I coached a manager who’d hired seven people in the previous year–and had fired five of them. His manager was ready to toss him out, too. Instead, the senior manager decided this manager needed coaching about how to hire people. When I asked the manager about his interviewing style, he explained that he used what […]
So you thought the project was on schedule. And now, someone in power has requested you finish the project earlier. Earlier than you can manage with the people you’ve got.You have a bunch of options, including moving to 2-4 week iterations. But that’s something I would normally discuss on Managing Product Development 🙂 So, here
Imagine this scenario: You’re a development manager in a small organization. You have a product and a couple of customers. Over the course of the next year or so, you add a few more developers and a few more customers. And, your customers want to know when you’ll improve the quality of the product, because
Ok, I sometimes extrapolate trends from little or no data, so be forewarned 🙂 Daughter #1 is graduating from high school this Sunday. We went to the awards ceremony last night. There were typical awards in memory/honor of so-and-so, and a whole bunch of recognition awards. But what I was pleasantly surprised at was the
If you’ve ever been involved in a startup before the startup had competitors or were part of a disruptive change in technology, you’ve needed this hiring strategy. In this case, technical skills are close to irrelevant. What’s really important when you’re starting a disruptive change or you’re hiring a not-quite-known skill set is to specify
Esther Schindler posted a great review of Hiring the Best, called Fluff-Free, Pragmatic IT Hiring Advice. She even linked the book to a hiring mistake she’d made earlier in her career. Thanks, Esther!
Sometimes, as a manager in a technical organization, you realize you need to change technologies. In my experience, this is a change that takes place over time. So when I’ve used this strategy, I have hired people with expertise in the new technology and who could coach my current staff with their learning. And, I
I received an email recently from an engineer who was considering a job at a non-profit. They offered him a much lower salary than he was expecting, because they were a “non-profit.” Some people are slimeballs, even if they work at non-profits. A non-profit has revenue. A non-profit pays salaries and benefits to its employees.
Sometimes, technical managers realize their groups aren’t performing all the necessary work, and worse, the people in the group don’t have the background or capability to do the new kind of work. The example I used in the book was that of a test manager who had been hiring testers who had all the same
The most common hiring strategy I’ve seen is when the hiring manager is looking for more people to do similar work to the work already in progress in the organization. For technical organizations, this means more developers/testers/writers/whomever with similar functional skills and the ability to easily learn the product domain. When you have plenty of