Learning Is The First Step
While I admit that logging tasks in Agile results in some overhead, there are many cases where this overhead is worth it. Decomposing user stories into tasks or subtasks in JIRA is a non-special case of task decomposition in general. Here’s an example paper showing that decomposition reduces estimation error. The magnitude is far from … Read more
I want to laugh when people say common metrics shouldn’t be used for establishing developer productivity. It seems like a prototypical pseudo-intellectual move to point out that such metrics can be misleading when used improperly, but the speaker of such obvious statements seems to think that this somehow removes the usefulness of such metrics when … Read more
This article quickly notes a few reasons why you, as an employee or an employer, will want the full hours of work recorded on any project, even for salaried employees. Some firms have a practice of limiting the hours recorded for salaried employees. These firms want to ensure that the employee works 40 hours, but … Read more
This article adds an item to my business consulting checklist. Here I argue that SMEs need an Extended Work Week policy. EWW, It’s Benefits, and The Mechanism EWW also goes by a number of other names such as Straight Overtime. The idea is that salaried workers are exempt from overtime regulation, but you can optionally … Read more
This article argues that culture affects productivity and therefore income-maximizing immigrants will engage in autoacculturation, which is considered to be a preference for native values over values from the immigrant’s homeland. In contrast, threshold earners are expected to engage a lower degree of acculturation. If true, we should expect threshold earners to be more culturally … Read more
The problem is incentives. I work hard and make an A in class. You are lazy and make a D+. The class average is a B. The professor says, “To be fair, next test everyone will simply earn the average. It’s equal that way.”Now I expect to earn a B even if I work hard … Read more
A friend of mine, an intelligent one at that, recently posted on Facebook that he would raise minimum wage. He said he would do this because there are many poor people and their income rises very slowly. I didn’t even address the problem that the term poor is a nearly useless designation. Instead I went … Read more