Let’s start with the visual… This new monitor configuration keeps popping up the engineering team and after walking into enough offices thinking, “Useful or flashy?”, I decided to give it a whirl. The basic usage pattern is unchanged. The left screen is for the active workspace whereas the right screen is the palette screen —… More

As we discovered in A Glimpse and a Hook, it’s almost a miracle when the phone rings and a recruiter wants to set up a phone screen. The fact is, someone, somewhere in the organization has successfully mapped you to an open position. This is a really big deal because, in my experience, the chance… More

The terrifying reality regarding your resume is that for all the many hours you put into fine-tuning, you’ve got 30 seconds to make an impression on me. Maybe less. It’s unfair, it’s imprecise, and there’s a good chance that I make horrible mistakes, but there’s a lot more of you than me, and while hiring… More

There’s a very short list of new manager “must do’s” in the Rands Management Rule Book. The brevity of this list comes from the fact that a must is an absolute and when it comes to people, there are very few absolutes. A clever way to manage one person is a disaster when applied to… More

I’m coming up on five years of steady Mac OS X usage and anniversaries are a time of reflection, so I went back to read my first significant article about Mac OS X. There’s something missing from this first analysis. See, there was one killer app that I’d been dying to try out on the… More

When you accept a new job, you don’t know who you are going to work with, what you are going to be doing, and how much (or little) you’re going to like it. Call everyone you want. Ask their opinions. Trust the fact that a good friend referred you for the gig. Revel in the… More

The rules are simple: Take 20 minutes from your busy day Grab some stickies (or equivalent) And tell everyone what’s up Post a link with a comment (or don’t) Winner gets a copy of the book (but that’s not the point) Tell a friend.

The creation of a Rands article goes like this. First, the idea strikes me at some random part of the day… usually in the car to or from work. I spend anywhere from a day to a month fine-tuning this idea in my head until it’s something I want to start writing about. It’s entirely… More

On the list of things I do a lot, typing is up there close to breathing. It started with the Apple II forever ago and now it’s now and I’m still typing every single day and each day I wait for the sharp pains to start racing up my forearms My only guess that I… More

Buried. Back at the start-up, we were shifting gears. After six months of talking about shipping a product, we needed to ship a product and nothing gets everyone’s attention like a deadline. The good news was that QA had been doing its job and there was a pile of work in our bug database. The… More