microISV startup

For the last eight years, I have worked as a freelance programmer on a product that is currently known, by the few who know it at all, as PVS.  I started with the product when it was the up-and-coming, eponymyous product of a software company named Ardence, run by my friend Richard Davis.  When Ardence was acquired by Citrix Systems in 2007, my contract was picked up along with the code.

Through four major product releases, I’ve been a remote member of a team that slowly nudged the product’s code up the scalable, enterprise-ready evolutionary ladder: from single-threaded to multi-threaded, from Access to Sql Server, and from being a stand-alone product to being a component integrated within other, larger Citrix offerings, which is how a product that is used by many is known by name to so few.

The amount of work varied from quarter to quarter but averaged 20-30 hours a week. For all these years, my Citrix hours have been the big rock that had to fit first into every day and that any other work had to fit around.  My Citrix contract has been ‘the day job,’ funding and enabling all the investment in our app product portfolio.

But as of Friday, May 31st, my last work order expired, I emailed my goodbyes, and I turned out the lights on all my remote connections to Citrix machines real and virtual.  I may need to go back to consulting to make ends meet, but not right away, and definitely not for a few months.  I’ve promised myself at least one full-time Summer of Product.  And, tempered with an appropriate amount of trepidation, I am really, really looking forward to the experience.

Citrix could not have picked a better time, from my perspective, to rationalize the resources being applied to PVS.  I frankly don’t know if I would have had the courage to jump ship right this minute but I am extremely grateful for the push. Read the rest of this entry »

There’s a remarkable amount of discussion going on, just now, of Sheryl Sandberg’s new book, Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead.  Sandberg is COO of Facebook.  Her book attempts to explain why women have stalled out in their march on the executive suite and “offers compelling, commonsense solutions that can empower women to achieve their full potential.”

Bah.

In this discussion, I’m much closer to the view of Jody Greenstone Miller.  Miller is the author of a recent Wall Street Journal piece:  The Real Women’s Issue: Time — Never mind ‘leaning in.’ To get more working women into senior roles, companies need to rethink the clock.  She correctly, in my opinion, points out that many great women don’t lack the skills or aggression to advance in large corporations.  They ‘stall out’ or bail out, rather than “‘lean in’ because they don’t like the world they’re being asked to lean into.”

Amen — but . . .

But even Miller is missing the boat somewhat when she frames this discussion as primarily a gender issue.  Women working for large corporations may have lead the charge on big-corporate work values for a few decades but they are hardly alone any more.  That movement has become much deeper and more pervasive.

Why isn’t anyone talking about the fact that the same ‘problems’ that have impeded women in some workplaces for the last few decades are exactly the same ‘challenges’ that Gen-X and Gen-Y employees of both genders are presenting to employers?   Read the rest of this entry »

We have two days left until the end of the ‘game idea’ contest we have been running over on Learning-Laboratory.com.  I’ve always figured that we would get the bulk of our entries, if any, in the last two days so I’m eager to see what rolls in by Friday.

For now, let me just say that, if you know a chem student with even half an idea for a game, you should tell him or her that the odds of any valid entry winning something are, well, quite good.

But why run a contest in the first place?  We’re in this business to make money not to give it away.  So what, specifically, was the contest intended to accomplish?  And how do we know, when we are done, if the project has been a success?  What are we trying accomplish? Read the rest of this entry »

In the U.S., April is usually thought of as ‘tax time’ since that’s when personal returns are due.  But, for small businesses, January is tax time since we have to get a ton of filings done by the end of the month.  Our own Federal returns aren’t due till March but all the paperwork we produce for others: the W2s for employees, the 1099s for contractors, and many other quarterly or annual reports are due by the end of this month.

I grew up in a family business and remember the bad old days of computing payroll taxes ‘by hand’, looking them up from the tax tables one employee at a time, late into the night, every two-week pay period.   So for the most part, with QuickBooks to back us up, I consider most of our tax reports a little bit nervous-making (Do I have the right numbers?  Am I getting the reporting quarter checked off correctly?  Is that deadline date a post-marked date or a due-there date?) but laughingly easy to actually generate.

However, amazingly to me, there are still a few tax forms that can’t be just printed out on blank paper by QuickBooks. Read the rest of this entry »