So in business school, the one axiom they pounded into our heads was: "The goal of the corporation is to maximize shareholder wealth".

Which is great as far as it goes, but thinking it over tonight, it sounds a little naive. I think a better goal would be "... to maximize stakeholder wealth.". (and wealth in this sense not necessarily being money wealth. Perhaps a better word here would be "contentment", or "prosperity"

Why? Because (I believe) it will actually lead towards the goal of the first! By striving to increase the prosperity of your customers, or employees, or whomever, you should, in theory, have better word of mouth advertising (or less furious customers who shout from every treetop how much you suck), happier more efficient employees and possibly a product with more quality.

This approach seems a lot better to me than the approach of maximizing shareholder wealth... which, taken to it's extreme means moving everything overseas (where it's cheaper), using less quality parts, and ticking your customers off because the quality of your product or services degrades... with the added fact that even your old employees can't buy your stuff because they're not getting paid anymore (or won't buy your stuff because they're bitter). Which seems like it would decrease shareholder value!!

So I've been learning Ruby and Ruby On Rails over the last few weeks for a new project. Today I ran across something, well, different:

if 0 then puts "0 == true!" end

Returns "0 == true". A "Gotcha!" moment for this old C hacker.

Now Python:

if 0: print "0 == true" else: print "0 == false"

Returns "0 == false".

Investigating this a bit more:

$ irb >>> 0 == false => false >>> 0 == true => false

$ py Python 2.5.1 (r251:54863, Jan 17 2008, 19:35:17) [GCC 4.0.1 (Apple Inc. build 5465)] on darwin Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information. >>> 0 == True False >>> 0 == False True

More info: Ian Bicking talks about Truth in Python and Ruby some too (and other topics).

So I go back and forth on the idea that a programmer can be 10 times as productive as other programmers. Part of me says, "No, that level of productivity difference just isn't possible". The other part of me has been there when the better programmer solved the junior's problem in 2 minutes flat, where the junior had been dealing with this for hours. (I've been on both sides of this)

However, TiWeb/DevTopics has an interesting article out: Programmer Productivity and the Teninfinity factor, where they outline 5 classes of programmers: visionary/artist, trailblazer, workhorse, drone, and idiot. And these classifications make sense to me... and I think you need a few of each type (except idiots) on your team.

So I read the news. Thanks to RSS, I read lots of different sources of news, relatively quickly. So today I can across something very... different:

Layoffs rise 68% in April vs May

Planned job cuts in U.S. companies totaled 90,015 last month, up from 53,579 in March and up 27 percent from a year earlier, employment consulting firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas Inc. reported.

The April layoffs were the steepest since the 100,315 cuts announced in September 2006.

Later on in my reading I see: Employers cut fewer jobs in April, which quotes:

But in April the losses totaled 20,000, an improvement from the 81,000 reductions in payrolls logged in March.

Now obviously they're measuring something different, because even March's number are different for both articles. But a) the headlines make it out to sound the same, and b) ummm... sounds like it should be simple "the number of people who don't have a job to go to in May, but did have a job to go to in April".

Yeah, ok, maybe it's a half-glass-full kind of thing... but there's a difference of 70,000... or more than 3 times the number in the last article. That's more than glass-half-full.

So theres a bit of wisdom in this article on employee turnover: for employees to say to themselves: "I know that I will quit my job, and there's nothing wrong with that" and employers to say "I know that my employees will quit, and there's nothing wrong with that."

The article also posits that a company with this culture doesn't have former employees, it has alumni.

The article has a several other insights, but this one might be the most important for a tech company. I kind of wished I knew about it when I had employees: it might have changed, at a very high and abstract level, how I dealt with everybody.

Shortly after I let "everybody" go in 2005 I created an email folder in Mailsmith: "WD/Alumni". So maybe I was thinking that way, a little bit.

Between 2005 and now I've had two more part time people, at various times, doing bits and pieces of stuff for me. I consider them alumni too.

Part of me would like to find another part time, secretarial-type, person. Maybe sometime in the near future.

So for the first time in a long time I'm able to relax tonight. All my promises "I'll have that to you by Monday", etc have been accomplished.

Don't take that to mean people aren't wanting things from me (they are), and I have plenty of things I could do (and that I should do) tonight. But some of the pressure is off.

At least for today.