Well, all the comments on my No More Bugs post got me thinking. To answer a few comments here and elsewhere, I’m not trying to blame developers for being human and making mistakes. When I was a developer, most of my mistakes involved code. As a manager, most of my mistakes were in my dealings
My Inc./Fast Company column is up: Put Your Candidate to Work. Please leave comments here. When I write columns for a site or magazine, I discuss the areas to write about with the editor. What the editors originally wanted was a here’s-how-to-use-your-intuition article about hiring. I explained that was a bad idea, and I would
Esther just called me from the Orlando airport to tell me she heard a fascinating rumor: Supposedly, she and I aren’t talking! After I was done laughing out loud, we examined this a little. We’ve facilitated sessions together at previous year’s STAR conferences, but I’ve been unable to attend last fall’s STAR and this spring’s
During an email conversation last week, I suggested that my client change his naming of “bug” to “defect.” He asked why. People don’t create bugs, but people create defects (or problems or faults). Bugs crawl in or fly in from the outside, when you’re not expecting them to. But we expect defects and problem in
I was reading Good Interview Questions. I was a bit surprised by the first question: State, Strategy, Bridge, and Adapter are all similar patterns. How are they similar, and how are they different? But I suspect I was surprised because I’m no longer a developer and am not familiar with the patterns. I suspect I
I’ll be guest blogging on Recruiting.com. I don’t have the magic password yet, so you’ll have to wait until next week to see anything I write. I had a great email and then phone conversation with Jason. I explained I wasn’t a recruiter, and only knew about recruiting from the client side. He said that
I was sitting on the couch was organizing a database last weekend, with daughter #2 sitting next to me. I was creating a script to go through each record removing a field’s contents and adding new contents to another field. Not a difficult thing to do. I created a loop, and daughter #2 said,
I’ve ranted about certifications before. But I recently encountered another job description with a certification that I just don’t understand. For a Quality Manager (not a Director or VP), the description asked for PMP. (The PMP is the PMI’s certification for project managers.) Here’s why I think requiring any certification is nuts: all the certification
Months ago, Debbie asked this question, “Do you have any comparative analysis on the disciplines (project management and program management) that you would like to share?” To me, program management is the ability to take a project or a series of projects and manage those (see Program Management: Multiple Projects With Multiple Deliverables) in the
I’m having an email conversation with someone who’s trying to hire some developers. He said, “For some reason, I think that developer who is comfortable in Lisp can take on any project, because I do know Lisp, and I feel that I can take on any project :)” Unfortunately, I don’t buy the transitive property