”You must see the people who work with you.”
The presence of rigid, e-mail-based status reports comes down to control, a lack of imagination, and a lack of trust in the organization.
The courage it takes to stop this meeting five minutes into the scheduled hour because there is no discernible way to make progress.
It’s great that your freak has chosen to freak out. The alternative is that they’re not saying a thing and have decided to leave the company.
A meeting agenda would help, but as most meetings proceed without one, you’re on your own.
It’s a noble act, speaking your mind in front of all your peers. But it’s also a waste of time.
Roles and agendas in these meetings are simple. Talkers are talking and listeners are listening. Get it? There is no problem to be solved other than the transmission of information. The quicker it happens, the sooner everyone is back to work.
Exhibiting your power and knowledge as a manager isn’t always the best method of communicating.
Blindly landing process without considering the culture it needs to support it is a recipe for disaster.
Each additional person levies a communication tax, and unless we figure out how to constantly improve our communication, we’re just going to get slower.
Bright-and-shiny inflection points are full of energy, but unless that energy is carefully channeled back into the building and immediately acted upon, all an off-site represents is a frustrating opportunity to dream, but not to act.
Use the development environment to build the product. This means you must be familiar with your team’s tools, including the build system, version control, and programming language.
Process is the means by which your team communicates.
What I am saying is that any big decision, any big problem, deserves time and consideration.
I know there is no controlling the world, but I will fluidly surf the entropy by constantly changing myself.
The game here isn’t just overcommunication and Grapevine eradication; I’m still worried I missed something in the plan, and the status spamming is another means of vetting both the plan and the progress.
These people, called managers, don’t create product. They create process.
We all get shit work, but it’s the responsibility of the guy or gal in charge to dole this work out fairly and consistently.
Each week that passes where you don’t share the joy, despair, and discovery of software development is a week when you slowly forget what it means to be a software developer.
A strategic hire is someone who is going to push their agenda, their opinion.
A tactical hire is a person who is filling a well-defined need.
Your job interview isn’t over until you’ve changed to become part of a new team.
There are chronically negative nerds out there, but in my experience with nerd management, it’s more often the case that the nerd is bitter because they’ve seen this situation before four times, and it has played out exactly the same way.
Yeah, they’re going to argue, but it’s the argument you want your teams to have. It’s not a fear-based “Should we or shouldn’t we?”it’s “Let’s do this thing, let’s make sure it gets done, and let’s make sure it gets done right.”
As an aside, let me stress how bad of a career move it is to not know who you are going to be working for when you arrive. The 30-minute interview you have with your future manager is a critical piece of information when you decide whether or not to make a move.
My personal favorites are mechanical organics. These folks have all the slick tricks of organic information gathering, but they’ve got the astounding organization skills of the mechanic. They know everything and never forget a bit. I mean it. Organic mechanics are frightening. They have extreme depth of knowledge, but there is no obvious organic thread that ties it all together. Here’s the scary part. There is a thread. There is a purpose. They just aren’t letting you see it. Organic mechanics will keep you on your heels and just when you think you’ve figured them out, they’ll change everything. I hate that. I mean, I love that.
Wait, don’t these holistics have product to ship? No, they have multiple products, but they’ve hired rock-star inwards to get the products built to specification and on time so they can focus on figuring out what to build next and who they’re going to need to build it.
I’m not suggesting that outwards don’t care about the daily professional shenanigans within the company; they do, but they’ve also hired a group of rock-star holistics to run their company. The rub is this: while it’s not their job to run the company on a daily basis, they are accountable for it.
What you need to know about your manager is how much he cares about this growth and, more importantly whether he sees this as his growth opportunity or the team’s.
You are not that person, because once you are rewarded for releasing crap, you begin a blind walk down a path of mediocrity that ends up with you working at Computer Associates on a product no one has heard of and that no one cares about.