Specialists, Generalists, Incompetence, and Cognitive Bias

I wanted to continue a bit where I left off with a non-technical explanation of what people such as myself do and my commentary on evolving technology management.

Here is the abstract from Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments (Justin Kruger and David Dunning, Department of Psychology, [...]

The Trials of Toorcamp

Toorcamp was many things this year.

It was fun.

It was uncomfortable.

Dustdevils ate things occasionally.

It was turbulent due to the trouble with Levitate to get hackers to help promote their event for free or they wouldn’t fulfill their agreement to let us use the missile facility for talks and workshops.

There was some excellent music.

There were fine people in attendance as it took some dedication and preparation to get out there and stay there.

Enough said about that. I was expecting more problems. More can be found at the Toorcamp wiki.

My presentation at this Toorcon Seattle area hacker retreat was concerned itself with three main points.

  1. How to get a job in todays market
  2. Identifying the common players and bad actors in todays organizations
  3. How I recommend dealing with them

I entitled my talk Hacking HR in the traditional usage of the word hack. I’ve seen a lot of usage that uses “hack” as a synonym for small tips on how to accomplish obvious tasks. This isn’t how I use the word.

Anyway, let’s get started.

Continue reading The Trials of Toorcamp

Notes from Monday

My notes from the discussion at the Washington Technology Industry Association SIG for July on IP addresses:

Continue reading Notes from Monday