Hiring Smartly

I just finished reading "Smart and Gets things done" by Joel Spolksy... I am sure the author doesnt need much introduction, but if you want to read about him goto http://www.joelonsoftware.com.

This book is about hiring smart people, why that is important and taking care of the smart people (and again why that is important). Having hiring smart people as my perpetual problem, I was relieved to know that its a genuine problem and the "your- hiring-standards-are-unrealistic" kinds of statements from my senior are balderdash. Thank god, that I read this book just in time to avoid a great mistake i.e. plan to lower the hiring bar.

One thing that I disagree with Mr. Spolsky is the concept of private cabins/private cubicles. (He strongly recommends Peopleware. I will try to read that next). So the logic goes that private cabins increase productivity. Supporting this statement in the book is that a person, when thinking about something is disturbed, he loses much more time to get back "into the groove" than the interruption time. While I agree with the time hypothesis, I don't think that private cabins solve this problem. Here are my reasons:
1. The example assumes that private cabins will make the seeker of information rely more on Internet than on the colleague. (Time to use the Internet < time to walk across to the cabin) But mostly, the queries are project specific. So the Internet can help in some cases but not all.
2. IM is being used extensively in organisations nowadays (at least in mine) and mostly people even 3 cubicles across, just use IM. So I think that the "walk across" concept is also not there now.
3. The example only explains the comparison where 4 people are sitting in a single cubicle and can interrupt each other Vs private cubicles next door. But what about the open cubicles 2-3 cubicles away. The time needed by a person to walk 2-3 cubicles == time to walk to the private cubicle. So the "time comparison" logic doesn't seem to be true in this case.

Does this mean, that just putting the most likely people who can answer most queries, away from "seekers" can put the open cubicles at par with private cubicles?

Let me give a counter example in favour of open cubicles. We have open cubicles in my company and the architect sits with other developers. The architect overheard one conversation and prevented an erroneous decision about to be made. Of course, reviews etc may have caught the error at a later time, but that would have been at a higher cost, specially in terms of productivity.

So there are pros and cons in the open cubicles Vs private cabins debate, but I am not willing to concede that one is defiantly way better than the other. Of course, I plan to revisit this blog once I read peopleware.

But, other than this, I highly recommend this book to everyone who has the responsibility to hire smart technical people.

Official Google Blog: Putting health into the patient's hands

This is an interesting article.. future of healthcare on the web. I think there's a lot to innovate in this domain.

Official Google Blog: Putting health into the patient's hands