Interviews and Questionable Advice

A friend of mine recently reposted this Forbes Coaches Council article on LinkedIn: Seven Things To Never Ask About During A Job Interview I do not normally spend much time critiquing the works of others in such a context, but I found the given advice to be dreadful and remedial enough that I am expending my own valuable … Read more

About Burnout

Candle burning at both ends.  Clip path

I have recently returned to writing after spending an entire year working on a digital transformation.  So, this post is both timely and personal for me. The art and craft of professional software development is a fascinating animal.  It is inherently abstract and can be highly complex.  In order to function effectively across the lifecycle … Read more

The #1 Communication Skill They Don’t Teach You In School

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I recently sat down to contemplate the most useful skill that I learned to help in my communication with others. One in particular kept rising to the top. This skill is amazingly basic, yet almost no one does it.  Perhaps our incessant internal mental chatter and our desire to be heard makes this skill difficult to master. Enough speculative philosophy. What is this mysterious skill … Read more

A Tale of Organizational Structures

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A promising young software professional recently asked me about the roles that exist between the customer and software engineers in a “typical” company.  My initial reaction was to describe a cross-section of business analyst, product manager, and software architect roles.  On later reflection, I realized that I was taking the basis of my own answer for granted.  This post … Read more

Business: Why Your Software Sucks

Young beautiful lady expresses anger and fury sitting in front of large computer screen. Smart casual dress, beige office desk, wireless keyboard and mouse, light grey background

“What do you mean the server went down?” asks the CEO.  “It has been happening every week” the lead tech says. “It didn’t do that for the other customers,” laments the CEO.  The tech replies “This customer is ten thousand times larger than all the other customers combined. We didn’t build the application to handle … Read more

Development Culture. Do You Speak It?

software developers in an open floor plan

What has a hundred legs, sits in your office, occupies fifty computer screens, clicks on keyboards and trackpads all day, and gets nothing accomplished? Answer: Your development team. Wait, the CEO says.  What is going on here?  We hired a bunch of developers.  We bought a very long party table and two very long benches. … Read more

Agile, Tribal Knowledge, and the Trail of Documentation

It's all ones and zeros

When I encounter a software company that claims to be “agile,” I often also hear something like this: “We’re an agile shop. We don’t do documentation because we don’t need to.  Documentation goes obsolete quickly.” Yeah, right. Whenever I hear such things, there is a part of my brain called the bullshitathalamus that quickly utters … Read more