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
There’s a meeting going on right now. It’s a cross-functional meeting, which means that not only are multiple departments in the organization represented, but multiple expertise types, attitudes, and agendas as well. The cross-functional nature of this meeting means a program manager is present and they are likely serving in their role as translator. See,… more
My management career began with a misunderstanding. “Rands, you’re doing a great job on tools development and I’d really like you to Lead the effort.” It sounded liked your standard professional compliment. Atta boy! Go run with it! Problem was, I didn’t hear the capital L. Lead is what my manager had said. Not lead,… more
Muddled. Our release was muddled. I was sitting at my desk talking to a white stone polar bear and trying to form an opinion about the release. The execs were going to ask. Soon. “Well, QA is freaked out, but QA is always freaked out, so I’ll call that a wash. The UI guys wanted… 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
Actual conversation. DSL has been off for over 12 hours and that’s about my limit. There’s only so long I can do without a fresh set of bits, so I break down and do my third least favorite thing to do… call customer support. Customer support frustrates me because of the well-designed ability to do… more
Ed: The last day of Deconstructing Managers week. It all started on Day #1. What happens when they lose their shit? Pride and panic. The two delicious ends of the management spectrum. Pride is when it’s going swimmingly. Great product release, selling well. Hired that phenomenal guy from the other group who is going to… more
Ed: This is Day #2 of the Deconstructing Manager’s piece. Day #1 might help you figure out what is going on here. I am not going to explain what your manager does all day. Sorry. I am going to hand you six critical questions that you need to answer in order to figure out if… more
The list of reasons folks want to become a manager is varied. I think it looks like this: I want to have more influence over product development. I wanted to try something new and I get along with people. I’m never going to be a great programmer, but I sure know what programmers are talking… more
You’ve just finished your big release and the team has mostly returned from that four day weekend where they’re supposed to recharge from four straight months of work. Everyone is still pretty screwed up. Folks still instinctively check the bug database every 4 minutes to see if anything critical showed up even though there’s no… more
