I had lunch with a friend-of-a-friend today. She’s considering moving to a process improvement position. I suggested she not move from a technical lead to a process improvement position — I don’t trust staff positions in this not-yet-robust economy. So I asked her why not do process improvement where she is, in her circle
Thanks to Brian Marick, I read Dave Thomas’s Weeding Out Bugs. Much of Bug-Weeding is developer turf. But here’s what managers can do to help: Look at defect counts by module. When you see a module that has more than it’s fair share of defects, start asking questions about what the developers are considering. You’ll
Candidates need to know where they stand — from the time you receive a resume until you’ve either hired them or rejected them. Make sure your autoresponses — or real rejection letters — don’t look like this: Subject: Got your pathetic resume. To: (name withheld out of decency) Look: We here at insult.com got this
I was reading Hiring Great Hackers, and I realized what went wrong in the places I’ve worked who hired great hackers. (In this case, a hacker is not a derogatory term, it’s someone who lives and breathes producing great software — just not software that yet has a customer base.) The problem was the
Esther‘s here this week (again), so we can finish the pre-review draft of the book. We’re telling the story of a great manager who’s just arrived to a new organization. We describe meetings ,where we wanted to say “Everyone nodded.” I wanted to add “like bobble-headed dolls.” While that’s humorous, it’s not very respectful to
Dave Smith said, One thing I see little of in resumes, but which pops out in a positive way when I do see is, is acknowledgment of past failure, with evidence that the candidate learned something from it, or at least walked away with motivation to improve. .I’ve been thinking about what to suggest. I
The folks at the monster blog have another winning post One More Time of tips for job seekers. One of the most important tips is to show your value in a resume, a tip from Five Ways to Make Your Monster Resume Stand Out. Thad Peterson says “Use Numbers to Your Advantage” and highlights some
Well, that’s certainly a provocative title. Let’s see if I can back it up 🙂 First, read Keith Ray’s Engineering post, where he says “software development is a cooperative “game” in creating and deploying “knowledge” and various people-oriented practices help make that work” Some of my recent posts about requirements show the problems when software
I’ve been traveling a lot this summer, and I saw bad requirements exposed while waiting for my turn at the kiosk. If you buy an e-ticket, you can walk up to a computer, called a kiosk, insert a major credit card, and check in. No one calls you. You have to know the computer
Recently, I spoke with a senior manager who’d outsourced new development to a non-local group. The development team has worked together in the past, and knows each other well. However, they are used to working on mature products, where you can actually write down the requirements and have them stand still for a few months.