Introducing Lost Cog
In an attempt to gain some clarity and separation of topics in which I’m interested, over the last month I’ve been preparing a new blog, which is now live. It’s called Lost Cog, and it focuses my research and interest in the relative maturity of tech companies (management, tactics, hiring, etc.) from the perspective of the average worker.
Go check out Lost Cog.
I’d like to note a few things about its development. More than a few intelligent, awesome people spoke with me about the underlying themes and questions. Without their help and encouragement, I would have kept my inner turmoil about the tech industry—well—inner. And there are far too many smart people keeping their observations about problems in the industry internal, to the detriment of us all, I believe. The tech industry is too new and raw to keep its maturity evolution strictly a top-down process. It employs some smart people, yet it undervalues or even ignores their analysis.
My interest in management theory comes out of personal discomfort with what I’ve experienced so far, in my career. I’m happy to admit my expectations were high, though. I was raised by one of the best managers in Seattle: my dad, Tim Fehr, who worked for Boeing his entire career. Tim Fehr (hereafter, Dad) started as an engineer within Boeing, eventually working up to being a senior VP, tasked with training many of Boeing’s top-brass in his management style. Dad underplays it, but my childhood was professionally managed by the best of the best. My analysis of management is strongly informed by a childhood absorbing Boeing’s management theory from my dad, and his take on management in a competitive, geeky industry not unlike the tech industry. So now I find myself reading management-theory books for fun, as an echo of management strategies played out on the kitchen table of my childhood, with salt and pepper shakers representing stakeholders, and the napkin holder representing the Board.
On the geek side, Lost Cog represents the beginning of my summer project of learning new skills: Ruby on Rails, domaining and improving my design and writing abilities. Lost Cog’s visual design tries hard to follow both grid-based design and a strong, mathematic attention to vertical rhythm, both hot topics in web design. It also runs on Garrett Murray’s writing-focused, RoR CMS SimpleLog, which gives me a working app for tinkering with RoR. Simplelog is a great project all the way around, and a good learning foundation for subsequent projects. (I’m a good ways into my first real Rails app, currently.)
With Lost Cog, I have a focused place to write about my ongoing argument about my career and industry, hopefully with an editorial overtone, rather than personal. I’ll cross-post summaries of big topics on Lost Cog here, of course, but I hope to keep Syncretic Conundra devoted to my own technical and design topics. More than a few posts are in “draft” status.
