In your quiver of management skills, you’ve got a couple of powerful arrows. There’s the annual review where you take the time to really explain, in detail, what a given employee needs to do to grow. That’s huge. That can be life changing. That’s a big arrow. How about the layoff? That’s when you get… more
Cabel Sasser of Panic dropped a shirt off with me shortly before my first presentation at WWDC. For those of you still using Lynx, the shirt reads, “Hi, I make macintosh software.” While Jimmy Eats World was ripping the tunes at the WWDC campus bash, I proudly wore the aforementioned shirt all over the campus.… more
As a manager in any software engineering organization, you’re going to be subject to a lot of interpersonal angst amongst the team members. You’ll be walking to lunch and Engineer A is going to be ranting and raving about Engineer B on another team… “Man that guy bugs me. Have you seen his code? Wow!… more
You and your software development team are close. So close. Just a few more bugs and you’re ready to get those bits out there. You can taste it, but… the bugs keep showing up. Five in the morning. Ten in the afternoon. Oh shit, fifteen more during the weekend. Each day… anything more than zero… more
I hate meetings. Everyone hates them because we’ve all been to so many that have sucked so badly that we now walk into a conference room, sit down… arms folded, and think, “Ok, how long until this one is going to suck?” And then it does. Time is wasted. Hot air is created. Silent frustrations… more
In this article, I start tackling the idea of replacing status reports with some mutant combination of emerging social software tools. My two requirements for this next version of a Status Report were: Makes it easy/attractive for larger organizations to share their information Provides a facility to publish scheduled structured reports to executive-types These requirements… more
At a start-up, there are two organizational inflection points which drastically change communication within the organization. The first change occurs around fifty or so people — this is the moment when, if you’re an early employee, that you first see someone in he hallway that you do not recognize. This is troubling to you because,… more
My all time favorite line from The West Wing is, “We’ve got a thing.” There are variations of this favorite line which all revolve around the same word. “Is this going to be a thing?”, “Have you heard about the thing?”, “So, here’s the thing.” I immediately applied a generous helping of Thingdom to my… more
As already discussed, Managers are not evil. They’re often just stuck in translation hell where they need to say one thing in one way to one team and say the EXACT same thing to another team in a different way. This constant verbal tapdancing looks sketchy to you, the Average Joe, and you start to… more
I recently got into minor war of words with a co-worker regarding the proper solution to a problem with one of my products. As an aside, let me say that email is never ever ever never ever the right way to resolve controversy. Too much subtly is lost when you’re YELLING IN ALL CAPS. Don’t… more