OnManaging

April 16, 2009
Some thoughts (that need better organization) after listening to 2 Radio Lab podcasts: ”Choice” - talking about the magic number 7 (+/- 2) and the experiment with cake and fruit, and ”The Obama Effect, Perhaps” [podcast only], talking about the distraction of stereotypes in performance:


DO NOT DISTRACT your technical people. They have a multitude of decisions to make throughout the day in terms of quality (better code organization, testing considerations, etc) which WILL COST OR SAVE YOU MONEY down the road.

Schedule pressures, multitasking, anything that will offer a technical person a conscious or subconscious reason to just move on with less than their best is bad business.

Of course, this whole point is irrelevant to you if you think too much that developing software is BDUF and Mindless (Monkey?) Coding At Back (MCAB).



This looks like it could relate, though not exactly sure how. (HT/RT: @marick)
In one study, college students were given one of two menus. One menu featured French fries, chicken nuggets and a baked potato; the other included those same items as well as a salad. The French fries, widely perceived as the least healthful option, were three times [33% of all subjects vs. 10%] as popular with students selecting from the menu that had the salad as they were with the other group.

tags: ComputersAndTechnology