Lack of metrics

“What gets measured gets done”

This is one of famous Peter Drucker’s sayings and it is there for a long time. And yet, it is fascinating how bad metrics is actually implemented in organizations today. I am not saying here that metrics is not there, many organizations do have metrics in place. We measure work hours, project timings, budgets, story points, who knows what else.

Let me put it this way. You are in your office, your car is on parking in front and you have flight in 4 hours from now. You can measure lots of things like time when you left, average speed, price of car, fuel consumption, average speed and so many different parameters. Most probably all those measurements are built in your car if it is recent model. But none of those metrics will make sure that you will catch your flight.

When I say we lack metrics it is not only in software development, many ICT organizations do not have metrics in place. Marissa Mayer’s recent call to Yahoo employees to work from office is according to ex-Yahooer right, because “”people slacking off like crazy, not being available, spending a lot of time on non-Yahoo! projects.”. Bringing people back to the office will not solve the problem, but my point is that problem might be much smaller if right measurement was in place. You want people in your organization to be effective and efficient, if they are, you do not care where they actually sit.

Implement right metrics, emphasize on right. It is easier said than done of course, but at least thinking about it is step in right direction.

RHCE exam

I decided to re-take RHCE exam. Main drive motive for that is to get re-certified. I earned my first certificate back in 2002 and meantime became known as RHCE in many circles. Although my career advanced a lot since and certificate might not be so relevant to me now, somehow I feel it is good to keep in touch with basics. So I booked myself a place and will take an exam.
RHCE is hands-on exam. I would encourage anyone interested in it to take training, this is usually best path. Or if you are really experienced Linux administrator, you can try just to pass the exam, as myself. Maybe my public notes that I will post here will help. I will try to cover exam objectives from Red Hat’s site (https://www.redhat.com/certification/rhce/objectives/). I will post links to relevant documentation and examples. Let’s start.

About ideas (and why they are not important)

Ideas are not most important things in business, implementation is.

• Do you know who Alan Emtage is ? He invented first Internet search engine.
• Do you know who Dan Bricklin is ? He invented VisiCalc, he often referred to as “The Father of the Spreadsheet”. Still no fortune there MS Excel took it.
• We all use GUI. It was invented in Stanford, polished by Xerox and all money went to Microsoft and Apple

Moral of the story is that ideas are not important, you do not need to invent something revolutionary (although it won’t hurt). Rather, focus on good implementation.

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