- Everyone would hire more seniors if possible. Juniors are sometimes seen as expensive and hiring only juniors does not scale.
- Education systems do not produce senior people. Also there are other sectors than tech too. I don't know the current situation, but it used to be that places for IT education were never filled completely. There just isn't enough people.
- I don't remember this being reported as significant
- I believe there is difficulties with taxation etc. if you hire people living in different country.
I'd suggest going with node.js. Lot of libraries, large community. Fast and easy to get started You are going to have to learn javascript on the frontend anyway, might as well use it in the backend.
It is hard to imagine anything is too late for a company that made over 20 billion profit last year. Even if Windows has done worse aren't Office sales increasing on OS X for example. Microsoft is a company that sells Office first and foremost.
No, that's actually quite easy to imagine. MS reputation is severely ruined by years of crooked behavior (which still continues into the present really). They are now seen as a dangerous thug which can not be trusted. To change that perception they'll have to work really hard. So these new developments are steps in the right direction but they are way not sufficient yet.
First, It'll take me a while before trusting MS again (people often forget or don't know the depth of what the anti trust case revealed). But I can't even _start_ to consider it as they continue to be a part of the patent-problem. (I'd say a big part, but big or small, it's old MS as usual as far as I'm concerned).
Second, when I was closer to MS, it really felt like there was company wide blindness. I'm not sure that's gone yet. I especially look at Xbox and Azure and I can't believe the cheerleading that's going into these massive money losing projects. Azure in particular..there was a Gartner report that showed Microsoft spending 5x more than Amazon yet having relatively no market share. It's like Bing all over again. Absolutely and totally disillusioned. (the report could have been wrong I guess).
Besides patents problem, MS is still into lock-in and sabotaging open standards where possible. Until that behavior ceases, all these new developments won't even start looking sincere.
Let's wait and see. From the recent events like MS fighting to revert uncopyrightability of APIs, or trying to sabotage patent reform which would cut software patents, it doesn't look like they seriously want to change. But may be more things are coming.
Microsoft has a large client base that does not move fast. Even if all the consumers goes the way of the interwebs, Microsoft is making huge amounts of money from enterprises that have no easy migration paths. I certainly can't imagine a measurable number of their enterprise customers ditching them in three years.
They have these "computer" things that actually use electricity just to work. Worst of all, they produce heat, so then they have to use this "air conditioning" machine to make it cool again. Crazy stuff.
Microsoft wants to sell Windows Phones using Microsoft brand. How would developing Android handset and selling it under Nokia brand help that cause? It could be interpreted as lack of faith for their own platform.
Would Microsoft do it just to get time to convert Nokia customers to Microsoft customers? Seems unlikely to me.
Microsoft has earned more money from android (by lawsuits) then it earned from WP8. Maybe it is trying to earn some more by embracing and extending.
And another approach would be like, Samsung Crapwiz will look the same even if it switches to tizen or stays android. Similar to that, the latest Symbian phones already resemble androids both in UI and UX. So changing the underlying software would cause minimal attention. Nokia would only profit from this more mature and capable technology.
> Microsoft has earned more money from android (by lawsuits) then it earned from WP8. Maybe it is trying to earn some more by embracing and extending.
It would be a big f_ck to all WP devs, why would they invest in Window Platerform if all they need is a linux box to develop for MSFT phones ? But hey, MSFT works in mysterious ways.
Not lawsuits, patent extortion. If only there were actual lawsuits, but I don't think they've won anything from actual lawsuits. They just pressured companies into giving them money.
The only way it would make sense is to use an android fork without app store as a way of making cheap feature phones. They could then upsell people to windows phone and create a market perception that android is inferior.
It doesn't make sense however, as the hardware needed to run android well outstrips that needed to run windows phone well. It would make more sense to make a stripped down windows phone. So, i see no way this plan survives the acquisition.
> the hardware needed to run android well outstrips that needed to run windows phone well
It is a myth. The worst (and only) SoC where WP8 runs is the Snapdragon Krait. On this configuration, Android runs very well (see also Nexus 4 or Nexus 7 2013).
Added to that, WP8 phones have lower-resolution displays (Lumia 520: 800x480, Moto G: 1280x720; Lumia 1020: 1280x720, Galaxy S4: 1920x1080), which drives down the needed RAM for your framebuffer, it's backing stores, textures and assests.
Not much point to that either, and I agree it doesn't make sense. Removing the Play Store, there already is Nokia Asha-- which runs very smooth on low-end devices.
I have always considered scrum to be like a beginners workout routine. It's never best for you, but it's better than doing what you feel like is good for you. Because if you've been lying on the sofa for the last ten years, you don't know what's good for you.
Chances are that you don't know what suites you, that's why you are looking into scrum in the first place. First you do it strictly by the book and in time you will learn what works for you and what doesn't. Then you can start customizing become mature agile team/organization. OP has probably achieved this, but I think it can be harmful to suggest "pro" techniques to someone just starting out :)
To borrow your analogy, to me Scrum is like the guy who reads some stuff about working out on the Internet and proceeds to try and correct everyone in the gym on their form.
That's a great analogy. I think you need a high-functioning team that really understands the Agile manifesto and its principles to roll-your-own solution.
If you are going to roll-your-own solution, start with retro and build from there. Retro is the most important part of the process. There's a reason it's the only explicit activity mentioned in the manifesto. As long as you keep reflecting on past performance and continually try to improve you'll probably end up with a good process.
It encourages everyone to ignore/bottle up issues until the magical retro day where everyone can spend a couple of hours venting their frustration. At which point nothing gets done and the process repeats. Project issues should be resolved immediately, directly with the people responsible and with actionable outcomes. Not during a glorified weekly/fortnightly 'meeting'.
It encourages everyone to ignore/bottle up issues until the magical retro day where everyone can spend a couple of hours venting their frustration. At which point nothing gets done and the process repeats. Project issues should be resolved immediately, directly with the people responsible and with actionable outcomes. Not during a glorified weekly/fortnightly 'meeting'.
If that's what happening then the retros are being terribly run. Especially if you're not coming away with an actionable outcome.
If you can deal with it immediately - you deal with it immediately. Nothing in any agile process says you should save it up for the retro. Many quite forcefully say the opposite.
The retro is for helping you spot larger scale issues or systematic problems that you miss / don't have the room to address in the day-to-day project.
(For example, we ran one last Friday where it was pointed that I'd been a bottleneck on several different tasks. I'd not been bright enough to spot that myself. Since the bottlenecks were with different folk nobody had spotted it at the time. Bring everybody together and - boom - problem identified and some options for solutions spotted. No angst or venting involved. There was cake though ;-)
"At regular intervals, the team reflects on how
to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts
its behavior accordingly."
That's what I mean by retro. Two parts: self-reflection, and change of behavior.
Sounds like your problem with retro is that behavior isn't changing. Maybe it's management stopping things from changing, or teammates who refuse to go along with what the team wants. A team that won't change won't get better.
