Tyler Langan

104 reputation

bio	website
	location
	age
visits	member for	5 months
	seen	May 6 at 0:54
stats	profile views	19

	104 reputation	bio	website		visits	member for	5 months
3 badges		location			seen	May 6 at 0:54

summary answers questions tags badges favorites bounties reputation activity

28 Actions

suggestions reviews revisions comments badges posts accepts all

May 6	revised	Mold Makers and Offshore Manufacturing added 180 characters in body
May 5	asked	Mold Makers and Offshore Manufacturing
May 4	comment	What are the most important business goals of a homepage? I would read Letting Go of The Words and Information Architecture for the World Wide Web. The user is in a hurry. They don't care about "Welcome to blah blah blah." What did they come to the site searching for? They're probably not in a browsing mood. They probably have a specific goal in mind. Try to let them achieve that goal on the homepage or quickly using navigation. It might also help if you read Don't Make Me Think! by Steve Krug. Start with Letting Go of Words. Edit: Info Architecture for the WWW 3rd Edition
May 4	comment	How Long is A Sidekick Obligated to Be Your Partner? Additional Info: He's an economics major and he's interested in financing. Right now I'm in the prototyping/funding stage of this process.
May 4	asked	How Long is A Sidekick Obligated to Be Your Partner?
Dec 8	comment	If you are a creative studio, who owns employees ideas that they come up with whilst in your employ? @Ulflander I'm sorry you feel that way. How can I make my comments more accessible? You're saying I should edit my answer. How can it be improved? What am I not getting? You also say some of my arguments are "contradictive." I'm just not getting this. I'm looking for contradicting arguments and I'm totally clueless. Specify my contradicting arguments so I have a single reason to believe you.
Dec 8	comment	If you are a creative studio, who owns employees ideas that they come up with whilst in your employ? @AdrianHoward Speaking of Daniel Pink, here's a facebook post I made awhile back. The book is The Idea Writers. The link is a paragraph mentioning Daniel Pink talking about right vs left brained thinkers, which is the main subject of one of his books, A Whole New Mind.
Dec 7	awarded	Student
Dec 7	comment	If you are a creative studio, who owns employees ideas that they come up with whilst in your employ? If you really want a better talent pool, try branding your company in an interesting way. Hire an accountant to work in your office display window for a day when taxes are due. You'll have a line of people waiting outside your door to get their taxes done. When your creative genius has to choose between working at your company for less salary or the giant company, he's going to choose the cooler company that gives him more room to be creative.
Dec 7	comment	If you are a creative studio, who owns employees ideas that they come up with whilst in your employ? 20% free time. Google famously gives all their thinking employees 20% paid free time now to work on whatever fascinates them. It's a strategy that's paid off. Most successful tech companies are now following this trend to some extent.
Dec 7	comment	If you are a creative studio, who owns employees ideas that they come up with whilst in your employ? The facts presented in this article as advice are false. Creative production does not increase with increased wages. The last 20 years of research in positive psychology confirms this. Paying people more to do their job works for algorithmic work, like working in a factory line, accounting, or any job where you use the left side of your brain. Creative, right-minded people are intrinsically motivated. They do things because they want to. If you want to motivate creative people, you need to give them more free time. I'll give you a concrete example. G-mail was created during an engineer's
Dec 7	comment	If you are a creative studio, who owns employees ideas that they come up with whilst in your employ? Instead of experimenting with new types of mice, Buxton has worked with some of the most creative people of this century in a vibrant array of fields. He's worked with famous movie directors, artists, CEOs for almost all the most successful companies, and so on. He trained all these people in design. But really he learned more from the process of these creative geniuses than he taught while consulting them. He left research for business. He might have given up historical precedence with his academic progress, but it enabled him to achieve greater fame. Find a new hill to climb.
Dec 7	comment	If you are a creative studio, who owns employees ideas that they come up with whilst in your employ? You think it's ridiculous that researchers feel relieved when they're no longer burdened by all the responsibility of their current research. It was a foreign concept to me too, EpiGrad. I agree and would add that this is Bill Buxton's sentiment. He left academic research to become the head of Microsoft's research. You can read about his experience in the link I posted. I shared this idea with a group of four graduate ph.D students currently grinding long hours into the night toward their dissertations. The talkative group went silent and really thought about my words. Something to consider.
Dec 7	awarded	Commentator
Dec 7	comment	If you are a creative studio, who owns employees ideas that they come up with whilst in your employ? Let me rephrase my answer. You define the scope of their work. You ask for a solution to a problem and they bring you 5 sketches of possible solutions. If they bring only one sketch and say they have the answer, you don't let them work on your team anymore. You can't have a conversation about the solution without it becoming personal if you only have one idea. If they generate an idea outside the scope of your problem, it's theirs. They can try selling it to you when they have free time. People with great ideas become managers.
Dec 7	comment	Why do developers/techies avoid salespeople? You'll never really understand their depth because you never experienced it. When you get resentful and act insecure, like you know where we're coming from, you don't. It's a nerd thing. We like talking to other nerds because they get it. And we don't ever try to act smart. Acting smart is what got us picked on growing up by insecure people like you, trying to act smart before us now.
Dec 7	comment	Why do developers/techies avoid salespeople? If you want to ultimately win power by successfully persuading them, don't pretend you're like them. You're not like them. You were both given a choice very early on. You both sat in front of a computer, with all its complexity, and you had to master it or give up. 99% of people get frustrated and quit. They moved on and were successful in having normal lives. Instead they spent their time getting drunk or laid. Geeks are the 1% of people who accepted the challenge. They saw the mountain, and they chose to climb it. They get off on the adrenaline of it.
Dec 7	comment	Why do developers/techies avoid salespeople? We go into nerd speak and forget to ping back that you're following what we're saying. A lot of us assume you're as smart as us and that we can just talk to you. We'll switch subjects quickly to some relevant fact that we feel would be helpful to add. But people can't take in that much information at once and we seem all over the place. Then we finish talking or making a point about some uninteresting thing and now you feel like the awkward person. You have to go through the agony of nodding approvingly, like you totally agree with that riveting gigabytes story.
Dec 7	comment	Why do developers/techies avoid salespeople? When you use extra words or focus on arbitrary details, it's agonizing to them. We can see where you're going a mile away when you started talking. But you had to keep going into agonizing detail to arrive at this conclusion that's probably wrong. And you're trying so hard to be that guy who's good at selling to people, so now we have to act excited like we agree with you and are impressed with your concept. We could tell you ten different ways it's wrong but there's no chance you'd understand.
Dec 7	comment	Why do developers/techies avoid salespeople? As a sales person, you identify how people sense the world. Most people see, hear, or feel the world. To be more persuasive, you can ask an auditory person "How does this sound?" instead of "Does this look crystal clear to you?" or "Picture this." For engineering/tech people, use "So what do you think of this" or "I want you to conceptualize this." Their primary sense is internal self-talk. They spend a lot of time talking to themselves. They've spent their whole life actually considering the world around them. Things really do make sense to them.