Gayle Laakmann McDowell | Technology Woman

When I was at Google, I referred a number of candidates, and ran a little (informal) experiment. How well could people judge their performance? After each candidate completed their interview, I’d ask them how they did. Then, I’d look up their actual performance. And guess what? There was no correlation. None. Zip. Zero. Zilch. Why [...]

Michale Arrington unleashed a fury of attacks – pro-women, anti-women, pro-Arrington, anti-Arrington – this week with his post “Too few women in tech? Stop blaming the men. Or at least stop blaming me.”  The assumption, of course, is that you should blame the women. The gist of Arrington’s post is this: Stop blaming us for [...]

Years ago, rumors used to circulate about Microsoft interviews.  They were the hot, new company that everyone wanted to work.  With envy came the urban myths.  These rumors have since been transfered to Google, and will surely be transfered to some new company in due time. Bloggers – always desperate for links and traffic – [...]

Many services are structured as follows: Person A pays Person B for a task or item, and the “finder” or “connector” service takes a cut. It’s a wonderful business model – someone else is doing all the “real” work, and you get a bit off the top. The problem is that users are wise to [...]

If you haven’t checked out PeopleOfWalmart yet, you’re in for a treat. Pages of entertainment from America’s classiest individuals (yes, mother of mullet-baby, I’m speaking to you). One of my favorite websites just got a little bit better: it just launched EmptySpaceAds! Move your mouse to the margins of the page and you’ll see the [...]

Since discovering the wonder of outsourcing nine months ago, in October 2008, I’ve outsourced approximately 300 hours. That’s 300 hours that I got to spend reading or playing (or working…) while various assistants re-formatted an e-book, researched traffic stats for competing sites, scheduled apartment visits, got price quotes for vacation rentals, designed posters for an [...]

A guest blog post I wrote for Women Grow Business: Working for Microsoft, Google and Apple, I not only became a better engineer – I became a better entrepreneur. Their successes and failures, encapsulated in these five lessons, provided me with invaluable instruction in how to build a company and effectively compete. #1. Build a [...]

Good news bloggers and website owners!  CareerCup has just launched its new affiliate program.  CareerCup’s affiliate programs allows website owners to post a link / ad for CareerCup’s interview guide and, in return, collect some of the revenue from any sale.  Best of all, it’s super-easy to use! We offer two designs: Horizontal (example) and Vertical [...]

As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve started outsourcing. A lot. Most of the outsourcing goes to an (awesome) assistant in the Philippines, who does everything from online research to document editing. She’s great, and she’s quite literally changed my approach to working. Although most people are merely intrigued by my hiring a remote assistant, a surprising [...]

While I can’t exactly call myself an avid photographer – as I have zero skill in this art form – I do have a lot of photo albums. I call it the “quantity over quality approach.” Unfortunately, when I want to look up, say, pictures from my Microsoft internship in 2003, it’s a mess. Picasa [...]