Life

Thoughts and comments about life, as I live it.

To Those of You Who Think Goal Setting is Overrated:

Posted on by Forrest Corbett — Posted in Life, Techknow

I know a lot of people find goal setting to be overrated. It’s often a struggle for some people and teams to set goals. However, unpacking those challenges is extremely valuable. Why?

  • The challenges regularly unearth core misalignment within an organization
  • A common challenge is that “leadership” is just going to change their mind. Addressing that disenfranchisement is incredibly important.
  • Cross-team misalignment is also extremely common, and ignoring competing commitments is not a successful path forward.

Another side-effect of problematic goal-setting is to reduce the cadence at which goals are set. Some will set half annual goals, annual goals or even longer. A more frequent cadence allows teams and individuals to more easily adapt to change and adopt new findings. Yes, we can still have high level, company-wide annual goals as a company theme.

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Hiring Managers: Provide Feedback to Finalists You Don’t Hire. It’s The Least You Can Do.

Posted on by Forrest Corbett — Posted in Life, Techknow

Many companies aren’t willing to do this, but I spent some time this afternoon emailing candidates we didn’t hire. Since they made it through the final interviews, I wanted to give them specific feedback.

Designers often spend many hours preparing case studies, researching prospective employers and interviewing. At the end of it all when they’re not selected, the typical response is something like “we’ve decided to move forward with other candidates.” I get that this reduces risk and those canned responses reduce employer effort. However, people deserve better.

We were fortunate enough to have some incredibly great candidates. In the end, almost all of the feedback I could give was simply what they did well. It’s not that hard to give that kind of feedback. In some cases, I also gave some specific feedback which should help them on future interviews. Sure that might introduce some risk, but I would rather take a little risk being helpful to someone than simply turn a cold shoulder to someone with no explanation.

People’s Names Are Always “Valid”

Posted on by Forrest Corbett — Posted in Life, Techknow

Recently at work, we had a discussion around what it means to have a “valid name.” As there often is, there’s a technical restriction. One thought on how to solve this is to tell the user their name is wrong. But we landed on not telling users that they spell their name wrong, because their name isn’t wrong, our systems have limitations. It’s not their fault, it’s ours (or more specifically in this case, a third-party integration.)

Today I went to create a shipping label on usps.com. I put the recipient’s name in. As you can see, the error message literally says “Please enter a valid last name.”

I don’t care what the United States Postal Service says, Peña is a perfectly valid name. Those of us who design and build systems that include name validation need to remember it’s our job to adapt to people’s names, not their job to change their names to fit our systems.

Twenty-Five Years Since My First Design Internship

Posted on by Forrest Corbett — Posted in Life, Techknow

Twenty-five years ago this month I landed my first design internship. It was unpaid. It only lasted a few weeks and I wasn’t able to contribute much. From that, I learned a few skills that helped me land my next internship. It lasted about five months and was also unpaid. (Though they did something special for me at the end.)

The experience, skills, understanding and awareness I gained from those internships were pivotal in my next steps and sparked my career. The internships were possible because they were unpaid. The first agency had no ability to pay me. The second could have, but to be transparent, I didn’t meet the bar for interns (not enough education) so just being there was a privilege.

With a quarter century of hindsight, I’ve never thought those companies should have offered me cash compensation. I’m still very grateful for the opportunities they gave me.

So when I see these debates on if interns should be paid, my answer is: sometimes. There’s clearly times where companies take advantage of people. That’s not good. There’s also clearly times where the experience provided is very much worth it and wouldn’t occur if cash compensation was required.