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Why graduates should look to tech start-ups
November 17, 2011
Sam England of PostDesk recently caught up with Songkick founder Pete Smith to ask him about start-ups recruiting new graduates:
I’m co-founder of east London-based startup Songkick, the company behind Silicon Milkroundabout, which brings together over 100 UK start-ups offering more than 500 tech jobs. We held our first event back in May and our second in October.
The idea came about over a pint with Ian, one of my co-founders. We were discussing a common problem. When recruiting graduates, many start-ups, say, looking for a graduate to fill a software developer post, struggle to compete against large employers, such as the big banks.
It’s good for graduates to think smaller
Silicon Milkroundabout encourages graduates to think about working for start-ups rather than a bank or other large corporate. I’m not totally against working for a large bank or corporate, of course. For some, it can be the right decision.
But graduates should know other options exist and that start-ups can be the answer when making important career decisions. Often people can get the wrong idea about working for a start-up, that it’s risky, for example, or that they’d need to waste loads of time visiting hundreds of offices until they find somewhere they really want to work.
In many cases, working for a start-up can be more rewarding. Often you get more choice about whom you work with and what you work on. I meet a lot of people who work in start-up engineering teams and usually they love the product they work on.
And whether they have business or consumer users, they know what their users do with their products and receive feedback immediately after release. That’s extremely rewarding when you’re building something you actually care about.
You learn how to run a company
Ultimately, if you have ambitions one day to start your own company, there’s no better way to learn the ropes than to spend a few years at a small company, so you can see how it is run and grown.
Things have changed. Tech start-ups now have the DNA of product and engineering teams. No longer are they two MBA guys raising a bit of money and getting some dude in Eastern Europe to build the website, as was often the case five years ago in London.
Just as you can go into a tech job at a bank thinking it’s going to be pretty secure (and you’ll make a bit of money), you can go into a start-up knowing 18 months or two years will go by before the next funding round is needed.
You may think it will get profitable in that time (and you’ll make a bit of money). Go into it with your eyes open and it’s a nice period of time to work with people you like, on a product you enjoy.
I don’t believe in the natural attrition rate of start-ups. Make wise decisions and your business shouldn’t fail.
My advice to graduates? Be smart. Choose a start-up with a plan you feel comfortable with. Ask yourself – “Do I trust the founders, the CTO and the developers?” If you can truly trust them to make smart decisions, there’s a very good chance you’ll make the right career move.
- Will the economic recovery be driven by tech companies or start-ups?
- Read more about staff and IT training
- Are we using technology, or is it using us?
Pete Smith founded Songkick, a website and mobile app which lets people track concerts happening in their area.
This is an edited version of an interview that first appeared on the PostDesk blog.
It's time to loosen up your business IT
November 11, 2011
Put your feet up and relax about your business IT (Image: Cristian Borquez on Flickr)
There's nothing wrong with being risk averse, and there's nothing wrong with not wanting your staff to do silly things or waste time with their company computers.
Those are the - perfectly logical reasons - why many businesses lock down their systems tightly. They want to stop employees opening the wrong kinds of files, installing dodgy software or accessing social networks.
Fine. But as someone who's fairly IT literate, I've always found locked-down PCs highly offputting. By and large, I know what I'm doing and I know what I need to do my job. I just want the IT department to let me get on with it.
Young workers want more flexibility
A recent piece of research has got me wondering whether this might be a growing sentiment. The 2011 Cisco Connected World Technology Report suggests that young workers (by which it means students and professionals under 30) take many factors into account when deciding where they want to work.
It's not all about the salary - the internet, flexibility and social networks can all make a difference. For instance:
- More than half of students either wouldn't accept a job offer from a company that banned access to social media, or would find a way to circumvent the ban.
- One in four employees say that not being able to work remotely and flexibly would influence their job decisions - they might leave a job sooner, for instance.
- Two out of five people would opt for a lower paying job over a higher paying one, if it offered more flexibility over use of IT and social media, and more mobility.
The overall impression is that younger workers want more choice over what IT they use and how they use it at work.
They want more flexibility in where and when they work. And they want to be allowed to use social networks because they believe services like Facebook and Twitter are key communication tools.
Is it time to loosen up your IT?
I can almost hear the tuts from IT managers at the idea of loosening restrictions, allowing people to use their own devices and turning off web blocking software.
But here's the thing: it's happening already, whether you like it or not. If you've blocked Facebook on your work computers, your employees will just be accessing it on their phones.
Then you've got mobile devices. You might think you've banned staff using their own mobile gadgets for work. But what's to stop them loading documents onto their iPad to review on the train, or connecting a smart phone to the company Wi-Fi?
Times are changing for office IT
Times are changing. The so-called 'millennials' - the next generation of workers - have grown up using IT and computers their entire lives. We don't need to teach them how to use it at work, because they already know.
Maybe, just maybe, if we open systems up and give people more freedom to use the tools and devices they want, they'll be able to do better work.
20 inspiring and insightful Steve Jobs quotes
October 07, 2011
1 “What made the Macintosh great was that the people working on it were musicians and poets and artists and zoologists and historians who also happened to be the best computer scientists in the world”
2 “Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren't used to an environment where excellence is expected.”
3 It’s not the consumers’ job to know what they want.”
4 “Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of other's opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most importantly, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”
5 “Things don’t have to change the world to be important.”
6 “Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn't matter to me. Going to bed at night saying ‘we've done something wonderful’, that's what matters to me.”
7 “We don’t do market research. We don’t hire consultants. We just want to make great products.”
8 “The most compelling reason for most people to buy a computer for the home will be to link it into a nationwide communications network. We're just in the beginning stages of what will be a truly remarkable breakthrough for most people – as remarkable as the telephone.” (speaking in 1985)
9 “Simple can be harder than complex. You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple, but it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.”
10 “My model for business is The Beatles: They were four guys that kept each other's negative tendencies in check; they balanced each other. And the total was greater than the sum of the parts. Great things in business are not done by one person, they are done by a team of people.”
11 “What a computer is to me is the most remarkable tool that we have ever come up with. It's the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds.”
12 “I'm the only person I know that's lost a quarter of a billion dollars in one year. It's very character-building.”
13 “You can’t just ask the customers what they want and then try to give that to them. By the time you get it built, they’ll want something new.”
14 “Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it.”
15 “You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.”
16 “When you're a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you're not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. You'll know it's there, so you're going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through.”
17 “It’s really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them.”
18 “Innovation comes from people meeting up in the hallways or calling each other at 10:30 at night with a new idea, or because they realized something that shoots holes in how we've been thinking about a problem. It's ad hoc meetings of six people called by someone who thinks he has figured out the coolest new thing ever and who wants to know what other people think of his idea.”
19 "I don't think I've ever worked so hard on something, but working on Macintosh was the neatest experience of my life. Almost everyone who worked on it will say that. None of us wanted to release it at the end. It was as though we knew that once it was out of our hands, it wouldn't be ours anymore. When we finally presented it at the shareholders' meeting, everyone in the auditorium stood up and gave it a five-minute ovation. What was incredible to me was that I could see the Mac team in the first few rows. It was as though none of us could believe that we'd actually finished it. Everyone started crying.''
20 “Stay hungry, stay foolish.”
How to manage remote workers
February 17, 2011
This is a guest post from HP Business Answers. Check out our website, blog and Twitter feed. If you have a business IT question, why not ask our IT Agony Aunt for an expert answer?
Letting people work away from the office – at home, at client sites or even in the local coffee shop – can improve productivity and morale. It can also help reduce office costs. Many businesses are reluctant to take advantage of these benefits for fear of giving up management control. Here are some tips to help you manage remote workers more effectively:
- It's all about time. Set deadlines. Book phone calls and chats using instant messenger (IM) software. Set yourself a reminder.
- Know your team. Make sure you spend some face-to-face time with your team, both at work and informally.
- Share documents. Web services like Dropbox make it easy to share documents over the internet and for remote teams to collaborate together. For larger teams, an intranet tool may be more efficient.
- Measure. Find ways to monitor and track the work that people are doing. This will build trust and replace the more informal, face-to-face supervision.
- Delegate effectively. Set objectives that are SMART: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-bound.
- Respect people's personal time. Don't fall into the trap of treating remote workers as if they were on call 24/7 simply because you can contact them outside 'normal' office hours.
- Take pictures. Post pictures of your team members or people on a website or pin board so that you can visualise people when you talk to them.
- Listen. In an office you can see when someone is upset or angry or bored. When they're on the end of a telephone, you need to listen actively and ask questions to find out how they're doing.
- Trust and be trusted. Trust builds when people do what they say they are going to do. As a boss, you need to set the highest standards of consistency and reliability. When you say you're going to do something, do it.
- Take turns. Let other people run meetings occasionally.
- Get objective feedback. Use 360-degree appraisals (consider including employees' families) and customer or peer surveys to make sure your virtual team is working well.
- Keep a schedule. Use a shared calendar to book meetings and share your schedule with your team (and vice versa).
- Be a role model. Set an example with your own punctuality, commitment, reliability and availability.
- Give recognition. It costs nothing to write a thank you note or to give praise where it is due. Recognition is a powerful motivator.
- Change your management style. Switch from managing by input (time in the office) to managing by output (goals met).
- Avoid second-class citizens. Once you've proven the concept, everybody should get a chance to work flexibly (unless their job prevents it). Don't give one person a notebook computer while chaining a colleague to their desk.
- Training. Train managers and employees about the challenges and techniques of flexible working. Don't assume that everyone knows how to do it well – they don't. Individuals may need extra help with, say, writing reports or using IT.
- Don't isolate people. Encourage regular visits to the main workplace, include flexible workers in company social events; and have more of those. Put procedures in place to monitor for stress and counteract it.
- Over-communicate. Many remote and home workers use VoIP (voice over internet protocol - using the internet as a telephone connection). Many HP notebooks include a built-in webcam that makes it easier to do video conferencing.
Image of a home office from Flickr user Fabio Bruna under a Creative Commons licence.
Could telecommuting get more out of your staff?
February 03, 2011
Research conducted at Brigham Young University has delved into data from over 20,000 IBM employees across 75 countries, with surprising results.
Employees who telecommute (or work from home) not only balance work and personal life better than ‘standard’ office workers, but they manage to work more hours too.
The researchers identified the point where 25% of employees report their work to be interfering with personal or family life.
In some cases, workers who utilised a mix of flexitime and telecommuting were able to work 50% more hours per week before hitting that point. That amounts to a whopping 19 extra hours work over the same seven-day period. Aggregate this over a year and you’ll run out of work for your staff!
So what is telecommuting?
Telecommuting is an arrangement which gives your employees the freedom to work where and when they please. This gives them big flexibility in their working lives, can remove the daily commute and ditches the idea of having a centralised place of work. It's all reliant on a technology network which allows an employee to work anywhere, at any time.
As a business owner, not only can you get more out of each of your employees, but you can also enjoy significant cost savings. Here are just a few benefits of telecommuting:
- Diminished office costs
- Lower travel costs
- A larger talent pool to pick from (telecommuting enable carers, parents and disabled people to be employed more easily)
- Reduced absenteeism.
Couple these benefits with higher employee satisfaction and it is hard to see any downsides to telecommuting. However, they do exist.
Telecommuting caveats
If your employees are to really benefit from telecommuting, they need flexi-time too. Because without some flexibility in working hours, most of the benefits of telecommuting are removed. You simply replace the effort of getting to work at a set hour with the effort of getting to a place of your choosing on time.
You also need to think through how to handle management and performance reviews. To assuage fears that employees would simply abuse the power to work remotely, a results-based system needs to be in place. Instead of individually monitoring employees, their work and goals must be measured solely by results.
You have to trust your staff. Any mistakes in implementing this kind of management style could have an adverse effect on employee productivity. After all, what is the point of getting 19 hours more work a week if they get half as much done?
Have you tried telecommuting?
Implemented correctly, telecommuting can be positive both for you and your team. As someone once summed up: 'work is something you do, not something you travel to'.
So how about it? Do you know of any companies or people that enjoy a telecommuting system? Or do you know someone who struggles and would prosper more in a structured office environment?
John Sollars is MD of Stinkyink.com
How to design an ergonomic workplace
December 07, 2010
This is a guest post from HP Business Answers. Check out our website, blog and Twitter feed. If you have a business IT question, why not ask our IT Agony Aunt for an expert answer?
A bad working environment can be very expensive for businesses and painful for individuals. Among office workers, repetitive strain injuries are common, not to mention headaches, sore eyes, and aching backs and shoulders.
Adjustable monitors and keyboards and good seating arrangements can reduce the risk of injuries. Getting the right temperature and keeping noise down can maximise productivity.
Ergonomic IT checklist
- Position your keyboard and mouse. Experts recommend that you place your keyboard and mouse so that you can use them with your body in a relaxed, comfortable position. If you have to reach for them or hunch your shoulders to use them, they're in the wrong place. Try alternating between your left and right hand when using the mouse to get a break.
- Get comfortable with your notebook. Consider buying a docking station and external keyboard (with number pad) and mouse for your notebook when you use it for extended periods. Alternatively, a notebook stand can make using a notebook in the office more comfortable and convenient.
- Choose ergonomic keyboards. Look for a keyboard that has different levels of tilt, including the ability to lie completely flat.
- Reduce eyestrain with an adjustable monitor. Put the monitor directly in front of you at arm's length. Adjust the height so that you can see it with your back straight and your eyes tilted slightly downwards. Try to avoid reflections or glare on the screen. A monitor that can swivel and adjust in height will be more comfortable because you can adjust it as you change your posture during the day. Consider using an adjustable second monitor for your notebook when it's in the office – it'll be more comfortable for extended use.
- Reduce noise to increase productivity. Ringing phones, music and loud noises increase stress, interrupt concentration and reduce productivity. Try to minimise unwanted noise.
- Set the right temperature. Productivity falls if the temperature varies far from around 25C. Getting too hot or too cold can slow you down.
For more information
- Get more information about creating an ergonomic workplace from HP.
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