The Mu

When a company fails to achieve market expectations, it is not surprising when their stock price drops.  When they exceed expectations, the intuitive result would be an increase in stock price.  Yet this happens less and less frequently.

I heard an analyst the other day say: “They did not exceed expectations as much as expected.”  I couldn’t hear what he said next because I was laughing too hard.

Recently there was a kerfuffle in the blogosphere about FizzBuzz as an interview question.  It turns out that a wide swath of computer programmers don’t really know how to program a computer.

As someone who interviews candidates for jobs in software development, I know that there are a variety of ways to determine ideal candidates.  At IBM we have a process of pre-screening, interviewing, testing, and selection that usually gets the best folks for the job.  It is by no means foolproof, but we generally get really good people working here.  In addition, we tend to fill a pipeline of internship students who go through a trial-by-fire to see if they would make good regular employees and we often (not always) hire from this pool of student employees.

Jeff Shantz is a student who outlined the entire experience of getting hired by IBM on his blog.  (I had the privilege of interviewing Jeff myself.  He declined the offer we gave him in favor of another IBM opportunity.  He applied to 47 IBM jobs so he probably disappointed 45 other hiring managers too.)  I am convinced that many companies would not get away with putting people through the kind of ordeal we do, but people who are motivated to work at a particular company will bite the bullet and accept a certain level of administrative agony.  I hear stories about other high-profile companies with even more arduous hiring processes.

In a way, the process itself is a filter.  Those who can navigate their way through it without tossing in the towel are better candidates than those who give up. I will still work to streamline the experience for others.

We’re in the throes of a reorganization here at work.  “Reorgs” are part of corporate life and most of use are pretty complacent about them.  But this one may make a real difference to the way we perceive our place in the hierarchy of software products offered by IBM.

Without getting into the details of how we’re organized (industrial espionage creeps love to start piecing things together from that kind of disclosure), here are my thoughts.  If you can see connections between the types of products your company produces, it makes sense to encourage synergy between groups by having them all report to the same boss.  This is not to say that things are best accomplished by homogeneous teams.  In fact, I strongly believe in small teams.  But those small teams should all be rowing in the same direction, and in any business the direction is set by the leadership.

Another way to look at this is with Lou Gerstner’s quote: “People do what you inspect, not what you expect.”  In other words, if one person (the top dog) is being measured on the success of a portfolio of products, the direction will be much more clear than if two or three top dogs are fighting for the same scraps.