Management
There are 5 entries for the tag
Management
Have you ever found yourself in a situation where you know what's the best thing to do, but are unable to convince anyone else that you are right? Developers know that even simple problems have more than one solution. Developers who have worked on a team of more than one have probably been in a situation where they just knew that the team was heading in the wrong direction and that they had a solution that was more elegant, easier to program, and better to maintain. Higher profile developers often find themselves trying to explain their solutions to non-technical...
"So when will you be done with this development project?" I don't know about you, but I hate this question. There simply is no good answer for it. It seems like such a simple question with a simple DateTime valued answer. One of these days I swear I'll answer with, "Oh, I'll be done next Tuesday at 2:34pm." just to see what happens. And seriously, businesses hate that we have such difficulty answering the question. It seems perfectly reasonable for them to want to know when they can plan to have the new processes that they know they desperately need....
Have you ever been in an interview and gotten some variation on the question "What do you regret most about your last position?" Everyone hates questions like that. They're a huge risk with little upside for you. You're caught between the Scylla of honesty and the Charybdis of revealing unflattering things about yourself.
Still, such questions can be very valuable if used personally for analysis and improvement. In that light, I'll share with you two things I regret about my stay at XanGo. Since I've ripped on the environment there in the past, it's only fair if I elaborate on things that...
It's always nice to have your opinions confirmed by someone you respect. Joel Spolsky's latest series on recruiting developers has a final section that includes essentially the same point I made a couple months ago: that specific technologies aren't as important in hiring developers as general savvy is. He even issues the same caveat that you do need domain experts for leavening. Nice. As is usual with Joel, he includes a thorough analysis of the issue he explores so there's a lot of good rumination there.
Technorati tags: Recruiting, Development, Hiring, Management
The following applies mainly to in-house business software development. It might or might not apply to ISV or other product development houses. I think that there's room for broad application, but you can hit my list of software blogs if you want some quality sources for more generalized ISV or product development exploration. Back when I was looking to hire developers a couple years ago, I knew some programmers that I wanted on my team. I had worked with them before and knew what they were capable of. Unfortunately, they didn't have much experience with .NET--our platform at the time. I...