"If you don't sell software to a mass market,
the economies of scope are much more important
than the economies of scale."
How about adopting honestly subjective performance reviews in your company?
Better? Definitely.
More laborious? I don't think so.
Worth a shot? No question about it.
Gmail displays random quotes on the top of my inbox and just now my attention was drawn to the quote (which doesn't happen often--usually I barely notice that there is a quote). The quote was by George Bernard Shaw, a well-known 19th century vegetarian playwriter:
"Take care to get what you like or you will be forced to like what you get."
What got me blogging about this little moment is that this quote immediately brought back memories from a previous employment where us lemmings were thrown around from project to the next based on what senior management decided behind closed doors. Ironically, when I once effectively sold a small 30-day project to a client--a project that I really wanted to do--management prevented me from going forward, offering another consultant to the client instead. It turns out the client didn't want someone else and the whole project was halted until a few months later when the client had hired someone qualified on their payroll.
In that organization, most people were effectively forced to like what they got. For some, that was all they needed and wanted. For some, that was frustrating. Some, myself included, made their best effort to get "in" to the discussions about forthcoming projects and to be able to affect the resourcing decisions. After a couple of years of projects and a couple of years of networking, all of this started to get a bit easier. Yet, even then it took serious effort to make sure you didn't end up in some godforsaken ERP system integration project with some CRM and B2C thrown in to give it some flavour.
I was able to get myself on some very interesting projects with that past employer but it certainly wasn't easy at times and, as you might expect, there were occasions where I had to endure periods of working on things that were hopelessly boring, maintaining something that was badly engineered, or writing software everyone knew was not going to create much value to the client (even though the client had a project manager tasked to make sure that the software was indeed built to spec).
I love the way I can influence what I do at Reaktor. I love being able to pimp myself to work on things I am genuinely interested in and to which I believe I have the most to contribute.