Category: Blog

Thoughts about IT, Data, Work Culture

An advantage of remote interviews

There have been plenty of articles and comments about the (dis)advantages of home office vs in-office scenarios over the past two years. One critical aspect of home-office is definitely about creating a personal relationship with people that you never meet in person.

One situation where a personal relationship is quite important is an interview with candidates (be it internal or external). Besides the technical expertise you also want to know whether or not the candidate is a fit for the team. In the past 2+ years, we interviewed dozens of people for positions in the team. I say “we” because we usually are 2-3 internals holding different positions in the team (dev, ops, product owner, …) interviewing the new candidate. And in the past 2+ years we did all those interviews remotely via video-conferencing.

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My critical view about “the Metaverse”

Recently the term “Metaverse” is across like in every IT related news. Noone really knows what it is but it seems to be the hot shit you have to be into! And it seems to be THE ultimate solution for so many odd problems AND a totally new business market!

The “metaverse” topic has followed me now a couple of months and I had a couple of discussions already about my critical view about the topic. And if it was worth discussing so often – it might be worth writing it down as well. 😀

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How to make efficient status meetings

Do you know these horrible status meetings? Every week, every two weeks or – when it is critical – 2x a week? Especially with multiple members? And you never know whether it’s important to go there or not? But you need to go there because there might be a relevant information?

The myth: “If there’s nothing to say, we can quickly close the meeting after 5min”. Seriously – I’ve not seen this happen very often. It quickly drifts into a common chitchat or Q&A. Don’t get me wrong: socializing is important – but a status meeting isn’t a socializing event.

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Do not make rules that you cannot control or enforce

I have been repeating this sentence more often than I’d like recently. But if the COID-19 time has taught me one thing very impressively, it is:

Rule 1: Forget rules which you cannot control or enforce
(Alternatively: “Do not hope for the sanity of your colleagues / fellows / …”)

Many of the COVID measures would certainly not have been necessary if “we all” had behaved reasonably. One could discuss the term “reasonable” right away. But “reasonable” unfortunately depends on personal goals. If the personal goals diverge, the opinion about “reasonable behavior” diverges as well. And suddenly “we all” do not have a common sense of what “reasonable behaviour” is. This discrepancy is then what is called a “conflict.”

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The real challenge of HomeOffice for companies

Many companies and executives thought COVID-19 and 100% HomeOffice would be a real challenge. Phew seems a lot of companies survived the Home-Office challenge! Companies have learnt that the business can continue. Employees have learnt that HomeOffice can work.

This was challenge 1: the technical challenge.

But now as companies slowly do not have to do HomeOffice anymore … now we will see what our bosses, executives and companies really think. How much they have really learned. How much trust there really is.

Now comes challenge 2: the people challenge.

The challenge might now be to keep people when a leader (or worse: a company culture) values presence (a.k.a counting sheep) over results – but employees don’t …

I’ll just stay at home and stay productive.

Don’t just ask for Feedback and Improvements

“Every employee should feel encouraged to give feedback and contribute ideas for improvement!” Who has heard this before? Probably everyone!

My (slightly provocative) opinion: “The effect was probably close to zero. So Forget it and don’t do such a shout out!”. Unless you want nothing or barely anything to change. Then do a big shout-out and send people back to work! Great show – with no effect! Of course, I made the mistake myself and didn’t notice for quite a while (years, actually). Every now and then an idea or suggestion came along (or I had one myself) and we were proud of the improvement. At some point between Retros and PostMortems I got the point: “It needs the right framework!”

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“Easy going” vs “Taking care”

Freitag Abend. Heimfahrt in der BOB (BayerischeOberlandBahn). Wochenende here I come!

In Bad Tölz (eine Station vor meinem “Zielflughafen”) höre ich “Hausham? Da sind sind im falschen Zug.” (Hätte man vor einer halben Std in Holzkirchen umsteigen müssen). Ich denke mir “Arme Sau – jetzt fährst erst mal wieder zurück – oder du kennst hier jemanden der dich fährt – Ist mir aber wurscht – denn ICH bin gleich daheim. HA-HA!”.

Der Zug steht noch – ein junges asiatisches Mädchen das gerade ins Teenageralter eingetreten sein muss läuft etwas hektisch herum und spricht mich dann an “schuldi-gung – Hausham?”
Ohoh. “Hm tut mir leid, falscher Zug, steig schnell um in den Zug am anderen Gleis. Du musst zurückfahren.” Verzweifelter Blick ihrerseits. “ik ver-stehe nicht?”
Oh verdammt – kurzer Versuch in Englisch – nada. Noch maximum 2-3min bis der andere Zug fährt. Oh – scheiße – das bekomme ich jetzt nie erklärt. Die Hoffnung stirbt zuletzt: Noch ein Versuch es ihr zu erklären. Auch die Taxioption versteht sie natürlich nicht.

Option A) Schultern zucken, mich nicht weiter kümmern, das Mädel bis nach Lenggries fahren lassen (wo sie nicht weiter von Hausham weg sein könnte) und gleich daheim sein (also ich – sie sicher nicht). Ist ja schließlich nicht mein Kind.
Option B) Zusammenpacken, das Mädel in den anderen Zug setzen und hoffen, dass mich irgendwer fahren kann (oder dass diesmal wenigstens Taxis da sind) weil MEIN Zug dann ganz sicher weg ist.

Continue reading “Easy going” vs “Taking care”

SRTM Plugin for OpenStreetMap

One of the features of our TrafficMining Project at the LMU was to use additional attributes in routing queries. Standart routing queries usually just use time and distance for calculating the fastest/shortest routes. In order to have an additional attribute we decided to use evelation data as this might be an issue if you also want to take fuel cost into account or if you’re planning a bike tour (instead of crossing a hill, you might want to consider a longer tour that avoids crossing the hill).

The problem just was that data nodes from OpenStreetMap are defined mostly by id, latitude and longitude, which is totally enough for painting 2D maps and standard routing queries. As the elevation is not added to OpenStreetMap data directly (and it is also not intended to be added to the OSM data base), a component was needed that parses both Nasa SRTM data as well as OSM data files in order to combine the data.

In the first version, we parsed the SRTM data directly and addied it to the nodes of the OSM-Graph directly. During one refactoring, we decided to integtrate Osmosis into the project in order to be able to read PBF files (another OpenStreetMap file format). During this integration we decided to separate the SRTM parsing into a separate module so that other people can make use of it as well. The plugin was open sourced some time ago at google code as the “osmosis-srtm-plugin” under an LGPL licence.

Relevant Links:

Sinn und Unsinn von E-Mail- und Link-Disclaimern

Wieder eine Mail erhalten mit dem zweifelhaften Text

Diese E-Mail und alle angehängten Dateien enthalten streng vertrauliche Informationen und sind lediglich für den/die in der Adressleiste genannte(n) Person(en) bestimmt. Sollte diese E-Mail bzw. deren Anhänge an Dritte und/oder nicht in der Adressleiste genannte Personen gelangen,  […]

Ich hab’ diesem Disclaimern ja noch nie wirklich vertraut. Ein Artikel bei heise (Disclaimer: Unnötiger Ballast für E-Mails) bestätigt die Vermutung, dass diese Disclaimer bei uns in Deutschland nicht wirksam sind. – Ebenso wie diese widersinnigen Distanzierungen von Links:

Mit Urteil vom 12. Mai 1998 hat das Landgericht Hamburg entschieden, daß man durch die Ausbringung eines Links […]

Auch hier gibt es eigentlich diverse Seiten, die erklären, dass das Urteil vom LG Hamburg eben genau das nicht tut, was die Links versprechen: und zwar den Seitenbetreiber schützen. Mehr Informationen gibt es unter anderem auf diesen Seiten: