Google Closing Denver Offices

Blogscoped reports on Google closing its Denver (and Dallas) offices after an operational review. Google may have high cash flow and revenues, it may spend close to $54 million on food expenses to feed its employees, but it is practical in determining the business case for each office. If a location does not have a positive NPV or fit in its long term strategy, it does not to continue with it.

(quote from blogscoped)

Following an operational review, we are consolidating our offices in Dallas and Denver, as we currently have at least two offices in each of these markets. This reorganization is designed to ensure we are serving the needs of our customers, stakeholders and Googlers [Google employees] efficiently. These are the only two cities affected by this review, and all affected Dallas and Denver Googlers will be offered opportunities within the company.

Boulder Net Reaches Its First Milestone - 100 members

The group on LinkedIn was started in January and it took six months to grow to 100 members. Compared to most groups on LinkedIn this is a small group. The group could have been bigger if I had approved the requests from those "LION"s who join any and every group just to get access to LinkedIn members. I turn away those requests unless they show some Colorado in their past.

The Blog on the other hand gets no readers. It serves only one purpose now, to get Google search presence.

May be things will change in the second of this year.

Hi, I am Normal

In one of the Sponge Bob episodes, he gives up his quirks to become normal. As his behavior changes so does his contours and becomes perfectly smooth and rounded. Normal without his laugh. Normal, as in having nothing to talk about but "wonderful weather we are having". Normal, without any imperfections and sharp edges. Normal, as in boring.

In his new book How States Got Their Shapes, Mark Stein describes Colorado's borders as "boring" (compared t Maryland that has the shape of a squirt gun).

Why does Colorado have such boring borders? Disappointingly, many of the Western states fell victim to carto-conformity when Congress clipped and hacked aborning states to a rough equality of size. So Colorado was designed to have 7 degrees of longitude in width and 4 degrees of latitude in width. Stein says, "The northern and southern borders of Colorado are artifacts of something remarkable. Or perhaps they are artifacts of something we think is remarkable, but which goes on more than we realize. They are artifacts of foresight and planning by our elected representatives."

Get in! Get out! Get on with your life!

Web surfers are getting more practical and impatient. A new report that measured user web surf metrics shows that people are not biting the tactics that are designed t keep the user longer or subscribe to a service.

The annual report into web habits by usability guru Jakob Nielsen shows people are becoming much less patient when they go online.

Instead of dawdling on websites many users want simply to reach a site quickly, complete a task and leave.

Most of the time people enter the site in the middle, through a search engine, and not through your home page. So every page should be designed as a landing page to service the viewer else they are off. They are not going to spend time drilling down the pages. The other truth about reaching through search engines is that the domain name does not matter. It does not have to be memorable or catchy, users are going to find the site increasingly through search engines.

Dr. Nielson's next point makes me wonder if I should get rid of widgets like Newreel and slide shows from this blog.

Web users were also getting very frustrated with all the extras, such as widgets and applications, being added to sites to make them more friendly.

Such extras are only serving to make pages take longer to load, said Dr Nielsen.

Conservative Chair at CU

Does the person who runs the Boulder Net have to be a Boulderite?
Does the person who is running the Conservative chair at CU Boulder have to be a conservative?

Here is The New York Times blog article on the CU conservative chair:

[Chancellor G.P.Peterson] acknowledged that the professor of conservative thought didn’t have to be an actual conservative, and pointed out that many teachers of French “aren’t necessarily French.”

Foreclosure Hotspot

The Wall Street Journal finds foreclosure hotspot in Colorado along I-25 and I-70 corridor. The thesis attributes the causes to not only the buyer behaviors but also the builder's bet that people would be willing to live far away from where they work if they can afford their independent house.

Many of these homebuyers are underwater not just because they bought more house than their incomes could support, and not just because prices are falling. They were also betting on commute patterns and demographic expectations that are proving invalid.

These were bets on location, location, location – premised on the idea that people would be willing to live hours from anywhere for a chance to own a single-family home they could actually afford.

Do you LinkedIn?

I do not say this pejoratively, from my experience I have seen a consistent pattern in LinkedIn activities that can be tied to people's planned career moves or their expectation that something is not right at their current company. I did not do controlled experiments nor do I have hard data, but I have seen flurry of activities during layoff times. People update their profile, start making many new connections and seek out endorsements.

One thing I would say is to have your resume, LinkedIn profile and connections updated constantly and not in reaction to external events. The time to start networking is not when you need the job but when you already have one and is really looking to build a network that is not based on quid pro quo. It is very hard to make a withdrawal right away from a network. It takes time to nurture it.

So do not wait to network until you need it. In fact, the macroeconomic studies of unemployment numbers state that people who already have a job are more likely to find other jobs than those who are unemployed. This is attributed to exposure to other professionals the job provides and the stigma associated with being unemployed. When you reach out to others when you already have a job there is a higher probability of cementing a relationship because others are less worried about the give and take of the relationship.

You cannot cram an year worth of profile and network updates in a month, so pace yourself and do it more regularly.

Mutual Endorsements

If you and your colleague write recommendations to each other in your LinkedIn profiles, do both of these cancel out each other?

Perhaps a little, but mostly it does not matter. For one thing no one is going to dig deep to follow the link to see the list of your recommendations. Secondly, I do not believe the recommendations add any more value than simple signal that you are not making it all up in your profile.

I would like to believe I add some value to others with my recommendations. So I do not display in my profile recommendations from people who I had endorsed. In fact I do not display any of the endorsements I received.

My LinkedIn profile is perennially incomplete.

I wonder if my recommendations of others tell something about me and my people management skills.

LinkedIn Endorsements

LinkedIn has a feature that allows you to endorse your connections or to receive endorsement from them. LinkedIn encourages people to get recommendations by indicating that your profile is only 80% complete, add four more recommendations and it will be 100% complete. This is a nice marketing message, people usually react to this positively.

Do these endorsements matter?
By definition you only accept positive endorsements and hence all of these are positive. So how can one make any judgment based on all positive endorsements? Even though these are all glowing and positive, the fact that someone has taken time to write you one is a positive sign.

Some recruiters who post on LinkedIn say in their posting, "you need to have endorsements if you want to apply for this job". I bet they are not going to make their decisions on the text in the endorsement as much as the presence of it. Their logic probably is, "if you cannot even get your closest colleagues to endorse you, I do not want to look at your resume".

My conclusion is endorsements add value only as a signal to the reviewer that they can spend more time in your profile/resume. After that initial screening, the endorsements don't matter much.

Looking for a Career Change?

It has been said in many articles and books on career change and job searches, that the time to start looking for a new job is when you don't need one and not when you are forced into one. It does not help our cause when we have a short time period to find a new job and under stress from the drastic changes in our current work, including layoffs.

Searching for a new job when you are doing very well in your current one, does not come naturally. We all love what we do and feel complacent, sometimes justifiably so, and sometimes we feel that we are too buys to add on this task. But when you search for a long before you need a new job you have time on your side and will be in a better negotiating position with the new offer. You will have less competition from your peers in your current organization than when the market is flooded with freshly laid off workers.

The first lesson in strategy is, companies that shape their future and not react to it stand to win. The same is true for personal growth. When you start early, you shape your future and not react to the unforeseen thrown your way.

I had a VP in my past career who said this when he quit,

"There are three stages to your career in any organization. In the first third you are learning as fast as you can and trying to become valuable, in the middle third you add value and make impact on the organization's performance, finally you get ready to move on, either within or outside the organization, and start handing off your responsibilities to the next in line."

These days the total length of these three stages is getting shorter and shorter, it stands at about three years. The first part is getting much shorter and corporations expect you to add value from day one and the third stage starts at about the same time as the first, with all three running in parallel.

Are you prepared?