The Alito hearings this week made me cringe. If you watched or heard any of them, you saw senators orating, leading, and in general asking ridiculous questions (both sides). Why didn’t anyone ask either of these two sets of questions: Have you been in a position to have to rule against the executive branch? What
I’ve been working on improving my writing for about 20 years. When I was inside organizations, I asked some of my colleagues to review my memos and reports. I gained valuable insights. (“A verb, JR, a verb. Please.”) But once I started my consulting business 11 years ago, I needed more help with my writing.
I changed ISPs last Friday. At some point Friday, my ISP bounced my email with a strange (to me) message. This is the same ISP that had problems just a few months ago, so I was done. I need email up virtually 100% of the time. And if I can’t receive email, I need
Dave Liebreich has a post Job Descriptions Made Easy, where he describes the value of following the job analysis template in Hiring the Best …and a technique to use Tinderbox to see the job analysis. Cool.
I’ve been attempting to clean up my office since I moved into it. I had some luck a while ago, using emergent design techniques for cleaning up. But that wasn’t enough. I was ready for an office redesign. So that’s what I did this weekend. Here is one before picture: The rest of the
Contents: This month’s Feature Article: Providing Effective Correcting and Reinforcing Feedback Announcements =-=-=-=-=- Feature Article: Providing Effective Correcting and Reinforcing Feedback So you can’t stand the way Bonzo checks in his broken code on Friday afternoons. Or, Cecile has such bad breath no one wants to work with her. Or, you’re not sure how to
Contents: This month’s Feature Article: Using One-on-Ones to Build Trust Announcements =-=-=-=-=- Feature Article: Using One-on-Ones to Build Trust A colleague of mine just arrived at a new company as a manager. He’s inherited a group where management was (and still is) a dirty word. Due to some of the previous managers’ actions, the technical
Contents: This month’s Feature Article: Becoming Comfortable with One-on-Ones Announcements =-=-=-=-=- Feature Article: Becoming Comfortable with One-on-Ones Last month’s feature article was about building trust with one-on-one meetings. In response, a reader mailed me this question: “How long should it take to become comfortable with one-on-ones?” Ok. Here’s the standard answer: It depends. It depends
I recently spoke with a recruiter who told me, “I just can’t seem to find agile candidates. No one has “stand-up meetings’ listed on his resume.” When you’re reviewing resumes, it would be nice to find some keywords so you could see if the candidate has had agile experience–but it’s unlikely. However, implementing a few
Technical debt is the unfinished work the product development team accumulated from previous releases. This debt includes: design debt, where the design is insufficiently robust in some areas; development debt, where pieces of the code are missing; and testing debt, where tests were not developed or run against the code. Technical debt is common, but