Jonathan Schwartz's Weblog

I am weighing how honest is htis person.. :) hey, no harm in visiting his blog.. after all he is senior guy at SUN

Raise me up, push me down...

Almost every company tries to make a formal system for employees promotion.. Right!! But one question that bothers my mind more frequently then not: you can raise someone up and push someone down using the same system :)

If it is said that one can move up the ladder if he will "do well.. now to do well you have certain parameters (for example, rapport with peers, work attitude, flexibility, punctuality, discipline etc) in which you have to show that you have reached some level. Now the problem, someone has done very well in productivity but he has not attained good points in lets say discipline.. Now those who are higher up can raise him by over emphasizing his productivity Oh! he is the winner, just look at his contribution in last quarter or else you can discriminate him badly His discipline has an overall bad impact on his team's efficiency.. Higher up, we need even more discipline and we can not afford to try him at that level without him first showing some more discipline. So i don't consider him as a candidate for this promotion at all

I was wondering how we can have a system which is comfortable to employees. After all these systems are made to motivate the employees, Aren’t they?
On this very topic!!! Still thinking, i am. :)

If you are looking for some good pointer on office politics try this. The Protocol Of Office Politics

Sketch in Middle

Why we do sketching? This is an important question that has started bothering me since one of the discussion I had on it. Is sketching a tool for research was another question? I got some clues from one paper: Design Oriented HCI.

What I understood (from what I read from that paper and the MID book) is: sketch falls in between if on left we have vision/idea and on right we have realization/ (external) representation. So, sketch is used to translate left-to-right and interestingly, also right-to-left. This indeed is an important thing when designing.

Rest, I still am interested in perusing if sketching itself is research or not.

Designe Oriented HCI

What do Prototypes Prototype?

What do Prototypes Prototype?

I still have to read the above mentioned paper but i read soemthing very simillar in MID textbook.. and

Here is what I found very amazing, never realizing before that I too am victim of this. People start evaluating the prototypes rather then a particular aspect that prototype is made for. Prototype should only be taken consciously as help in evaluating a particular aspect.