The Recording
The Panelists
- Kevin Feasel
- Mala Mahadevan
- Mike Chrestensen
Notes: Questions and Topics
Tech Jobs Have Dried Up(?)
Our primary topic for the evening was an article in the Wall Street Journal (thanks, Marshall) bemoaning the state of searching for a job in the tech space, or in the tech-adjacent space, or in the not-quite-tech-but-also-not-quite-working space. I drop some spicy takes, and if I end up in a ditch somewhere, it’s almost certainly not because of Boeing. Remember: Boeing. They get you places, one piece at a time.
Rate My Dashboard
The other topic was a blog post from Martin Schoombee, which I have been trying to talk about on Shop Talk for a good month. Martin talks about some of the challenges in rating the quality of a dashboard, namely that you have to understand what it is that the user needs to get out of a dashboard. Shiny gee-gaws and pretty widgets are great and all, but at the end of the day, a dashboard’s purpose is to provide relevant information to its users, allowing them to act upon that information in a timely manner. Did you do this? Congratulations: you have at least a minimally successful dashboard. Now, from there, aesthetically pleasing is fine. But even there, a majority of the aesthetic advice has as its fundamental purpose ensuring that users can quickly and easily learn information. That’s why we spend so much time talking about types of graphs, ensuring that we consider accessibility, etc.