News and opinions from our team
Innovation and doing business
Posted on 2015-08-24 15:44:35 by CScaleTeam
Last month the European Commission published their annual report on the status of innovation for 2015 within the EU-28 block and comparing them to a few non-EU countries. Some time ago Bloomberg did a similar thing and even though the methodologies are different the results are pretty consistent with each other.
With few exceptions there's almost a 1 to 1 mapping with the rankings on how easy it is to do business across the world. You might say that correlation doesn't imply causality, but I think in this case it does.
I had to write a paper at the end of high school and I chose to do it about innovation because I was dreaming to become a researcher. I spent like 3 months reading about the psychological, social and organizational aspects of innov...
How to put a price on your work
Posted on 2015-06-08 12:12:12 by CScaleTeam
When you start your own company you start it with the idea to make a reasonable profit. I'm saying 'reasonable' because a 'little' profit may not be enough for your investors. I'm not even going to bring up not having any profit at all. With time you're going to want to expand in order to get a larger profit.
But where does this profit you seek come from? On the most basic level your company buys some goods from other people or companies, gives these goods to its employees, who work with them and produce other (more valuable) goods that you need to sell for a price that will cover the price of the initial goods and the paychecks of your workforce plus your most desired profit. But someone needs to buy your products and that someone is either a person getting a paycheck from some company or another company that also needs to make a profit. The whole thing seems recursive and it seems that something is wrong with this picture. In the end it has to stop somewhere, right? There are...
Staying away from bad people
Posted on 2015-03-23 10:52:27 by CScaleTeam
Yesterday I came across a nice article on techcrunch about people who are bad at their job, but somehow manage to go under the radar of HR and Management and have a long career on the back of their colleagues. It made me think about myself, the team and the company I'm part of. It also made me think about a lot of people who work in IT and who, at some point or another during these 10 years I've spent in the industry, have told me stories about that that one guy in the article. I've heard stories like this from people all over Romania and abroad. Probably the most mind blowing stories came from abroad, but that doesn't mean the "local" ones are not worth a big WTF rate.
But in large companies it's OK to have some weaker people in the team as long as the team performs OK and the product comes out OK. F...
Outsourcing aging products
Posted on 2015-02-23 14:52:27 by CScaleTeam
Every company with some history has encountered the problem of the legacy products. There's always a customer somewhere that has been happy with a certain product installation for years and now they want some small set of issues fixed or maybe even some tiny new feature added. Of course they don't want to pay for a full upgrade to a new product or to the latest version. They want to keep it "simple".
But it's not that simple, is it?
The developers who did the work for that product are either
- working on the new projects, which are obviously more important for the future of the company
- promoted to some management or architect position and they haven't written a line of code in years
- long gone from the company payroll