Labels: April, books 0 comments
Learning Cocoa with Objective-C, 2nd Edition
In Praise of Slowness: Challenging the Cult of Speed (Plus)
Influence: Science and Practice (4th Edition)
Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days
Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood (Alex Awards (Awards))
Happiness: Lessons from a New Science
Labels: economics, jobs 3 comments
Joel Spolsky wrote an editorial at Inc.com. It is an edited version of one of his articles at Joel on Software, which I can’t find a link to.(Update : Original article link is here,thanks CK!)
A lot of companies think they’re hiring the top 1 percent because they get 100 resumés for every open position. They’re kidding themselves. When you fill an opening, think about what happens to the 99 people you turn away. They don’t give up and go into plumbing. They apply for another job. There’s a floating population of applicants in your industry that apply for nearly every opening posted online, even though many of them are qualified for virtually none of these positions. So if the top 1 percent never apply for jobs, how can you recruit them?
It is Naked Economics time again. Joel has done a fantastic job of describing in layman terms, what economists call ‘Adverse Selection’.
Adverse selection or anti-selection is a term used in economics and insurance. On the most abstract level, it refers to a market process in which bad results occur due to information asymmetries between buyers and sellers: the “bad” products or customers are more likely to be selected.
In this case the information asymmetry exists because the company/firm has no information about the relative quality of the applicants whose resumes they are receiving, whereas the applicants are usually better informed about their standing in the job market, which could be measured by the number of firms which offer them a job. Hence companies are actually worse off because bad applicants are more likely to be selected, because they would be the ones most likely to apply in the first place.
Reality ofcourse is not that simple, and there are many ways to avoid the problem of adverse selection. Joel’s article has some good advice. But the one thing that you definitely cannot rely on is to put out an ad and wait for the resumes to float in.
Labels: finder, path, textmate 1 comments
Textmate became my favorite text editor ever since I started using a Mac. Textmate has a feature that is very powerful, but intuitive at the same time. It has support for evaluating Ruby expressions within the editor window. It is actually defined in the Ruby bundle, but is available in all contexts with the shortcut key Cmd-Shift-E.
As an example, here is an expression that I type in Textmate.
After, pressing Cmd-Shift-E, I get this in my editor window.
That is pretty neat. However, I had some initial pain trying to configure it with the right version of Ruby. The default version of Ruby that comes installed with Mac OS X Tiger is 1.8.2. I have however, following some excellent instructions upgraded my Ruby installation to run 1.8.6. I had configured all the paths correctly in my .profile to point to the right Ruby version, which Textmate apparently respects, but on evaluating puts #{RUBY_VERSION}, I kept getting 1.8.2
After searching a few docs, I found the solution which involved changing the default Finder path, which gets set on login. Apparently, Textmate was still using the default Finder path for evaluating the Ruby expressions. So I went into ~/.MacOSX/environment.plist (you will most likely have to create this) and put this in
{ PATH = "/usr/local/bin:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/mysql/bin:/opt/local/bin:/opt/local/sbin:/bin:/sbin:/usr/bin:/usr/sbin"; }This will make sure that Finder picks up the right Ruby version in /usr/local/bin. You can easily test it in Textmate too :).
Labels: books, economics, price 0 comments
I have been reading Naked Economics by Charles Wheelan, and it has been amazing so far. But my first real insight from it came when I was buying ice cream yesterday.
Andersen’s Icecream in Singapore sells a single scoop of ice cream for $4.50. You can however, have a double scoop of ice cream for $5.50, just a dollar more.
The concept at play here is price discrimination, albeit with a slight twist. From a seller’s perspective, it costs virtually nothing for Andersen’s Icecream to provide you with that extra scoop of ice cream. From a buyer’s perspective, there are two scenarios. You might be willing to pay $5.50 for that extra scoop because of the satisfaction you derive from it, or you might be thrifty and decide that you will be satisfied with just one scoop. Ignoring the size of the scoop for a moment, there are now two different price points at which Andersen’s is selling their ice cream, and hence maximizing their profits.
So what use is this insight to me, you ask. Well, I actually went to buy ice cream with Divya, and I paid $5.50 for two scoops of ice cream. Except, that Divya and I split the cost and shared the ice cream :). If both of us had got a single scoop each, it would have cost us $9. We ended up saving $3.50. Andersen’s is quite lucky that most people who eat ice cream will probably not read Naked Economics.
Incidentally, the first time I came across price discrimination was in a famous essay by Joel Spolsky titled Camels and Rubber Duckies, where he discussed the mechanics of pricing software. Read it, it’s quite funny!