And you are here why?

  Cynicism is pretty much in vogue. Mind you, I suspect it's always been in vogue, well before the Marquis of Cynìcse famously remarked " mon élicotère est plein d'anguilles " in response to a question about the monarchy (etymology of "cynicism", in case you're wondering). This is particularly relevant when it comes to one's workplace - witness pretty much anybody's response to an exhortation to do good by the company. I mean, " The company doesn't give a s**t about me, why should I give a s**t about the company " is pretty much is a fact of life these days, isn't it? The thing is, it is all too easy to mix up the Company with the People That Work At The Company. If anything, that's pretty much the job of whoever is doing brand-management at the company, that's their job, and they tend to be very good at doing so! But, and this is important, don't fall into that trap . Oh, by all means, be cynical about the company t...

It’s (not so?) surprising how contentious the above statement can get. The responses to it exists on a spectrum, with one end consisting of Libertarian-types who hate the very concept of Management, and the other end consisting of Dictatorial ass-hats who are convinced that things would be just fine  if only people did exactly what they were supposed to in the project plan!!! The thing though, is that there  is  an element of truth in the above statement, but, as with all things, semantics matter. Let’s break “ Software ” into two categories • Engineering : The process of finding the appropriate solution to the problem at hand. Frequently, this also involves figuring out what the problem is in the first place! • Coding : Implementing the solution that was identified in the  Engineering step above. When broken out like this,  Coding  is “hard” in the sense that there is skill involved. It may take years —  or 10,000 hours  — to become great at th...

/via http://www.commitstrip.com/en/2013/08/01/moment-de-solitude/ I — literally — have no idea how many different types of ToDo lists I’ve worked my way through in my life. Off the top of my head, I’ve used • Post-Its : with the inevitable breakage when they fell off the monitor without my noticing) • TextEdit : Oh the fun when the laptop crashed, and my list hadn’t been saved. • OneNote : All well and good, till I switched to OSX… • Trello : Huh, I’m spending so much time tagging and categorizing my ToDos, I don’t actually have any time to actually  do  them. • JIRA : That one time I  Kanban ’d my way to using JIRA for my ToDos. It was excessively silly • Keep : Surprisingly effective. Really. Go figure. • Email : Ah, the old standby. Give that I’m always hovering pretty close to ZeroInbox, email does work extremely well. And lord knows how many other things. That said, I’m currently in an  Email + Keep  kinda place. What about you?

Hang out in the world of Software Development for pretty much any length of time, and you’re sure to hit a  DeathMarch  (•). You know, the kind that goes, “WE HAVE 17 DAYS TO RELEASE ALL HANDS OF DECK LATE NIGHTS MOAR COFFEE …”. Oh, there might ben occasional “justified” one — I recall an instance when a Very Important Client basically told us to add a feature within the month, or they’d switch, and switching meant that we’d be out of business. Result — lots of pain and suffering on our part, but it was that, or around 45 people being out of jobs. (And yes, we did, eventually, manage to rebalance our clients so that this wouldn’t happen again…) That said, most of them tend to be due to  some  form of screwup in the development process — be it requirements, expectations, or whatever. However,  there are those organizations (quite prevalent in #TechBro culture), where late nights are a way of life. Beware these! In particular, look out for two specifi...

/via http://www.savagechickens.com/ Meetings suck, right? I mean, sitting in that room, while Bob (•) drones on and on and  on , and you wish you were somewhere else, anywhere else, maybe even judging the Fingernails On Chalkboard contest, and it’s been 30 minutes  and Bob is still going … It doesn’t have to be this way. More to the point, if  you  have any agency, you can make sure that it isn’t this way. Everyone Talks Look around the table, and pay attention to the distribution of the conversation. Check out who hogs the spotlight (Bob!), who rarely talks, and who has checked out. The key point here is that you want  everybody  to have a voice, to participate, to be part of the team. Give the quiet ones a voice, and make sure that the inveterate talkers, well,  don’t  (if necessary, have a word with them before the meeting). Your aim in all of this is to enable a free flow, to have  everyone  participate, be involved, par...

Do *you* know how to make your team productive? I sure as hell don’t. Mind you, I know any number of ways to  decrease  productivity. Some of them are ludicrously obvious (open-plan offices, daily all-hands, audible Slack notifications), and some, not so much (poor air quality, working through breaks). ( I mean yeah, if you want to go down the “you increase productivity by removing things that decrease productivity” route, well, yes, I’ve got ideas. But that’s already pretty meta, and not quite the direction I’m going in. ) See, the problem starts when you get down and dirty, and start trying to figure out what exactly it is that you mean by “productivity”. We ourselves are quite to blame here — once we realized that making decisions without data was prone to error (who would-a thunk it?), we started measuring  everything . That’s been A Good Thing for a lot of stuff (Instrumentation, Observability, etc.), but it’s also caused no end of issues thanks to  M...

/via http://www.fau.edu/research/research-communications/index.php The means and lines of communications within organization have expanded by a ridiculous amount over the last couple of years. At the same time, so have issues associated with these forms of communications. For example, you’ve probably heard the following in some form or the other • “ I find Slack counter-productive ” • “ Hangouts are a waste of time ” • “ I prefer email to WhatsApp ” and so forth. The thing about the above is that each and every one of them is absolutely valid. For example • “ I find Slack counter-productive,  because the constant interruptions prevent me from getting into the groove ” • “ Hangouts are a waste of time,  because everybody here likes the sound of their own voice ” • “ I prefer email to WhatsApp,  because you can keep track of conversation threads ” Fair points right? Especially the one about distractions, right?After all, most of us have run into th...