I heard this the other day from someone and can’t get it out of my mind – I call it SUE for short. SUE happens when someone enters a meeting and they are so pumped about what they are doing they rattle off status updates. We delivered this. I coded that. Someone is testing this. We are designing this tomorrow. This is good, status updates are good, but now give me the context of that…
If you are accountable for your actions, whether right or wrong, succeed or fail, but mostly when you are wrong and you fail – you will change the culture of your team overnight. No longer will they think they need to hide and toil away mercilessly in the background trying to get something fixed before someone notices. In meetings, they will speak up about something being broken and not let it go down the line.…
When I went to configure my first hard drive, I had to use my thick thumbs to put these tiny little jumper boxes into the back of the drive on the pins so that the computer would pick it up correctly. I’d try, reboot, try, reboot, and eventually, I’d get the message that the drive was detected and ready for use. Oh, happy days – I had done it, I had configured the drive correctly.…
I came across this article last week on StackOverflow – The Great Resignation as it applies to Software Developers. It’s a pretty good read – unfortunately, it’s nothing new – all of these elements of being a software developer existed before – all the Pandemic has done has made them visible (more so before). Burnout is not new, the term might have even been invented by Software Developers. The section on “Challenges for Managers and…
If you don’t know what you are measuring, what the goal is, what matters in the end. What are you building for? How are you building it? And what will it be what you need when you get there? Knowing what you’re moving towards (and your team) is the most important part of your delivery. It might get repetitive as you ask the same questions over and over as your spidey sense tingles when you…