Big vs small company

What is the absolute number one thing that you learn working at a big company? Big company politics, and how to play the game

What is the absolute number one thing that you learn working at a small company? How to know a little about, and be involved in, every aspect of the business

Whilst on the face of it, the latter seems a lot more valuable, that skill-set doesn't necessarily help you succeed in a big company where the focus is typically on specialism and politics.

Employee focused recruitment consultant

Recruitment consultants appear to be an increasingly important part of the hiring process. But unfortunately for the potential employee, their business model is based on satisfying the needs of employers - they're the ones that pay. This business model creates some perverse incentives which may result in behaviour that doesn't benefit the potential employee.

This model can potentially be flipped, with the recruitment consultant being paid from, and in proportion to, the increase in salary of the employee they place in a new job. The recruitment consultant would operate on a "no pay-rise, no fee" basis. This way the employee always wins (assuming they pass the interviews), as the fees would be less than the increase in income.

An interesting aspect of this model is that the recruitment consultants would be most incentivised to place employees that are underpaid relative to their market rates - the more they are under-paid, the more the recruitment consultants can make. This could potentially have a levelling effect on the market.

Anonymous timesheet service

Understanding how employees spend their time is an important part of making an organisation efficient. Unfortunately, the act of measuring how employees spend their time may significantly alter how such employees behave, potentially in deleterious ways (an example of the Hawthorne effect / observer effect).

The author hypothesises that a key driver for the change in behaviour is a belief by the employees that they will be challenged on what they are booking their time to. A possible solution to this is a third party online timesheet service that guarantees that employers cannot identify what time employees are booking their time to, but only provides data in aggregate. This anonymisation technique is already in use for surveys, and as such it should be possible to automate the anonymisation (i.e. not giving the employer granular data where this would enable identification of employees). The employer would still be able to check whether employees were filling in timesheets or not.

The system may not work for small organisations or for projects where only a few people work on them, and of course would need good security to gain the trust of the employees.

Runaway biotechnology

I think the general principle for scientific research should be freedom by default, and restriction by exception (incidentally, I would advocate a similar principle for the openness of government/public information, or information within companies, i.e. shared by default, restricted by exception). The other day a scenario that seems a prime candidate for restriction that occurred to me: cellulose metabolism.

Cellulose is the most abundant organic polymer on Earth. It is also relatively difficult to break down (cellulolysis). However, if man were to, through biotechnological research, develop an enzyme that could more efficiently break down cellulose, such an enzyme could pose a significant risk. For example, if this enzyme is engineered into a bacteria (as is common practise in this kind of research) and this bacteria is released into the wild, the competitive advantage to the bacteria at being materially better at breaking down the most abundant food source could result in its rapid proliferation.

Once released, eliminating the bacteria from the wild would be nigh-on impossible due to difficulty in targeting the bacteria and the relatively rapid rate of evolution of bacteria (one possible solution would be nuclear strike on the release zone before the bacteria has had the chance to spread).

The effects of the engineered bacteria could be extensive. Plants existing immune-like mechanisms could potentially be effective, however the increased efficiency of break down would allow such bacteria to breed faster, potentially out-matching these defences. The impact on the world could be apocalyptic.

(The similarity of this thought to the "grey-goo" concept is noted. However, the biological basis for this is more thoroughly understood than self-replicating artificial nano-machines.)

Freedom of speech in companies

The concept of freedom of speech has strong ties to the history of distrust of government. Whilst a healthy distrust of government is a good thing, governments aren't the only entities that we should be wary of: our corporations have a lot of power too.

It would be interesting to explore what extent the principles of freedom of speech could be incorporated into companies. Typically companies work much like a tin pot dictatorship: there is much behind closed doors mutterings about leadership and strategy, but public criticism is frequently met with persecution.

A typical response might be: but how can companies remain successful if their leadership is openly criticised from within? The answer to that is: how has the USA been so successful when its leadership is only criticised from within.

The culture of persecution of free speakers within companies has led to a weak corporate culture, and weak corporations. Good leadership can still lead even when many of their flock openly criticise them.

So how might democratic principles be brought into companies? The big challenge is culture - there needs to be a top-down acceptance of democratic principles. Other levers include the employment contracts, which should be encouraged to state more employee rights about freedom of speech, and also through legislation. (In respect of the latter we do already have whistle-blowing legislation, which is a step in the right direction.)

Who's talking to who encryption

The problem: how to ensure that the "who" is just as private as the "what" of communication

The idea:

• There exists a voluntary network of nodes that all have public key encryption systems, and published public keys.
• The sender sends a message to the first intermediate node, encrypted with that intermediate node's public key.
• The first intermediate node decrypts the message, which contains the second intermediate node's address and a payload that's encrypted with the second intermediate node's public key. The first intermediate note sends the payload to the second intermediate node.
• The second intermediate node decrypts the message, which contains the third intermediate node's address and a payload that's encrypted with the third intermediate node's public key. The second intermediate note sends the payload to the third intermediate node.
• The third intermediate node decrypts the message, which contains the final recipients node's address and a payload that's encrypted with the final recipients's public key. The third intermediate note sends the payload to the final recipient.
• The final recipient decrypts the message.

Key points about this system:

• the sender needs the public keys of all intermediate nodes (a published database would be needed of addresses and public keys)
• I was originally thinking of this in respect of email, but it should work with any communication, e.g. snail mail, IP packets, etc
• on a computer it should be fairly easy to automate the multiple layers of encryption
• the number of intermediate nodes can be manually selected, or selected at random
• the intermediate nodes themselves should be selected at random
• the communication could contain multiple next-hop nodes with a priority order, in case nodes fail. The nodes could provide an acknowledgement message back to the node they received communication from
• the messages could potentially be randomly padded to ensure that the reducing size of the message over time (as address headers are removed) does not give a clue to the communication direction
• random communication could be added to the network to further confuse snoopers
• to prove the source of the correspondence to the sender, the sender and recipient would need to pre-agree a secret that the sender would include in the message. Alternatively, the entire system could be set up such that each node gives a secret to each other node encrypted using that node's public key. This would establish encrypted relationships by default, without the need for pre-agreeing, and wouldn't allow anyone to infer relationships from the establishment of the original secret

Challenges

• as the network scales, the database of addresses and public keys becomes potentially too large
• if the secret sharing mentioned in the key points is employed, the number of secrets each node would need to hold could get prohibitively large if the network gets large

Questions

• Does this exist already?
• Would it work?

Spying on undiscovered peoples

We are in a unique period in history where there are still undiscovered peoples, but where we also have sufficiently advanced and discrete surveillance technology to examine them non-disruptively. Are we fully making use of this? We should be hiding spy cameras and microphones in trees.