This is MP3Monster's blog. The blog covers music, technology, photography and anything else Monster considers worthy of blogging about.Chance to influeence music industry leaders
Posted by monster in Music, Work
According to the NME (here) Fergal Sharkey the former lead singer of The Undertones who now heads an industry representative body has setup a website which will give people the opportunity to feedback to the ‘powers that be’ about their music buying habits. The only problem in my mind is that they’re not interested if you’re over 24 years old. Which I have to say I find a little insulting - I am well outside that age bracket, but still very much clued up about ways to acquire and listen to music; and spend as much or more now than I did when I was 24.
I think that the age banding also assumes you have an understanding of your demographic, but the point of site I thought was to try and understand your consumers. So why not let all contribute and then look at the patterns in the responses.
Junior Development staff in a distributed development team
Posted by monster in Work
An interesting problem was highlighted the other day in conversation with colleagues in the IT industry. How do you take on a graduate or junior developer within a highly distributed development team, and how do you make Agile work well in a distributed team.
Often the argument is that distribution doesn’t matter, we have lots of technologies to overcome that. But, when we deal with new people, particularly those who haven’t had much or any experience there is a lot of contact needed - communicating large amounts of detail - not the clearly expressible things that we can read in a document, but all the nuances, the policy compared to the actual practices; seeing and feeling the tensions and people politics within a team and how they should be negotiated. It is this very reason that video conference is better than a phone call, and traveling to meet someone is better than a video conference.
With my new roll which involves running a team of individuals, it is easier for them and me that we now located in the office as group. I obviously will get to feel how they interact with external demands, and what the demands are - which in our case are many. But the team have a better sense that they can call on me to help easily. This cant translate to a distributed team.
This is not to say that there a good things for distributed teams. The staff will be content as they located in situations they should be happy with. The disruptions of a large office dont exist, so the chances of longer periods for clear thinking are there - which are important to developers.
