IPUrbia

As has been reported before, AT&T has been pursuing legal action against rural ILECS in Iowa and and their partnering voice service providers for fraudulent activities. As a little bit of background, a handful of rural ILECS who are entitled to higher than average termination costs (5-10 cents a minute) have partnered with voip companies who provide services ranging from free conferencing to free international calls. The idea is that, since the termination rates are higher than the the cost of doing business, there is a lot of room to get some good revenue. It’s all in good fun, and thrifty consumers have loved the services. AT&T, on the other hand, has been less thrilled with the concept since they have been footing the bill to the tune of several million dollars. They’ve been aggressively filing lawsuits, claiming fraud and arguing that, since the calls are forwarded onto international destinations via VOIP, they don’t qualify as “terminated”.

The Iowa telcos, however, aren’t just rolling over. AT&T has been withholding payments and has racked up over 10 million dollars worth of termination charges, and the small-town farming community telcos have enlisted a top-notch Beltway law firm to defend them.

It’s a tough dilemma for me. Personally, I’ve never liked AT&T (or any large telco company) in anything related to billing, both from personal and professional experience. They act unilaterally and generally act contrary to responsible business practices and, dare I say, common ethics. On the other hand, the Iowa ILECS and their voip partners are clearly gaming the system in a way that is patently unfair business practices itself. It’s not a sustainable model–at a large enough scale, any major voice provider would go bankrupt funding these “free” calling ventures. In the end, I think the law should be reformed–but, AT&T should still be responsible for past and current charges. After all, what goes around comes around, and AT&T deserves a taste of their own bitter medicine every now and then.

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Since I’m currently doing contracting work, I’m not in a position to have much say over hiring; but I had a lot of experience in the process from doing management at a small ISP with an egregiously high turnover rate. Still, since I’m back in startup mode in my free(?) time for a project I’m getting off the ground (details to come, but it’s good…very good), I’m thinking over the HR aspects of running a company. Recently a friend of mine asked on his blog, Anxiety Catharsis, for some commentary on the matter, so I (belatedly) am getting around to writing some of my thoughts on the matter.

Joel on Software has an excellent article on the subject that I definitely recommend. From my experience, I’d sum the following general guidelines

1. Be slow in the process. Don’t be afraid to have a gap for a little bit of time, use temp employees, but do NOT allow yourself–or your good employees–to be weighted down with a bad employee or coworker. Every bad hire that I made was because of not adhering to this principle.
2. Hire smart people: This is a difficult one. The Anxiety Catharsis discussion touched on the “Quiz” style interviews; this is definitely better than nothing, but heads slightly down the wrong path. I tend to think that it is best to look for people who understand processes, NOT people who know some trivia. If–as often happens–you are hiring for positions (ie entry level) that your interviewee does not know very well, test what they do and should know. If they were a CS student for four years, and still have no understanding of programming, then it is pretty much a given they can’t/won’t learn. But, regardless, ask WHY and HOW questions, not WHAT.
3. Hire passionate people: The greatest talent and knowledge will not overcome general apathy. Someone who CARES deeply about the output will make sure that they get it done, whatever it takes.
4. Take care of them once they are hired. Make sure that they have professional development, deal with them fairly and honestly, and give them opportunities to actually grow equity in their position.

It definitely is a difficult process to be sure. But, especially in a small startup, it is probably one of, if not the, most critical aspect to the success of the company. Be slow, be cautious, and don’t be afraid to correct “mistakes” sooner rather than later.

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Andy Abramson posted an interesting link regarding the statistics of presence technology, probably one of the hotter buzzwords with voip technology. From the article

That is the productivity cost of telephone tag. 384 calls to reach 69 people; 31 people missed all together.

I definitely am conceptually a fan of presence and think it has amazing applications in the workspace. Still, the article did not actually delve into the the statistical ability of presence being able to “solve” this problem, rather just trusting that we’d all assume that everything would magically be better with presence-enable communication systems.

While I think that the statistics would improve somewhat, current generation presence implementations are a little tedious because they require constant updating of location. While I think the concept of twitter, etc.. is brilliant, or at least the original concept, I’m somewhat mixed on the actual implementations. Personally, I’m not sure that I don’t really care to update this constantly, but, a lot of my friends on my personal IM list are almost scary in their detailed status descriptions.

The most convenient scenario would be an application integrated with cell-phone based GPS and various “zones”. The zones could be setup online to mark “home”, “work”, “gym”, etc..; and then could be tagged into permissions. So, while an employer might have ready access to see “work, at desk, at lunch, in meeting” zones, any out of office activities would just show up as “private”. On the other hand, most personal friends could probably care less as to what particular subset of work we are involved in at the moment, so, while they might get privy to more detailed personal updates, work might just be categorically labeled as work.

Even with those restrictions, I’m not sure that I like the overall privacy implications. GPS tracking of employees in a business environment, regardless of how it is spun, is a little creepy to say the least. Still, in small professional consulting firms, for example, that are more partner-based, it could prove invaluable.

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Apparently, South Carolina is studying state-wide wireless Internet access. I wonder if this is related to Google’s recent interest in building data centers in South Carolina….

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