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Catching Elephant is a theme by Andy Taylor (slightly modified)

 

Good programmers want to work with other good programmers. So once the quality of programmers at your company starts to drop, you enter a death spiral from which there is no recovery.

Paul Graham, What Happened to Yahoo [via ★]

In the software business, you can’t afford not to have a hacker-centric culture.

Paul Graham, What Happened to Yahoo [via ★]

Success hides problems.

Ed Catmull, President, Pixar, What Google Could Learn From Pixar [via ★]

You can learn more from failure than success. In failure you’re forced to find out what part did not work. But in success you can believe everything you did was great, when in fact some parts may not have worked at all. Failure forces you to face reality.

Fred Brooks, Master Planner: Fred Brooks Shows How to Design Anything

If you bought a Kin, you bought a product that was developed solely to meet contractual obligations, not because the company who made it thought it was any good. If that bothers you, then do you really want to buy a product from that company again?

Mike Evans, Microsoft’s mobile strategy in chaos [via Boing Boing]

…the remaining Danger team was not professional nor did we show off the amazing stuff we had that made Danger such a great place. But the reason for that was our collective disbelief that we were working in such a screwed up place. Yes, we took long lunches and we sat in conference rooms and went on coffee breaks and the conversations always went something like this…”Can you believe that want us to do this?” Or “Did you hear that IM was cut, YouTube was cut? The App store was cut?” “Can you believe how mismanaged this place is?” “Why is this place to dysfunctional??

A Microsoft employee (and former Danger employee) on development of Microsoft KIN, in The KIN-fusing KIN-clusion to KIN, and FY11 Microsoft Layoff Rumors [via rit]

If you know the lever will always produce a pellet, you’ll push it only as often as you need a pellet. If you know it never produces a pellet, you’ll stop pushing. But if the lever sometimes produces a pellet and sometimes doesn’t, you’ll keep pushing forever, even if you have more than enough pellets (because what if there’s a dry run and you have no pellets at all?). It’s the motivation behind gambling, collectible cards, most video games, the Internet itself, and relationships with crazy people.

Issendai, How to keep someone with you forever

There’s something about the mechanics and arms-length nature of the web that just begs companies that know better to treat people in a way that they’d be humiliated to try face to face.

Seth Godin, A bias for scamminess

In the end the organization should be designed to create successful products, products should not be designed to fit the existing organization.

Jasper van Kujik, Company: Align the organization with user needs

Bring up irrelevant issues as frequently as possible.…
Refer back to matters decided upon at the last meeting and attempt to re-open the question of the advisability of that decision.…
Hold conferences when there is more critical work to be done.…

From the OSS’s “Simple Sabatoge Field Manual,” 1944, cited in Sabotage! Or How “Dilbert” Won The War [via Aaron Swartz]

I think the Gulf disaster is a symptom. Treat the symptom, of course, but don’t ignore the underlying disease.

Tim Bray on Twitter; if I had to guess, the “disease” is probably corporate favoritism or perhaps oil dependence

If [a company’s board of directors] can’t say no to the CEO on a club membership, then how can we expect them to say no to an acquisition or some other decision that is not in the interest of shareholders? We have found over and over again that it is a leading indicator of a board that is not providing effective oversight.

Nell Minow, co-founder of corporate governance research firm Corporate Library, quoted in Perks unchecked for some Wall Street CEOs [via Reddit]