as days pass by

Andy, who is a friend and comrade and not incidentally the other half of the Men With Big Stones , has started a weblog where he intends to talk about things which interest him, which include football, Linux, geopolitics, and HR. The Linux stuff should be interesting; this is a bloke who wanted a computer to do all the standard computer things (surf the web, read email, write documents, rip CDs, plug in devices) and so I gave him Ubuntu, and he’s had nothing but success with it. He is a bright shining light shedding the illumination of truth on my fervent contention that ordinary people can use Linux just as successfully as they use Windows, and like it just as much. However, that’s not what I’m going to talk about today. Today I’m going to talk about HR.
Andy’s a pretty big wheel in HR for a large bank, which I’m not going to name. Over Christmas we talked about reward and recognition for people in IT, and since I go along with Joel Spolsky on this I said that recognition schemes were no good, give them new laptops and 19” flatscreens instead, all that sort of thing. And he was convinced. This is great. He’s an HR guy who gets it. Whether he’ll be able to implement this stuff remains to be seen, but he’s been writing about his attempts to tell people that IT reward is not about certificates with your name on. More! More!