The problem is, of course, that there are tens of thousands, perhaps millions, of users who used Megaupload for perfectly legitimate, legal storage of files. As of yesterday, all their access to those files is gone. Work documents that groups were collaborating on, family photo albums, insurance records, and other valuable documents, now completely unavailable.

The action is similar to the government discovering that a criminal is using the local post-office box store for transferring stolen goods. The feds swoop down; instead of locking that P.O. Box, then instead shut down the entire chain. Now, there’s tends of thousands of people across the country who cannot access their (perfectly legitimate) mail.

Of course, in the real world, it probably wouldn’t happen that way. The feds would target the criminals, and non-criminal users wouldn’t be affected. But let’s take this analogy one step further: the people who own and operate the chain know that their post offices are being used by criminals to transfer stolen goods. Moreover, the government prosecutors have clear and indisputable evidence that this is the case. Would a judge in this situation issue an order to shut down the entire business, seizing not only the illegal good but actually taking people’s perfectly legal property along with it? It’s possible, I suppose, but there would almost certainly be a period where, after the government has gotten the evidence it needs, the shops would be re-opened and people would be permitted to retrieve their mail. Will that happen in this case? I think it unlikely, but we’ll see.

Is this a reason to avoid storing your valuable files “in the cloud?” I think it is; certainly, the cloud offers an inexpensive way to backup your data, but I’m not sure that I would rely upon it as the primary repository of data.

Dear Sir,

SOPA and PIPA are bad laws that fundamentally affect the freedoms enjoyed by Americans. I do not want to see the USA using the same techniques as China and Iran to control our citizens. Moreover, I have worked in the Internet industry—previously, as an engineering manager for Yahoo!, and currently as a software architect for Rackspace hosting—and I can tell you that these laws, if passed, would create huge burdens on providers while actually doing very little to stop piracy.

I encourage you to drop your support for these laws. No businesses have ever been successful in the long term by using the legal system to repress competition, and these acts will simply NOT stop the mechanisms used, nor the motivations for, sharing illegal content. The solution to intellectual property infringement is NOT to place a huge burden on businesses to enforce someone else’s rights, and I, for one, am appalled as the loss of freedoms that have occurred in the USA to such an extent that such laws could even be conceived.

Yours sincerely,
Glen Campbell

Very cool (at least if you use Instagram).

IBM may have made the “personal computer,” but it was Steve Jobs who made the computer personal. Personally, I cannot imagine how the world would be different without the effect his singular vision has had on how computers and machines interact with each other. He was perpetually pushing us to “think different” and to do things better than we ever imagined. The list of his successful products are being listed all over the web.

But I’m also interested in his failures; if ever there was a person who learned from his mistakes, it was Steve Jobs. Do you recall the “Cube,” the beautiful but feeble Macintosh? He learned that beauty was not enough to make a good product; it also had to have performance.

The original “iPod Phone,” made in conjunction with Motorola, was a joke. With a crappy user interface and limited to only holding 100 songs (can you imagine?), this worst seller forced Jobs to confront the real problems in the phone business, resulting, ultimately, in the iPhone, the “smart phone” that changed the entire industry.

The Apple TV was, and still is, one of those “little projects” that Apple still plays with. It has its enthusiasts, but it’s never really caught on in the wider populace. Yet Apple keeps tinkering with it, convinced that there’s “something there.” Will Apple ever get it right?

So much product development consists of tiny, incremental changes. Much of it is based upon user feedback; this is good, but users don’t think outside the box. They don’t imagine things in a vastly different way than they already exist. When all personal computers had a command line and a 24×80 character display, Jobs envisioned (with the help of Xerox PARC) a fully graphical user interface in the hands of every single computer user. While the iPod wasn’t the first music player with a hard disk, it was the first to offer an online store, with the full participation of record labels, where users could simply purchase and download music as opposed to ripping MP3′s from their CDs. When every computer “had” to have a floppy disk drive, Jobs sold the iMac without one. (Side note: when my wife and I got our MacBook Airs, she insisted on getting the plug-in CD drive. We’ve never used it.)

The world is a better place because of you, Steve, and we will miss you.

Google Plus has launched, initiating a flurry of interest among the bleeding-edge technophiles of Silicon Valley (the metaphorical one that spans the globe, not just the literal one in California). It’s ignited a frenzy of commentary and participation not seen since, well, not really seen before—few services have started with such furor and immediate adoption.

Some of those A-list technophiles have given up their blogs, simply redirecting their personal domain to their Google+ profile page. Others have claimed that Google+ is the “Facebook killer,” and still others are ambivalent. In reality, of course, much of this is hype, and one of two things will happen: either Google will continue to build out G+ so that it truly is competitive with services like Facebook and FriendFeed, or else people will come to their senses, retract their statements, and write cautionary blog posts on the dangers of getting caught up in a feeding frenzy.

Some commentators add additional hype, claiming that Google+ is “not a social network” and that Google’s announcement emphasized “sharing” and not the “social network” nature of the site. This is, of course, baloney. Google Plus is nothing but a social network at the moment; it has no other features beyond those required to connect people together and group them. This is better known (in some circles [see what I did there?]) as a “social graph,” which is exactly what Facebook and LinkedIn maintain on their users.

What’s really important about Google+, however, is what it’s missing, rather than what it has, at least for the time being.

First, let’s start with Google+’s core feature: Circles. This is the differentiator of Google from other social networks. Circles are a much more flexible method of defining groups; in Google’s case, they are strictly one-way relationships between a user and other people. Those other people can be on Google+, too, or they can simply be an email address. Thus, Google has expanded the implementation of a social network beyond the mere website. If I have a relationship with someone on Facebook, it is owned and maintained by Facebook; if I have one on LinkedIn, it is owned and maintained by  LinkedIn. Facebook has no knowledge of a relationship that I may have with someone via LinkedIn, and vice versa. With Google+, however, I can include any user that has an email address in my social circle; that way, when I share something, that person receives an email about it.

It’s a powerful feature, and one that helps ensure trust and privacy. Google+ assumes (rightly or wrongly) that the people I want to share things with are the same people whose stuff I want to see. Once two people have each other in a circle, they have effectively created the same two-way relationship that exists on Facebook or LinkedIn.

What’s surprising (for a company whose main business is indexing content) is how terrifically difficult it is to actually get content to share with people. At the moment, all content sharing must be done manually. Want to show someone a picture? You have to upload it or paste in a link to Flickr (assuming that it’s stored there). If you upload it to Google+, it’s stored in Picasa; there’s no way to have it automatically sent over to Facebook to share with your friends there—you have to do it twice. Create a cool picture on Instagram? The only way to get it into Google+ is to manually cut and paste the link. There is no automatic import or export of any content.

In all honestly, I have to assume that this will change in the future. WIthout it, Google+ is a mere skeleton of a framework of a social network. We’ve all gotten so used to being able to take a photo on our smartphone and instantly share it with our friends no matter what social network they’re on, it’s a huge step backwards to start living on a single service. However, that’s exactly what some people think you should do. In essence: everyone, stop using all the other services and start doing everything on Google+, and it will be great. Nice idea, but the world doesn’t simply work that way. It took years to get all of my relatives onto Facebook, and it will take years more to move them off. What this means is that, if I actually want to be able to share with all of my friends, Google+ will have to support sharing of data across multiple services.

Likewise, I’m not simply going to stop posting here on my blog; people will not simply stop using Twitter, and next year’s new toy will not fail because everyone refuses to leave Google+. I therefore need to have some easy way of getting content created elsewhere into Google+, since I want to share it with my friends. And having to paste it in manually each time simply won’t work. Again, I have to assume that this feature is coming, but it’s not there yet and, until it is, Google+ seems like a deficient copy of FriendFeed, albeit with a bigger audience.

Google+ also needs to allow better content moderation/curation once automated import is coming. For example, my friend Beth might be a SEO marketer and a photographer. I want to see her photographs, but I don’t want to have to wade through her marketing pitch; Google+ needs to give me the ability to selectively “mute” by types of content or origin. FriendFeed’s “hide other posts like this one” shows how to do this.

Finally, Google+ has to work out the bugs. Most importantly, they have to learn how to deduplicate the user’s stream. It’s frustrating to sign onto Google+ and see fourteen (!) copies of a post by Robert Scoble, simple because others of my friends decided to reshare it. Google+ could take a cue here from FriendFeed and implement the “also shared by” links that exist there.

I’ve reference FriendFeed several times here; I still use it, not because of the feature set it provides, but because that’s where my friends are. If Google truly wants to make Plus “like sharing in real life,” then they have to face my reality that my friends live on other social networks and let me keep sharing with them. Google+ is great technology that’s still raw and will hopefully improve quickly.

While in California last week, I had lunch with a colleague from my days at Yahoo! In fact, I was the manager who hired this person, and I’ve watched him mature from a “wet behind the ears” (but very talented) n00b to a highly-skilled, valuable engineer.

One of the things that indicates maturity in a software developer is the ability to interact with others, to provide feedback when necessary, and to seek advice when it’s needed. This individual had been the technical lead on a project and was having his own problems working with some of the more junior members of the team. The junior members appears to be somewhat intimidated when asked about their work by the older team member—this is not uncommon, since a junior developer is often unsure of his or her work and feels self-conscious about showing it off.

In addition, if the team leader simply “drops in” and asks how things are going, it’s often likely that the junior programmer’s code is not in a set state for demonstrating. For example, the programmer may have been trying to isolate a bug, and has just put in a dozen or so lines of bugs, trying to determine which path the code is taking—not exactly the best time to show it off to your leader!

He asked my advice on the matter: how best to interact with his team members without intimidating them and yet still getting a feel for progress. I gave my advice, and here’s the note I received from him today:

Hey Glen,

I hope you are doing well. I just wanted to send you a quick thank you note for the advice you gave me over lunch the last time we met.

You may recall that one of my questions to you was how to ensure that a junior member of my team was pulling her weight without having her feel overwhelmed about her work or making her nervous with my presence. Your response was a two-fold solution: a) to remove the element of surprise by setting up regular meetings with her and b) to make these meetings as much about showing progress as talking about it.

I am happy to report that we have been having said meetings since the start of this week and already there is a noticeable improvement in her work — not only is she delivering more than before but she has also become more open to asking questions rather than making assumptions (probably because she realizes it is the safer route to solving problems).

So thank you for your advice. Not only is our project humming along nicely now but I feel a small sense of accomplishment on a personal level too.

I, too, feel a “small sense of accomplishment on a personal level.”

I have been a huge fan of Continental Airlines since the early 1990s. I have flown hundreds of thousands of miles on them, and I’ve encouraged friends, coworkers, and family members to fly them, too. For years, they had a stellar on-time record and a great frequent-flyer program. But, more importantly, they always treated me well, personally. They at least acted like they cared about me and my problems.

The first time I ever flew First Class was when a Continental gate agent took pity on me arriving, wet, grouchy, and late, to a flight at Newark International. She gave me a complimentary upgrade and it helped me to relax and look forward to the weekend.

I lived in Europe for five years and all of my trans-Atlantic flights were on Continental. When my wife had to go to an unexpected funeral, Continental helped to arrange the last-minute travel.

Today, the airline managed to reverse twenty years’ of good will in a matter of minutes.

I’m booked on a return flight from San Jose to San Antonio, with a change of planes in Houston. My father (who lives in Beaumont, TX) went into the hospital yesterday morning with some broken ribs and a subdural hematoma after a fall. I talked with my brother (who lives in Houston) and he offered to put me up for the night so that I could visit my Dad in the morning. I have tickets for the Houston Astros game in Houston on Sunday afternoon, so it seemed logical that I could stay with him and drive back with my wife after the game.

I had already checked in to the flight, however, so I arrived at the airport about two and a half hours before the flight so that I could drop the Houston-to-San Antonio leg of the trip, and make sure that my luggage got off the plane in Houston.

The first surprise was learning that the Continental ticket counter wasn’t open. There was a large queue of people waiting, and the sign telling me that the ticket counter is open from 4-7AM and then from 10-noon. No one could check in early or drop off bags because the ticket counter was unstaffed.

Next, after waiting for the staff to arrive and process the people in front of me, the agent informed me that I could not simply drop the final leg of the flight. I would have to cancel the remainder of the ticket and pay for an upgrade to not fly with them. The thought of this is staggering; it took me a few minutes to get my head around it. Their silly rules mandate that, for them to avoid weight, labor, and excess trouble, I have to pay them extra. She told me that, if I wanted to get off in Houston, that was my business, but my luggage would have to be checked on through to San Antonio.

Luckily, I had packed all of my clean clothes in my carry-on backpack, so that’s not a problem, but the implications of this are, frankly, scary. Because of the risk of terrorism, it used to be illegal for airlines to carry luggage without the accompanying passenger. I’ve seen it happen before; someone fails to show up at the gate on time, and they had to hold the flight to remove that passenger’s baggage.

Needless to say, I’m booked through to San Antonio, as is my luggage. Who knows what will happen in Houston?

I work for Rackspace Hosting (see the Disclaimer on the home page of this blog), the home of “fanatical support.” Our objective is to be the best service company in the world, not just our industry. One of our business role models is Southwest Airlines, a company that, in spite of its quirks, still has a real person answer the phone or respond to your tweets. Continental, presumably as a result of its merger with United (“breaks guitars”), has opted to avoid providing good service and simply hope that people will have no other options when it comes time to travel. Unfortunately, that may be true at times.

But you can bet that, when I’m given a choice, I sure as hell ain’t choosing Continental again.

Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns — the ones we don’t know we don’t know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tend to be the difficult ones.

The language may be convoluted, but it’s impeccably true. We can be aware of our own ignorance: the “known unknowns,” according to Rumsfeld. However, it’s the things that we are yet unaware that we are ignorant of that are likely to bite us in the ass.

Software development has two major components. First, and most simply, is the active design, development, and testing of the code. Secondly, however, is the planning and coordination of the delivery of that code. Generally speaking, the larger the first part is, the more difficult the second one. A single programmer working alone can often easily predict how long it will take him or her to complete a specified unit of work. The more people that get involved in a project however, the more uncertain things become.

The ability to predict software deliveries is important (well, it’s important to companies that sell software or services based on software). For example, it’s quite possible that a software product might take so long to develop that the company will never recoup its investment (hence the huge amount of interest in early or first providers of software services). And, like military operations, it’s the “unknown unknowns” that are impossible to plan for and difficult to handle when they occur.

Scrum and related “agile” development practices tend to focus on iterative development and planning in an attempt to mitigate these sorts of unexpected changes. They’re not, as some people might suspect, intended to let the product stakeholders change their mind on a whim. The central idea is that, by breaking development up into discrete chunks (where each chunk is fully functional and working), it gives the development team opportunities at regular intervals to change direction or adapt to new circumstances.

Teams that are new to scrum often have misperceptions of the practice, ranging from a misunderstanding of the various components (stories, tasks, standups) to a reluctance to move away from personal responsibility to team-based management. One of the scrum fundamentals, however, should remain at the core focus of the team: scrum is focused on delivering working software, and not on time tracking, management reporting, or a plethora of other benefits (perceived or real) that might come out of it.

When you’re faced with an uncertainty in the scrum practice, ask yourself: How can I best deliver working software in a predictable manner? If the process doesn’t support that, then get rid of it. Unexpected events happen: for example, you might start on a feature, only to discover that it’s much more difficult than you originally anticipated. While that points to a need to improve your planning (and that’s an ancillary fact that needs to come out at the retrospective), you need to ask yourself what you can do to deliver some working software. If you can reduce the scope and only deliver a small part of the larger feature, then do that. If you can bring in someone else to help, then do that. There’s no right answer.

By resynchronizing at the end of every spring cycle, scrum lets a team handle not only the “known unknowns,” but also the “unknown unknowns” that inevitably attack the software development process.

Approximately five years ago, one of the most devastating natural(?) disasters in US history occurred. Early on the morning of August 28, 2005, Hurricane Katrina plowed into the Mississippi river delta and up towards New Orleans.

The first reports seemed to indicate that the city had survived relatively unscathed. But an hour or so later, the world began to receive reports that the levees, long viewed as the weakest part of New Orlean’s hurricane defensive shield, had begun to fail, and the city was filling with water.

The story is fairly well known, but I had a small part in the midst of it. At the time, I was an engineer for Yahoo! News, and Katrina rapidly became the top story. We watched as our traffic doubled, then tripled, then quintupled our normal daily rate. And it stayed at that level, with little variance, for the next week or more.

My nephew was a flight mechanic and rescue winch operator for the US Coast Guard at the time; he took the top photo you see here on one of his (many) flights over New Orleans and the Mississippi coast. He had, in fact, transferred out of the New Orleans Coast Guard station several months before Katrina but was recalled (along with hundreds of fellow Coast Guard men and women) in the aftermath of the storm.

They flew inland, landed in the parking lot of a Home Depot store, and purchased every chainsaw available. They flew back to New Orleans, distributed the chainsaws among the Coast Guard rescue crews, who used them to speed their entry into the attics where residents had retreated from the encroaching floods.

One of the problems in the immediate aftermath was how to reunite the evacuees from New Orleans with their friends and relatives who were looking for them. Yahoo! put together a team of volunteers, including me, who flew to Houston to set up a computer center to help the evacuees search for and contact their relatives.

Yahoo! employees worked with a local computer networking charity and Verizon to set up a telecommunications center and a computer facility.

At the end of the first day, we reviewed the situation. One of the problems was that there were too many people trying to help. There were at least sixteen websites, many of them small, local sites, that carried lists of people trying to make contacts with their friends and relatives.

David Filo, one of the founders of Yahoo!, was on the call and realized that this was an area where Yahoo! could help. He had Yahoo! build a special search index that integrated data from all of the sites, and thus gave us a single site (by the next morning!) that linked out to all the necessary information.

The tragedy was great and is still ongoing, but it was an awe-inspiring site to watch a company like Yahoo! use its huge resources in such an open and rapid manner; this is one of the reasons why many of us are still here.

In keeping with my homage to William James, I suppose that this blog post should be subtitled, “A Study in Human Nature.” However, my goals are not quite so lofty as James’s; I am merely an observer, and not a philosopher, of online social activities. Perhaps a better title would be, “A Field Guide to the Social Media Participants of the Online Realm,” but even that is a bit pretentious, don’t you think?

Those of us who live in the rarefied air of Silicon Valley tend to assume, almost always incorrectly, that the “rest of the world” experiences social media the way we do. It therefore comes as quite a shock, at times, to discover that there are enormous hordes of online users who do not experience the Internet the way we do. Here are some facts about the “other half” of the online world:

• Many of them do not know what a URL is, nor what a search engine is. There’s a reason that the most common search query at Yahoo! is “Google,” and the most common search query at Google is “Yahoo.”
• The term hyperlink has no meaning and is probably confused with something in science fiction.
• They have never heard of Techmeme, ReadWriteWeb, Mashable, TechCrunch, or any of the other dozens of sites that we tend to rely on for our daily news.
• They believe that the Internet is a scary and dangerous place, and will rarely, if ever, divulge any personal information, much less their credit card numbers, online.
• They have no sense at all of the relatively safety or security of one website versus another. “https://” vs. “http://” is meaningless.
• They tend to perceive Internet sites as TV channels: different content, to be sure, but fundamentally the same technology.
• If they notice the URL, they get concerned if the site does not use “www.” before the domain name, thinking that it somehow controls the behavior of the web.

It’s not surprising, then, that these people tend to have different experiences of social media. This is an attempt to catalog, based solely on my personal experience, the various types of social media behaviors that occur.

The grandma

She has an account on Facebook after frequently seeing her grandchildren using it. She has had a computer since the 1990′s, and it’s mostly used by her grandkids when they come over to visit. She’s good at a few tasks using the computer: she can print out maps and directions, she can retrieve her email, and she can upload pictures from the tiny little Canon point-and-shoot camera that she carries everywhere.

Unfortunately, she has no fear and little understanding that there are Very Bad People on the Internet who would like to take over her computer and use it to send thousands of spam messages per hour for the next few years.

Her social graph consists of a) her immediate family members, b) some people she knows from church or the local community, and c) scammers who would like to inherit her modest fortune.

She loves seeing the pictures of her children and grand children, and she’s a big fan of casual games online. She has a farm on Farmville.

She reads every word of text on a web page before taking any action at all; because of this, she does not distinguish between actual content, navigation, and advertising.

Because of her innocence, she needs to be protected. Default privacy settings that reveal her name and location to the world could put her in very real physical danger. She will never be a mobile device user, and strategies that encourage her to become one will only confuse and frustrate her. She gets far more value out of “real life” social interaction than she does online, and she will drop the online interaction in a heartbeat if she has an opportunity to do something that involves real people.

The student

He is in high school or college, and has never known a world without the Internet. He does not wear a watch and probably never will. The concept of a “landline” is a novelty, since he’s never known a phone that would not go everywhere. He will not use email personally because it’s too slow, instead relying on SMS (text messaging) for most of his interaction with his peers.

His attention span is under two seconds: if he looks at a web page and cannot figure out how to use it in that time (or if it takes longer than that to load in the browser), he will drop it and move on to something more interesting. He is incredibly frustrated with his college’s website, and will scream out loud at how difficult it is to use.

He is completely and totally paranoid. He was raised hearing horror stories about online dangers and will go to great lengths to avoid giving any personal information online. He has no way of determining the difference between real and imagined risks. He will grudgingly order things from Amazon, but he will not allow them to save his credit card information for later, preferring to enter it each time.

He uses Facebook almost exclusively on his smartphone. He updates his status several times today, often with totally introverted comments about his state of mind.

Because of his paranoia (some of it justified), the student needs to be enticed to expand his social media horizons. For people his age, the best way to do this is with sex. The ability to share with people of the opposite gender is a strong attractor, overcoming many fears. Seriously, however, the student needs to be introduced to things gradually; he needs to be assured that he has control over who can see his personal information, and what it will be used for.

To be continued…

(My favorite part is the final ukulele solo as it fades out.)

It’s very creative, and it’s an insightful look into the process required to produce something of this quality. If you’ve ever been involved in professional music production, you’ll understand that much goes on “behind the scenes,” and this video gives you some insight into that.

If you’ve been in California for more than a few minutes, someone has probably told you about In-N-Out. This venerable chain of restaurants has more rabid fanbois than Apple, and for a good reason. They sell excellent hamburgers and french fries; and that’s really all they do. They have drinks and shakes on the menu, but the In-N-Out menu was probably the inspiration for  Steve Jobs’s dictum to keep things simple. There are very few options, but the quality of what they sell is exceptional.

However, an upstart chain called Five Guys Burgers and Fries, started in Virginia, has moved into California in the last few years, mostly around the Los Angeles area. And, in the last few months, they’ve moved north into Silicon Valley. They are often touted as an “In-N-Out Killer” (sound familiar?), and yesterday was my first chance to sample their stuff.

The Five Guys menu is much more feature-rich than that of In-N-Out. In addition to hamburgers (they have a “little burger” with one patty, and a regular “burger” with two), they also sell hot dogs. Moreover, and much to my delight, they also have bacon cheeseburgers, which is the height of burger gastronomy in my humble opinion (In-N-Out does not sell bacon at all, even on their famous secret menu). Five Guys is awash with options: you can have mayo, ketchup, hot sauce, BBQ sauce, A-1 sauce, or any combination. You can top your burger with grilled onions, green peppers, jalapeños, or grilled mushrooms.

Both chains offer fresh (never frozen) beef, and they are roughly comparable on that front. In-N-Out offers small, crispy fries, while the Five Guys fries are much larger and correspondingly less crisp. Five Guys does, however, offer a Cajun variant of their fries.

Unfortunately, Five Guys’s burgers cost about double what In-N-Out’s cost. My verdict: if you’re looking for a good burger, you can’t go wrong either place. If you want to save some money, however, go to In-N-Out. On the other hand, if you’re looking for a flexible, ultimate burger experience, Five Guys can’t be beat.

Unlike today’s digital cameras, this little gem did not have a built-in LCD display, high-speed USB transfer (USB had not been invented yet), a flash, or any of the other features we consider normal. Its resolution was measured in kilopixels, not megapixels, with a maximum photo size of 320×240 pixels. It connected with the computer via a serial cable terminated with what appeared to be a 1/8″ headphone plug. There was not an electronically-generated shutter sound; instead, there was a reassuring but mysteriously mechanical “thunk” when you pressed the shutter button. It would hold approximately 20 images, even at that low resolution.

Nonetheless, that camera captured some of the most important moments in my life. We had moved to England earlier in 1996, and so the Kodak’s digital images record much of our wanderings and explorations in and around the area where we were living. It also captured my son, age 5, on his first day of school.

Some of the best images from that camera are included below, in their full original size and glory.

(Note: your company’s process is most likely somewhat different than mine, so feel free to adapt this to your particular situation. I do think, however, that the general principles are common to most business settings.)

The first rule of thumb is: be on time! A review or self-assessment that arrives *before* my deadline for reporting on you is infinitely more valuable than one that arrives later. When I have to tell my manager about your performance, I’m going to have to rely on my (imperfect) memory about your work if you don’t give me your self-assessment to remind me. Six sentences scrawled on the back of an envelope (who uses envelopes any more, any way?) is far, far better than a dozen pages that arrive 24 hours too late.

Second: nouns are better than verbs. Which of these sounds better?

1. Bob was an excellent performer whose efficient work was creative and elegant. or
2. During the First Widget project, Bob’s design for the left-hand invigorator was delivered early and was used as an example for all the remaining invigorators.

The first one has glowing adjectives (“excellent,” “efficient,” “creative,” etc.) but no details. The second example gives specific examples of the work that Bob did to justify his performance. When you write a review, think of specific examples and specific value that the other employee (or yourself) has provided to the company: “Jane solved the XYZ problem and saved the company $12 gazillion per year” is much better than “Jane’s creativity was a great benefit to the project.”

Finally, be honest. The most common example of this is, “I can’t see any possible room for improvement in Jill’s performance.” Really? Jill is absolutely perfect and cannot be improved in any way? What that tells me is that you didn’t take the review seriously enough to put in a little effort to think about Jill’s performance. Not only does it give me nothing to discuss with Jill, it also reflects badly on you.

Dishonesty appears in other guises as well: “Matthew was always an eager participant at meetings.” Superlatives like “always” are very difficult to justify—maybe Matthew is an exception, and he was “always an eager participant,” but a few examples of his eagerness would be better than an overeager statement like this that’s difficult to justify.