This is Your Brain on Facebook

Are you a Facebook addict?  Take heed, comrade, your countless hours tagging photos and using super-poke are a tell-tale sign on how you want to work:

• Knowledge workers crave validation.  You solve hard problems, right?  In fact, the software business is constantly humbling to even the most experienced professional.  Not only do you have new problems to solve every day, most of them would never have crossed your mind if they hadn’t been thrust upon you by an irate customer or overworked colleague.  While you are resourceful and talented, we all want to hear “good idea” when coming up with a solution.  Isn’t validation from our friends the reason we joined Facebook in the first place?
• Group decisions are usually good decisions.  Given tough the problems we face, group input can be invaluable to give different perspectives that ultimately lead to a better solution.  Need a good, healthy recipe for dinner?  Post the question to your group and see the volume of response.  It’s going to turn out way better than the leftover mac and cheese you were thinking about re-heating.
• A successful project involves many, many people.  Are you in sales?  I guarantee your most successful deals were touched by many people throughout the cycle.  Many of which may have been nothing more than a single comment you used in a meeting, then forgot quickly afterward.  But that minute piece of information may have been just enough to generate the lead, sway an opinion, or convince a key influencer.  The more of those you can get – and retain -- the better.

The beauty of collecting these one-off comments?  They’re often spot-on.  After posting a comment on my hotel in Dallas, a fraternity brother I haven’t seen in years let me know about his favorite hotel bar in the area.  Having known him in college, I knew his expertise in this area would be superb.

That, my friends, is the definition of value-add.  Now if he can only give me advice on a Windows-based ad-hoc query solution…