Starting February 1st, i will join NineConsult, which is a Danish consultant company. I am really looking forward to this change, and it will be interesting to be part of a 25 people organisation (as opposed to the 110.000+ employees in Capgemini).

Having good and skilled colleagues is one of the single most important criteria for happiness at work. And this makes it extra interesting in NineConsult, since they have a very high standard on the programmers they employ.

I think NineConsult is one of the best places to be for programmers at the moment. Paul Graham puts it this way when describing programmers in “great hackers“:

[...] what good hackers like is other good hackers. Great hackers tend to clump together– sometimes spectacularly so, as at Xerox Parc. So you won’t attract good hackers in linear proportion to how good an environment you create for them. The tendency to clump means it’s more like the square of the environment. So it’s winner take all. At any given time, there are only about ten or twenty places where hackers most want to work, and if you aren’t one of them, you won’t just have fewer great hackers, you’ll have zero.

I know a lot of my new colleagues from previous jobs, and all of them (no exceptions) are very skilled.

For this single reason alone, i am really looking forward to my new job :)

This one was caught in the moderation queue (and would probably be caught with Akismet otherwise). For entertainment purposes, here is the text I recieved:

Anikrichard | anlikivanna.80@mail.ru | wwwwww.com | IP: 72.9.235.218

hello , my name is Richard and I know you get a lot of spammy comments ,
I can help you with this problem . I know a lot of spammers and I will ask them not to post on your site. It will reduce the volume of spam by 30-50% .In return Id like to ask you to put a link to my site on the index page of your site. The link will be small and your visitors will hardly notice it , its just done for higher rankings in search engines. Contact me icq 454528835 or write me tedirectory(at)yahoo.com , i will give you my site url and you will give me yours if you are interested. thank you

However, I think the best one Idiot spammers found by Donncha O Caoimh:

This comment was posted automatically using Blog Comment Poster. Check out its site to learn more and start building backlinks to your websites today.

Remember the Seti project, where you could make your computer processor available for other projects when you’re not using the computer. We could probably eliminate global warming and poverty in a few weeks. Find a cure to cancer, Ebola and AIDS before christmas if we could just tab into spam commenters brains. What a waste of brainpower:)

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Technorati Tags: spam comments, spam, comment spam, brainpower, idiot

According to a paper in the latest edition of the journal Computer Standards & Interfaces, the answer is yes. It seems that teams that collaborate using a instant messageing [sic] software like MSN messenger or GoogleTalk generate more ideas than those who reply on email instead.

Unfortunately I was not able to find a direct link to the referred article. Let me know if you find it, as I really like to have a complete reference here on the blog.

For some reason the paper doesn’t say how long the tests latest. But, on average, the IM teams produced one more idea than those using email. The researchers suggests this may be due to the speed of IM compared to email. Perhaps it also shows that, when it comes to generating ideas, it’s better not to spend to long thinking over your reply, as can happen with email.

More info New Scientist Technology blog “Is IM better for brainstorming?” (via Megite)

Technorati Tags: brainstorming, tool, IM, instant messaging, messenger, googletalk, computer standards, interfaces, email, brainpower, psychology, productivity