Weeknotes: 2022, Week 4
Thoughts
Is the nature of our business holding back our recruitment? We’re targeting steady growth and identified a major obstacle to this being our ability to recruit experienced engineers into the organisation.
A hypothesis we share as a team is that Engineers are put off by the prospect of working with WordPress - WordPress development has a reputation as being a matter of throwing together some styles and PHP templates*. Or that is our opinion of what is being said. I’m currently formulating ways to test this opinion/hypothesis on our “target market” so to speak. I think it’s survey time again! I’ll see if I can get some budget for incentives.
*This is certainly not the case for our organisation - WordPress focussed as we are, we face some of the most engaging problems and challenges, and formulate some of the most interesting solutions I have seen in my time in the industry.
We should engage in more formats that put our ideas out there on their own for criticism.
Why do I always have my best ideas outside of group sessions? To be fair, I think everyone has their best ideas outside of group sessions - yet we persist with shouting at a white board and engaging in groupthink. I suppose it’s what everyone feels more comfortable doing.
What I’ve learned this week
- I learned how to use the Post Office self-serve machine to print my Air Mail stamps. Points of feedback:
- I had no idea what was going to happened after I’d paid and was reluctant to do so. Turned out the machine just printed a sticker (stamp) to put on my envelope, but I didn’t know it was going to do anything except take my money - therefore experienced trepidation.
- There were no instructions on what to do with my envelope - I assume I could now just post it into any post box, but it would have been nice to have an extra bit of hand holding and tell me this was the case. Who did they test the machines on?
- On the recommendation of someone I did a Myers-Briggs personality test. This is the first I’ve done since a Belbin one 10 years ago (97% Plant for any Belbin fans)
- I came out as Commander, Inventor and Champion.
- I’d say the descriptions were accurate - but there’s probably a certain level of Barnum effect going on.
- What did surprise me was that I leaned more heavily towards extrovert than introvert from my answers.
Achievements
I produced a useful wireframe prototype for a WP Editor based solution using Whimsical in only 15 minutes. I’m pretty proud of myself.
Targets for next week
I never got a chance to look into Logo or Jupyter notes. I probably won’t next week - I get the feeling I’m going to get sucked into my next task of looking at how people have successfully marketed open source projects in the past. Has there been any purposeful manoeuvring on these - or are they just led by demand?