In this article you'll read about: cost of desperation in IT recruitment, what's one of key requirements if you want to move "from good to great", what does Kent Beck think about bad programmers, why "just letting her/him go" is much more a big deal than one may think and what the word "recruitment" truly stands for. I've actually planned to publish something completely different today, but we all know them - stubborn, relentless thoughts that just won't let you go until you share them with the wider public. So, here it is,…
All posts in “organization culture”
By reading this article you'll learn that: not everything that appears as pep talk is a brainwash, you can be a Moses (& carve some stone tablets) for your team, why 10 commandments are better than "Chairman's Mao Little Red Book", where's the border between good & bad principles, where do the values come from (& whether they can be imposed) ... Utterly pragmatic creatures known as engineers are by definition allergic to any kind of activities they classify as "brainwash". This category is quite wide: all sorts of pep talks, motivational speeches, noble ideas/values behind…
TL;DR It's 2018 & for majority of developers speaking to a business person (/stakeholder /user /sponsor) is still a grand rarity. We explicitly ask for "layers" of intermediaries who can translate business to tech & back. And once it gets to crafting the actual solution we either reduce ourselves to purely subservient automatons ("I do what I'm asked to, so where does this button go?") or follow the other extreme ("Provide written requrements until 10th, then we'll make something out of it & let you know"). We feel too comfortable in "secluded…
Disclaimer: Some (over)sensitive readers may find this post offensive. Arrogant. Elitist. Oh well. Bozo effect (aka Bozo explosion) - gradual descent of (once unequivocally high) average employee's competence level (overall: skillwise, intellectual, attitude, etc.), usually due to lowered recruitment standards, departure of key people or general organisation culture degradation. Bozo effect is usually accompanied by ignorance - subjects lack the awareness of the downfall. The past glory is still alive & vivid in bozos' life (even if they didn't contribute to it themselves) - in fact they completely miss their present mediocrity as they've made themselves believe they keep…
Let's start with a short quote from the book I'm reading at the moment (recommended, good stuff): "In good organizations, people can focus on their work and have confidence that if they get their work done, good things will happen for both the company and them personally. (...) In a poor organization, on the other hand, people spend too much of their time fighting organizational boundaries, infighting & broken processes. They are not even clear on what their jobs are, so there is no way to know if they are getting the job done or not." Ben Horowitz, "…