Description of Conway's law.. also referred to as the "mirror hypothesis" in the management literature.
"This paper studies differences in the effect of temperature on cognitive performance by gender in a large controlled lab experiment (N = 543). We study performance in math, verbal and cognitive reflection tasks and find that the effects of temperature vary significantly across men and women. At higher temperatures, women perform better on a math and verbal task while the reverse effect is observed for men. The increase in female performance in response to higher temperature is significantly larger and more precisely estimated than the corresponding decrease in male performance. In contrast to math and verbal tasks, temperature has no impact on a measure of cognitive reflection for either gender. Our findings suggest that gender mixed workplaces may be able to increase productivity by setting the thermostat higher than current standards."
More on Jeri Ellsworth pointing out limits in the Valve structure.
I think that writing about a companies internally strategy is pretty risky but the idea that Google is putting its own interest over its users is an interesting idea that meshes pretty well with the whole antifeatures cocept that I've been throwing around.
Nice Scatterplot write up (and interesting comment section) on the Satoshi Kanazawa "Why are black women less attractive?" blogging scandal over at LSE.
Mark Shuttleworth is trying to recruit engineering managers to Canonical. I agree that the good engineering managers need not be good engineers. I think solid tech skills do go a long way to helping engineers respect their managers. And that is important.
Mark keeps talking about this and I still think it's an interesting idea but there's a massive coordination problem here. Getting some people excited and all the right people excited are two very different things. Mark's record so far seems to be mostly in doing the former.
This is the best website I think I've seen introducing academic models to a non-academic context anywhere.
