The STAGE-A / STAGE-B theory

Chatting with some colleagues in front of the coffee machine, I've heard an interesting theory about the cycle of recruitment in some companies, that can be summarized in a sequence of actions:

1. STAGE A:

The company hires a new employee. In order to save money and have more control of his work, the person is chosen without any particular experience or skills.

The work is being pursued, but the employee makes many mistakes and does not produce an exceptional quality work. He also requires considerable time from managers to be trained properly on any action to be taken, thus reducing productivity over the department.

This brings to ..

2. STAGE B:

The company hires an experienced person with skill and considerable motivation.

He is more expensive, but the company considers the new employee a good investment on the quality of work and productivity of the department.

The new employee works well. However, because of his experience, motivation and skill, he tries to improve the organization to achieve even more efficiency. This attitude can lead to a positive evolution of the entire organization or a friction and annoyance if the leadership is not keen to see a devolution of control to the experienced staff.
In the second case, the employee hired in Stage B loses confidence in the organization and starts to look around until the inevitable dismissal.

At this point the company gets back to ..

3. STAGE A:

The leadership, given the negative experience of the employee expert / skilled / motivated again decided to take a low profile guy. In this way, they think to gain control of its activities.


... at this point the cycle is repeated indefinitely, with the turnover of this company constantly focused on profiles of Stage B.

After a certain amount of time and the succession of stages, the company will lose these figures only to find themselves with employees hired in Stage A ...

I do not believe that this theory is applicable to all real companies, but it certainly is interesting and curious.

What do you think ?

Do you recognize this sequence in the history of recruitment of your company?


[Translated from MinddrivenIT]

Auto completion on iPhone - isn't it strange ?

If you ever wrote something on an iPhone (SMS, notes or mail messages), you'll probably know that this phone uses an auto completion engine completely different from the T9 system available in other cell phones. This system improves the speed of your writing, but not always the quality.

How does it work ?

While digiting a word, the editor searches if it is the start of, or is similar to, any word available in an internal archive. If found, the editor shows a small popup above the word with a proposal. If you don't like the word proposed by the auto completion, you just have to touch the popup and it disappears. Elsewere, when you hit 'space' or 'enter' or another punctuation character, the proposed word is automatically substituted to the one you entered.

Is there something wrong ?

In a standard auto completion system, the proposed word must be confirmed by the user in order to be accepted. When the user looks at the proposal and finds that the word is right, he can choose to stop digiting the word and speed up the writing. On an iPhone, the proposed word must be refused, or it is accepted by default.

This behaviour is everything but intuitive. It works well only if the auto completion guesses perfectly all the words you are writing. When it doesn't, you have to keep constantly an eye on the popup because you need to close proposed words that don't fit. If you miss a word, you have to delete it and rewrite again.

An example. If I digit "My pc is very good" without looking at popups, the message becomes "Mg of os veri golf" (language setting on 'italian'. I hope that english language works better ...).

Great, it isn't ?

This approach, the need to refuse proposals, forces the user for extra activity, and does not allow to concentrate on the real task: writing a message.

In conclusion, the approach of the iPhone is for sure original and interesting, but thinking different not always brings up the best result !

[Translated from USERInterfaccia]

Poll results 3 - What music do you listen at work ?

here it is ..

Team working .. and the coffee machine

You know. We italians don't take work breaks around the water cooler but in front of a coffee machine.

Always.

The coffee machine zone is ideal to reduce stress, distract, reorder our thoughts. In front of the coffee machine we chat, relax, rest eyes and exchange useful information about the project in an attitude that is more informal of office meetings. With a coffee, the social hierarchy of the organization flattens out and shuffles. Here you can see the manager joking with a junior employee.

So, don't underestimate the importance of the coffee machine zone (or the water cooler zone), and above all don't prevent your team to make use of it.

If you want to take the maximum advantage of the coffee machine, always remember to keep it in an area that is isolated from the office. Is should be out of eye and ear contact, so that the people having a break can not distract who is still (trying to) work.

Still, don't isolate this area too much, or you'll give lazy people an opportunity to shirk.

The coffee machine area is also suitable for communication that is not strictly verbal. A bulletin board with fliers or announcements fits very well in this area. So, why don't celebrate your team's small successes by displaying a chart of resolved bugs (obviously in positive trend) or an anthusiastic feedback from one of your customers ?


[blog post traslated in english from Minddrivenit]