In a recent post, I spent a couple of paragraphs describing how you might help a new manager learn how to manage people, and came up with a combination of incredibly banal advice (“buy donuts!”) and vague and unhelpful handwaving (“people are different”). This bothered me, so I wanted to sit down and attack the […]
Category Archives: Management
For the past couple of years, I’ve split my time between managing individual contributors and technical managers. This is my first time doing the latter, and while I can’t claim deep experience, I’ve learned a lot, and thought I’d put down my personal, highly idiosyncratic, in-no-way universal take on the subject. Think of it as […]
In a previous post, I talked about what it was that stars did differently, and how it didn’t require either 80 hour weeks or incredible genius to shine. But there’s another side to this, and one that doesn’t get as much air time. Everyone wants to know how to be a big success, but the […]
This is a blog post about status reports. Yep. And I’m not going to lie to you – the fact that I find this interesting enough to write about is simultaneously disturbing, disappointing, and unpleasantly enlightening. I’m not proud, but it was something I was thinking about, and I thought I’d share. You see, I’d […]
So what does your boss do, anyway? It can’t all be lying on a divan eating bonbons and watching other people do the work, can it? I mean, OK, sure, there might be a lot of that – but when she isn’t eating bonbons, what then? It’s natural for this to be a source of […]
I interview a lot of software engineers, and people (especially college seniors) frequently tell me that they want to work on “hard problems.” When I ask them what they mean, they generally talk vaguely about doing something algorithmically challenging on the back-end, maybe related to machine learning, natural language processing, or big data. They don’t […]
“Experience is a dear teacher” – Benjamin Franklin In previous posts, I’ve focused a lot on getting the right people in the door – great coders with great attitudes who communicate status aggressively, don’t wait for someone else to fix problems, and never let bad news wait. At which point, of course, there’s nothing for […]
Dan Dreams of Coding 