Oslo Dinner

You’re invited to a Joel on Software dinner in Oslo, Norway on Thursday, August 14th, at 19:30 at Peppe’s Pizza, Karl Johansgate 1 (outside Oslo S).  I’m arriving that afternoon on SAS 1514; you may want to check if the flight is horribly delayed or cancelled, in which case the meeting is still on but I won’t be there!

Yes, we’ll have more dinners in other cities in the future.

Joel (March 28): “… when you relocate more than a couple of miles, some employees’ lives would be too disrupted to make the move, so you lose a lot of employees, and all the institutional knowledge, skill, and experience that comes with those employees. While I was working at Viacom one of their companies, Blockbuster, decided to move from Florida to Texas after they hired a new CEO who lived in — Texas! What a coincidence! Only a small portion of the employees made the move. For years and years the business press watched agog as Blockbuster made mistake after inexcusable mistake, re-trying all kinds of ideas that had failed only two years earlier.”

LA Times (April 13): “Investigators are examining whether the move eviscerated Boeing’s technical capability and played a role in the Columbia disaster on Feb. 1…. The decision to move the jobs was highly unpopular among Boeing’s workforce, and about 80% of the California engineers refused to relocate, forcing the company to hire workers in Texas and forfeit much of the experience of its California engineering base.”