I showed up late to drones. A few weeks ago it was my father’s birthday. The reason I am an engineer is that my father is an engineer. (Aside: The reason I am a leader is that I watched all of my mother’s moves as she wrangled my father the engineer.) For the 4th of… more
My first job in technology was a QA internship. The summer between my freshman and sophomore years, I tested the first release of Paradox for Windows at Borland. As an intern, I started by following someone else’s QA test plan – dutifully checking each test off the list. After a few weeks, I knew my… more
You’ve heard of the 10x engineer, but I am here to tell you about the Wolf. They are an engineer, and they consistently exhibit the following characteristics: They appear to exist outside the well-defined process we’ve defined to get things done, but they appear to suffer no consequences for not following these rules. Everyone knows… more
You arrive at work. You sit down at your desk and you scan your inbox for potential disasters. Two mails pique your interest. You write brief responses to nudge the engineers in the right direction. Nothing else is urgent so you walk to the kitchen to get breakfast. You sit down with three fellow engineers… more
… Engineers are tired of being spammed by recruiters and rarely respond to their emails.
You have a job and it has a name. A name of convenience. It exists so that when someone asks, “What do you do?” you can simply say, “I am a software engineer” rather than saying, “Well, there are these things called computers and computers run software and humans write software and I am one… more
On the list of ways to generate a guaranteed negative knee-jerk reaction from an engineer, I offer a single word: process. Folks, in order to make sure that we hit our ship date, we have a new bug triage… process. You’ve heard the groans and you’ve seen the rolling eyeballs and made the fair assumption… more
Stephen was a hired gun at my first start-up. His contract started a year before I arrived, but he was long gone before I walked in the door. The story goes that when Stephen started, he found a small, solid team of five engineers, a QA lead, and a project manager. They were slowly and… more
A quick search of Rands in Repose archives reveals that I have never mentioned Piers Anthony as a major influence. I consumed the Xanth series over the course of several years, and am certain much of a formative teenage wit is based on the literary stylings of Anthony. These books have not aged well, or… more
For a word that can so vastly change the fortunes of a company, it’s worth noting that no generally accepted definition of the word design exists. This means when your boss stands up in front of the team at that all-hands and says, “We’ll have a design-centered culture,” there’s a good chance he’s saying nothing… more
