business
Job opportunities v competencies: focus on these?
oDesk, the freelancer haven, did — yet another — good thing and published this awesome table. It’s a “fill ratio” table that show the imbalance between job offers and how much success the companies are having filling them in.
It is very interesting because it is, in my opinion, an indicator of where one should focus their training effort in the current rather depressed market.
| Skill | Average # Jobs Per Month | Fill Ratio |
| iPhone | 93 | 23.96% |
| AJAX | 315 | 27.07% |
| Java | 75 | 27.65% |
| Graphics | 106 | 29.13% |
| XHTML | 163 | 29.31% |
| SQL | 112 | 29.89% |
| XML | 111 | 30.28% |
| PHP/IIS/MS SQL | 114 | 30.31% |
| JavaScript | 339 | 30.90% |
| SEO | 201 | 30.97% |
| MySQL | 658 | 31.65% |
| PHP | 731 | 33.84% |
| English | 109 | 34.99% |
| Flash | 257 | 35.86% |
| Writer | 101 | 36.36% |
| Joomla | 236 | 37.11% |
| Drupal | 117 | 37.75% |
| Data Entry | 120 | 37.95% |
| html | 237 | 38.16% |
| WordPress | 197 | 39.36% |
| Photoshop | 285 | 39.61% |
| CSS | 150 | 42.71% |
| Excel | 106 | 48.31% |
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Zenoss jobs mailing list: Mistakes to avoid
Oh, how unfortunate: Zenoss, most likely not by malice but because they were not paying close enough attention to social netiquette, committed a big no-no: they decided that everyone whose email address they had on record was to be automatically added to their new jobs-related mailing list, no confirmation required.
Of course, now people are — some pretty aggressively — complaining and demanding to be removed from the list, and this makes matters worse because their list server is configured so that all replies go out to everybody on the list.
In the process, these unhappy responders’ signatures with work phone number, etc, are in turn published for everybody to see/collect.
And, to make matters worse, their list server does not properly weed out out-of-office messages and these, too, have become part of the email storm.
So, how could you avoid the same mistake(s)?
- When launching a new mailing list, it’s OK to *tell* people about it but the list itself should be opt-in (ideally double opt-in), never opt-out
- Even so, make sure that all emails sent from your list server contain a prominent link allowing your users to easily unsubscribe
- Configure your list server properly! Have a professional marketer do it for you it that’s not your thing. Do not underestimate what could go wrong: this is real-time communication, you do not have a safety net.
Update: – June 18th
Uh-oh. What was, I am sure, a misguided act, is starting to elicit more “hateful” reactions. I hope the Zenoss people address the issue before things get too ugly.
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Long-live the Triangle!
Aaron Oliver points out that knowing about the “Pick two” triangle is not as much the issue as what people do with that obvious bit of knowledge.
The “triangle,” if you are wondering, is a regular triangle with three named corners: Good, Cheap, Fast. Quite often, when faced with unreasonable demands, project managers/team leaders will draw this triangle on a white board/sheet of paper/paper napkin and ask their management to “pick two” because honestly it’s the best you can realistically get.
Sometimes, freelancers try that as well; often ends up with more unemployed freelancers. People do kill the messenger.
I find only one flaw with Aaron’s post: granted, grade-school students understand this thing. And so do your management/customers. Unfortunately this is irrelevant: their own management applies enough pressure on them that all they can do is look at your drawing and nod in agreement and ask in the very next sentence what can be done do “get all three.”
It’s like when using CMMI: one of the first things you need to do is to decide whether, for your project, schedule is the most important criteria, or whether features scope is.
It’s almost 100% certain that you will find, months in the project, that the most important criteria is the one that’s behind:
- If you selected schedule and now need to kill a couple features to meet your deadlines, marketing will most likely point out that the project is doomed without these features.
- If you had agreed on features being the driving factor and need a couple extra months to deliver them, then…well, why don’t you give it a try and let me know how that went for you?
So, yes, the triangle is a bit obnoxious. And no, if you’re an engineer, it’s very likely that your management does not need to see it once again. But the problem lies mostly with the stakeholders: management’s management, marketing, other groups/units. These are the ones who need to be regularly reminded that “it’s not so simple.”
Because the more stakeholders the project has, the more likely they are to behave irrationally. That’s how we are wired to cope with external pressure.
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