Management

Delivering Big/Bad News

As a manager, at some point, you’re going to have to deliver news that is going to be of significant consequence to your employees. It’s likely to either be big news (“the team has been split into three and everyone you know is no longer on your team”) or it’s going to be bad (“we… more

March 9, 2003 7 Comments

Synchronicity

I build software for a living. I started out in quality assurance in the 80s and now I’m responsible for a reasonably large engineering organization tasked with developing four very different products. This week, the team sat down with the executives at the company and basically asked for several million dollars to finance the development… more

February 14, 2003 2 Comments

Engineering Management Interview Questions

A former employee recently asked, “What are questions you ask software engineering management candidates?” These questions really focus on the people-skills for managers. If you’re looking for technical questions, I highly recommend techInterview or stumbling around on Stack Overflow. Lead Off Questions: These are vanilla, boring questions which I use to begin to assess a… more

October 14, 2002 3 Comments

Surreal Meetings

At the new gig, everyone is sporting fancy laptops and the whole building is wired for 802.11b. This has some significant implications on the way work gets done in a meeting.

August 4, 2002 4 Comments