Month: June 2018

June 13, 2018

Greg Thomas

Fastest to the Mess

It’s easy to get flustered by someone next to you that is ripping through the code, their keyboard is on fire and they are knocking off bugs faster than you can open them.   Take a piece of paper right now and split it into two sides, with the following headings – “Who Cares?” and “Why does it matter?”. Fill in the one column with the people that really care about speed and the other with why does it matter to them that this person is going so fast. Are these people that matter to you and appreciate your work?

June 12, 2018

Greg Thomas

Always have the last laugh

Not the last “I told you so” laugh. Not the last “This is so dumb it’s silly” laugh. Not the last “I got my revenge on you” laugh. No, I’m talking about the last laugh that happens when you and a bunch of your co-workers are sitting around trying to figure out why X is broken you realize it is a semi-colon in your code. I’m talking about the laugh that happens when someone tries something new and it blows up in their face. I’m talking about the jokes you make in your weekly meeting with the team to discuss

June 11, 2018

Greg Thomas

Forget the Negative

No one ever got anywhere having a negative approach to the problem. The other team has much faster coders. If we had their tools, we’d be a stronger team. The rules are unfair. They get all the perks and we get nothing. Our timelines are always too tight, we never have enough time. When has being negative to any of those problems ever solved anything? Never right? Change doesn’t happen overnight – you can’t fix the “rules” in one fell swoop or address the timeline issue all at once. They happen over time with the implementation of consistent, incremental steps.

June 8, 2018

Greg Thomas

The People that Learn from Failure

Are easy to spot. They don’t complain about it. They don’t make excuses for it. They don’t look to their phones for inspiration. They take a moment (because everyone needs one). They figure out what went wrong. They do the work to fix the problem. And they try again with a different approach, different goal and objective. They might fail again, but when they do, they are that much farther than those still complaining and making excuses about it.

June 7, 2018

Greg Thomas

Getting Past the GateKeeper

You might know them as the “GateKeeper” – the person you need to get past in an Interview to get to the next person on the list – the one you really want to talk to, the one who will really see you for who you really are, the one who knows the trees for the forest of what you are being interviewed for But you have to get through the GateKeeper there so here’s the plan; Know they might not know everything about the “thing” you want to be doing. Appreciate that in this instance, they are the representative

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