I spoke at Boston SPIN last night, and facilitated the hiring initiative roundtable before the main presentation. One of the roundtable participants explained that he was looking for entry-level testers. And, since no one (okay, not quite no one, but almost no one) teaches testing in college, he wanted to develop an audition to see […]
I’ve changed a few things about this blog: I enabled each post to be its own archive. You can click on the title or on the “link” in the byline. You should be able to use the little email icon to email a blog entry to someone. Please let me know if you find any
I maintain the AYE web site as part of my responsibilities this year for the conference. I post the news, the new articles, and do the general updating. Monday, I posted one of Don Gray‘s articles, Shifting the Burden – Whose Monkey Is It? Except, Don and I had both made a mistake. Don
Last week, while driving to/from parents and funerals (my folks are fine), I had several long talks with my sister, who’s looking for a job. She’s the best salesperson I’ve ever met. She’s great at selling, and stays friendly with her clients over the years. She stopped selling in high tech about 16 years ago
It’s been a tough week, and it’s only Wednesday morning. We’ve had a bunch of family illnesses — nothing deadly, but difficult to diagnose with long term effects. A very old friend of the family died. And because it’s June, the kids have a gazillion things with school and sports. I’m not quite back
My column over at the Fast Company/Inc Hiring Center is up: Make the Work Interesting. That column grew out of Negotiating an Offer and Negotiating and Offer. (Yes, I mistakenly named two posts the same title. Must have been tired.) Please leave comments here on this column. If you have requests for other column topics,
If you’re managing a project longer than a few weeks, you may realize that the project’s progress is not quite where you think it should be. It can seem impossible to change course. But choosing to continue what you’re doing is a choice. So you can choose to do something different. I started thinking
I’ve been thinking a lot about impossible schedules. I’m talking about the project schedules that no matter how you organize the project, it’s not possible for this group of people to cram that set of features into this much time. At least, the developers don’t think so. If people are up against impossible schedules,
I was speaking with a colleague the other day, and he told me about an audition he’s been using for developers for years: asking them to implement a String-Copy function in the language in which they’ll be developing. Some of their reactions are telling: Some have said, “Why? The language has it?” Some have worked
I’m in Israel this week, continuing an assessment I started last week. For those of you in the US, sit down. The people who have offices on an outside wall have windows that open. Yup, they do. The A/C and the heat know to shut off when the window is open. (I think they do,