can solve a particular problem or if you are an expert level on some skill, what are you supposed to say...

I would like to say, I have a sharp mind, I am hard working, I have worked on this and this before, and maybe I can solve it or I am working on being an expert (you can never be perfect/absolute expert 10/10 in any skill!!!). Whats up with this hypocrisy. In any case its all about just making more money at any cost... I am probably in the wrong line here. Is it too late to change?

If I start a firm, who will I partner with, how will I get clients, will I be able to weather storms that will surely come without being blown over?

If I go to university, that place unless I luck out doesn't look too promising either. Same kind of beasts rule there. Even if I luck out how will I support family with very limited income?

Idea

Well, this is not necessarily an idea, just starting some train of thought to see where it leads.

If you are build something, it should perhaps be simple (but not simple enough ;) ) and something useful to businesses, preferrably smaller ones.

Something related to internet perhaps or something design oriented.

Re-read the article on web science, and see what body of knowledge from there would help.

Read some business stuff on how to start a business. Contact the guy from paypal who gave the presentation at ISNA few years back.

Something to simplify programming? So its not such a guessing game. You think you know how it will behave and then you realize, something is missing. Is TDD an answer to that? Perhaps.

Look at functional.

Ideas and thoughts on the web

I am going to start writing some random thoughts on these blogs, so a) I get more clarity of my thoughts within myself, which in turn helps me communicate ideas better to others, b)I can read them later and others can read them and point out flaws in my what I am trying to convey (user testing in practice :).

People spend most of their online time on "other sites", not on your site, so you can't be so self centered as an organization to create things so unique that people are ready to blow their brains out trying to figure out what it is exactly that you are saying. I don't think people at my company, especially marketing guys/gals get it. Some other people get part of it (including myself), but not enough to convince others or take on the task to start the conversation with people so they can change their old way of thinking and doing things.

One of the most interesting thing in the web-revamp/refresh presentation was the graph of customer satisfaction. It went up whenever there was a design revamp and went down again after a while. The conclusion that was drawn was that we should do web redesign/refresh every couple of years. Well, that may be good for people to keep their jobs. I though that graph indicated something quite different, that we are doing the same thing over and over again and expect a different result each time or are satisfied with the bump we got in the ratings (from a survey) and that becomes are target. I thought the real progress meant that with each redesign the graph always went up higher a little, maybe come down slightly- stress slightly, as people caught up with whats going on the web on "other sites" and thought were getting bored/or not used to anymore of the way we did things. So that misses me.

In my view there should never be a reason to "revamp/overhaul" a website completely unless its to get a fresh start with new philosophy about way of doing stuff. If we started out on the right track then we should make incremental improvements/tweaks, additions/removals, but never really an overhaul, so much so that people think after a website launch that they came to the wrong site (if they had previously been to the site before).

People seem to judge design by how cool it looks. Essentially I think they are just expressing a human emotion when they see something fresh/new, just in the way we like to get new clothes, or a new furniture replacing the old one. That is fine, but it should never be the primary way we judge it. The main question to ask is "does it work?"... even for one person? If it doesn't then all the "coolness" is useless.

Surveys:

Relying on surveys primarily as your feedback mechanism is also not very helpful. I think surveys are helpful but should never be the only means of collecting feedback on a website. Surveys by nature rely on a person's memory however recently they have completed a task and the usefulness of their response also depends on what questions we are asking. User testing on the other hand lets you actually "see" if something is working for a real live human. It lets you gain knowledge about things that would be very difficult to solicit from an actual user by asking them a question.

Fitt's law:

We violate is so badly on our site, I don't even want to talk about it. Maybe later.

Again, this field of "Human computer interaction" which I think includes usability, user experience, interaction design, information architecture etc. has become a pretty advanced and specialized field. Its not my area of expertise, but they seem be saying things that make sense. Why not try and be professional and take these concepts and ideas from these other professionals rather than thinking thats our job and then do it so very unprofessionally (I don't think I want to use that word, but can't think of another term, I mean where we do things using our whims, emotions, projecting stuff from other fields that we may specialise in...).

Anyhow, so last rant on user testing is this quote from Jakob Nielson:

"User testing does not result in brilliant design. That requires brilliant design. User testing guarantees that whatever level of design a company has been able to achieve will actually work".