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Every organisation has to continuously solve a set of legal, financial, technical and social problems in order to survive. Small businesses have limited resources and prioritise problem solving in their main fields of endeavour. For example, software development companies like The Frontier Group constantly buy programming books, refine development practices, research new technologies and send their employees to technical training and conferences to expand their skill sets.

However, quite frequently it’s the social problems that businesses face that can make or break them. Many employees lack the skills to communicate, to work effectively in teams and to manage others. Fresh graduates may not know how to work at all. The failure to address and solve these social problems results in reduced operational efficiency, inadequate management and poor employee morale.

The stereotypical programmer is an introvert with plenty of technical skills, but few social skills. How often do you hear about software development companies conducting training in non-technical fields such as leadership, team management, project management, dispute resolution and sales? It’s rare. When it comes to employee skill sets, most companies, especially small ones, focus on improving strengths instead of addressing weaknesses.

The Frontier Group recognises that its employees can’t cut code all the time, no matter how much we love doing it. Our team leaders and project managers require excellent skills to ensure every project hits its targets. We’ve partnered with local company Alive and Kicking for management and sales training for our staff, and look forward to learning from them.

Improvements in management skills are difficult to quantify, and spending cash on training when budgets are tight is difficult to justify. As always, the adage “you have to spend money to make money” applies. Small businesses can only grow as fast as their employees will let them, and The Frontier Group is grooming its employees for success.

Paul Saab has written an interesting article about scaling memcached at Facebook. It looks like they’re doing some cool things over there.

Sometimes you’re working on a server remotely and the ssh connection gets interrupted. Usually when that happens, ssh will stall until the socket times out and you’re stuck with an unresponsive terminal. To get back to the terminal from your stalled ssh session, use this key sequence:

<enter>
<enter>
<enter>
<shift-tilde>
<period>