My favorite part of shipping a product is crunch time. It’s the month or so before a major release when you’ve acknowledged that you can no longer delay the inevitable — you must ship this product. What’s gratifying about crunch time is the velocity with which the product team moves. Decision-making occurs in the hallway.… more
You’ve been here… You get a random email from your boss that you need to meet with him urgently at some odd hour of the day. You sit staring at the email, wondering what could be up. No rumors of layoffs are in the air… the company is hitting it’s number this quarter. You don’t… more
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
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
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
Jim Barksdale of Netscape fame offers us these management nuggets:
If you see a snake, kill it.
Don’t play with dead snakes.
Don’t forget that great opporunities look like snakes at first.
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.
I’m switching jobs over the course of the next week. Been with the current gig for about four years and the stench of idiocy was getting terribly strong, so… Splitsville.
Mondays in the software biz are hell. Because productivity decreases in relation to how you close you are to Friday, Mondays, invariably, are full of everyone