Should I stay or should I go? At 40

Reblogged from Rajesh Shetty's "Why many smart people hit a plateau (and stay there)"

The magic number is 40.

Yes, it is at the age of forty that many smart people realize that they are stuck. I am not saying that smart people don’t get stuck some other time but 40 is the age where I have heard about “getting stuck” a lot more than other ages.

I first wrote about this in my book “Beyond Code” (foreword by my hero Tom Peters, free download) but it’s worth revisiting again.

Here is what I think happens. The first 10-15 years of working life seems like progress for most people although what is typically happening is general upward adjustment of salary that marketplace offers to pretty much anyone that is doing reasonably well. Exceptional people are getting a premium even during that period but the delta between exceptional people and good performers are not big enough to catch anybody’s attention.

The second coming of 9/11

Over the past weeks I've watched the growing attention for the 10-year anniversary of 9/11 in every media possible, including so-called conspiracy theories. What strikes me most is that a majority of the attention is on the events itself, and very little on what to learn from them.
Since 9/11, the US government (agencies) have gotten an increased grip on privacy - not only in the US, but all over the world. Taking a flight has become a silly drag, where I for one sometimes don't have to take off my shoes while going through Customs, and sometimes I do.
Just one example, yet I could go on and on...

It doesn't matter whether I think (or rather, believe) 9/11 was an inside job or not, or whether measures taken since are proportionate or outrageous or anything in between. What does matter is the fact that the "War on Terror" has an eery resemblance to the Crusades

How to queue - that is the question

The other day my attention got drawn by a very large national company that claimed to have a performance problem: sometimes it would take ages for messages to reach their destination, and entire applications would come to a screeching halt.
After a few questions and answers, it was clear that they didn't have a performance problem: they had an architectural problem or, in a nutshell, a very unfortunate design

Queueing has become a much-appreciated message-transport system in the last decades.