Female Rising Star Effect

I got an invite to connect with a stranger on LinkedIn. It has happened before. Just a recruiter looking to make a commission I guess. I looked at their profile. It seemed new - only a few connections made already. Did not put their full name on their profile. The capitalization in the education section was not uniform. Duplicated some information in the education section. The feeling I got was that they did not spend a lot of effort on their profile.

LinkedIn showed me the notification for the invite. I somehow got to the same profile again. The strange thing different was that the connections were up to 50. It took me a few weeks to get in touch with my network to get 50 connections. Hmm. Very strange. The real kicker was when I checked a week later. This recruiter had 500+ connections.

What was the reason? I thought maybe because it was a female that posted her picture. Because the sloppy profile did not warrant a connection. They also seemed to be shooting in the dark with the invites. Maybe they spammed 10k people, and got a quite 500 accepting in no time. What was the purpose? All I know is that I am not accepting the invite. Why would I want to be connected with this stranger? No apparent benefit to me. Still an interesting rising star phenomenon at LinkedIn.

Configuration Confusion

We had a rush to finish our first delivery for testing. Some guys on the team were staying late until midnight to finish tasks. I was gunning hard to be productive so I did not need to work so late. It was hard. But we finally got our first release ready.

Then the configuration management guy calls a meeting. He said things are confusing. We tried to clear the matters up. Then he uncovered that he does not know where he is going to deploy our changes for testing. There are many other streams of work going on. There is currently no place to deploy our changes. Oops.

The lead on my team pushed this issue up to the project managers. He asked them to sort it out and let us know the outcome. Good job. I imagine there was a task on the project plan to take care of these infrastructure issues. Guess nobody paid attention them until the last minute. Now it is too late. Testing will just have to be delayed.

Luckily this is a huge effort. We only just finished drop 1. There are many more drops to go, and many more months of work left (maybe 6 to 9 months) before we deploy to production. Hopefully we have some lessons learned with this first failure. I am not losing any sleep over it.