Mike Industries » A running commentary of occasionally interesting things

Evaluating Employees in Product Design & Development Roles

Results. Metrics. Impact.

When deciding how to evaluate employees, these are often the things companies land on. It makes sense on its face. If a company’s goal is to, say, grow its customer base from X to Y in 12 months, what better way to align employees to that objective than to try and directly measure their contribution towards it? You worked on Project A and it singlehandedly got the company 20% closer to its goal? Congrats, you are judged to be a successful employee and you will likely enjoy everything that goes along with that.

But what if you worked on Project B — not even by choice but because you were assigned it — and it ended up being a failure? Your results were terrible, you didn’t move metrics, and your project had no impact. Then what?

Welcome to the controversial world of employee evaluation in product design & development.

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⇗ An Old Idea, Revived: Starve Cancer to Death

When Thompson presents his research to high-school students, he shows them a slide of mold spreading across a piece of bread. The slide’s heading — “Everyone’s first cancer experiment” — recalls Warburg’s observation that cancer cells will carry out fermentation at almost the same rate of wildly growing yeasts.

It's amazing how many "diseases of civilization" are all starting to point directly at sugar. Incidentally, if you haven't seen Fed Up yet, it's a great documentary.

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⇗ How Technology Hijacks People’s Minds — from a Magician and Google’s Design Ethicist

Here’s the unfortunate truth — several billion people have a slot machine their pocket.

An important essay on the responsibility we have as designers to provide experiences which enrich lives as opposed to merely illusions of enrichment. If you work on digital products, this is a great gutcheck. If you use digital products, this is a wake-up call to take control of your precious attention.

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Three Years in San Francisco

I had only been to San Francisco on random business trips and a couple of times with my family when I was very young. It seemed like a place I might live if I had never found Seattle.

It was go-time now though.

A drawn-out dance of interviews over the course of six months resulted in an offer to move down to the City and join Twitter to lead its Design team. My wife and I had never considered leaving Seattle before, but the opportunity to join Doug, Dick, and a few other people I knew designing a product that reached hundreds of millions of people was exactly the sort of thing you drop everything for.

“We can always hightail it back up here the second things go to hell.”

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⇗ Deep Learning Is Going to Teach Us All the Lesson of Our Lives: Jobs Are for Machines

On December 2nd, 1942, a team of scientists led by Enrico Fermi came back from lunch and watched as humanity created the first self-sustaining nuclear reaction inside a pile of bricks and wood underneath a football field at the University of Chicago.

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Reboot!

It’s been 7 years since I last redesigned Mike Industries, and it feels like even longer. The old design still holds up considering the largely desktop audience it was designed for, but since it’s May 1st Reboot Day, and I’ve had some time on my hands since leaving Twitter, I thought I’d release a shiny new version today.

Say hello to Mike Industries, Version 3.

What is wrong with the old Version 2, you ask? Well:

It’s not responsive.
It ingests and displays all of my Tweets and saved Tumblr links, which seems like overkill now.
Because of all the peripheral stuff being displayed, WordPress isn’t able to assemble the page very quickly and browsers are also slow to render it.
It doesn’t take advantage of any of the great HTML, CSS, and related advancements that have developed in the last few years.
It was just time for a change, and I felt like getting back into pixels and code again.

While I’ve spent the last few months putting this together, it only occupied a day or two of time per week. Lots of fits and starts, including periods of frustration and reflection where I’ve asked myself “Why am I not just moving everything to Medium?”

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⇗ The sugar conspiracy | Ian Leslie

In 1972, a British scientist sounded the alarm that sugar – and not fat – was the greatest danger to our health. But his findings were ridiculed and his reputation ruined. How did the world’s top nutrition scientists get it so wrong for so long?

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⇗ On Being A Senior Engineer

I think that there’s a lot of institutional knowledge in our field, especially about what makes for a productive engineer. But while there are a good deal of books in the management field about “expert” roles and responsibilities of non-technical individual contributors, I don’t see too many modern books or posts that might shed light directly on what makes for a good senior engineer.

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Faves from The Pixel Awards

Pardon the mess around here as I move around some furniture and get ready to start publishing on Mike Industries again, but I wanted to share a handful of sites, apps, and interactive projects that stuck out to me as I finished judging The Pixel Awards today. These projects were from about 20 different categories ranging from Fashion to Experimental to Student Work, so they may all be great at very different things. I found them all delightful and a reminder of the great work going on in our industry. Was also surprised at how many hamburger menus I saw across much of the field, but that’s a topic for another day!

Thank you to the Pixel Awards for having me as a judge. These were my faves:

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On Teleportation

I remember the first time I heard of a real product described as a teleportation machine. It was only a couple of years ago, actually. A founder of a popular photo sharing network described the ultimate purpose of his product as a means to teleport anywhere around the world. I remember reading that sentence and thinking “this is a really great product, but it doesn’t actually make me feel like that.”

Maybe it was the fact that individual photos only provide a split-second glance into someone’s world. Maybe it was that filtering, cropping, and opportunistic life-editing sometimes creates a veneer that doesn’t feel like real life. Most of all though, I think it’s because the experience wasn’t live.

The difference between something typed or captured minutes before you see it and something you experience simultaneously — cooperatively — with the person doing the broadcasting is transformative.

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