High stress scoring
Like most of us, I was watching the kickboxing soccer game yesterday that went two hours without a goal. And like many of us in North America, I’ve been hearing people (let’s call them basketball fans) talk about how the game would be fairer if there were more goals — they’re right, if you determine outcomes by a single goal, the amount of statistical noise in the results is going to be pretty high.
But of course the point isn’t to determine the best team, so much as it is to get an audience; and the more stressful it is, the more exciting it tends to be.
I’m nearing in on 100 LinkedIn connections (which I might get doughnuts for), which is just about the opposite end of the spectrum.
But I have other metrics that are upsettingly close to the stressful end of the spectrum:
- Uptime. We target 99.9% uptime (and we tend to surpass it handily) but one day of outage can kill your stats for months.
- Competing for projects. A fair amount of our work comes in through responding to requests for proposals, which is a little like sending in a resume — you may be a great person but you only have a few pages to sell yourself and pretty much any mistake can sink you. Usually we have to bounce these around a couple times to make sure I haven’t written a passionate ode to a particular technology stack rather than an explanation of how we’ll solve a problem.
So I’d like to make a few changes, next time a machine overheats because I thought I could ignore a warning for one more day, or we lose a bid because I missed something in a 30 page document, I want there to be a fifth referee who can over-rule reality. Or worst case, can we have a do-over in 4 years?
Oh, and a belated congratulations goes out to my Alma Mater’s Dave Johnston on becoming our next Governor General.
A hearty congratulations go out to Wavii, the latest startup by a friend of mine, on their funding and amazingly good press:
