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,
I’ve been thinking about project retrospectives. Too few project teams participate in end-of-the-project retrospectives, and to few managers arrange for them. My clients seem concerned by the price of an outside facilitator and the cost in time to the next project. To address the facilitator cost, I’ve suggested that any facilitator not on the
Take a look at Success Through Failure. I really liked this: Software development is difficult in the best of conditions. You should always be failing some of the time, and learning from those failures in an honest way. Otherwise, you’re cheating yourself out of the best professional development opportunities. How do you ask about mistakes
If you’ve been hiring for a while, you probably have a list of questions you like to use with candidates. I certainly do. So let me ask you, “Can you give me an example of a time when you wanted to learn more about a candidate, and your questions didn’t seem to work?” Notice what
Frank sent me the music baton. I don’t do chain letters, but I thought this was cute. Sorry, Frank, I’m still going to relate it to work.The official stuff: Total volume of music on my computer: 1128 songs (or 3.2 days, 5.23 GB) The last CD I bought: I can’t remember if it was Saturday