Jesse walked. Monday is the day we set aside for new hires. All the new hires spend the morning learning about the company, figuring out how to create accounts, and becoming indoctrinated in company culture. When lunch time arrives, managers pick up their new employees and take them to lunch. Their morning starts at 9am,… More

On my list of creative management solutions to dire situations, I offer the rolling whiteboard. The rolling whiteboard was a curiosity at the start-up. Not a full size whiteboard, but a door-sized whiteboard on wheels, suitable for rolling into conference rooms and cubicles alike. I never knew who owned it; I just grabbed it in… More

At the end of each fiscal year, companies take stock of their performance. How’d we do? Better or worse? This is a natural time to reflect upon individual performance — this is when your boss writes your review. In my ideal management world, a review is simply a documentation of well-known facts, your performance over… More

Everyone is an adjustment. When you’re interacting with anyone, you leave the core you and become slightly them. This is not a betrayal of who you are, this is the middle ground we define between any two people. It’s a place of compromise so we can communicate. There are those people with whom this is… More

I admit it. I love it when the sky is falling. There is no more delicious a state of being than the imminent threat of disaster. During these times, I’ve done great work. I’ve taken teams from “We’re fucked” to “We made it”. Yeah, we had to cancel Christmas that one time and there was… More

My management career began with a misunderstanding. “Rands, you’re doing a great job on tools development and I’d really like you to Lead the effort.” It sounded liked your standard professional compliment. Atta boy! Go run with it! Problem was, I didn’t hear the capital L. Lead is what my manager had said. Not lead,… More

Larry was pissing me off. We were a year into a two-year development process. Far enough along to have confidence that we could do it, but not far enough to be sure when we would get there. Features were claimed to be done, but each build of the product was a study in broken and… More

There’s a gaping hole in The Taste of the Day. Yes, it’s a handy task management system, but it’s incomplete. It describes a process for constant scrubbing of a task list, as well as a handy place to keep distractions out of your way via the Parking Lot, but at the end of the day,… More

Think of this. You have a job where, whenever you need to, you can find the absolute truth. When someone asks you, “Phil, why is this happening?” you are 100% confident that you can figure out the precise answer. This is the idyllic situation many engineers on the planet Earth live in, and, well, it’s… More

If you’re wondering about your next job, there are a series of Rands articles that might make the transition easier. First off, there’s A Glimpse and a Hook, which will describe how managers read your resume. Then we’ve got The Sanity Check, which will prepare you for the phone screen. And finally, there’s Ninety Days,… More