The Mindset

Dear CEO,
What do your people feel when they wake up in the morning and have to go to work? Is it something like “I wish I could just wake up when the weekend starts”, or is it more like “oh well, I guess I have no choice, do I”? Or is it something completely different?
You […]

One of the things I hated as a teenager was being told I should grow up already. Whenever I was told that, my immediate reaction was “You don’t understand anything. YOU grow up!”. Undoubtedly a typical reaction for a teenager. Not to say an immature reaction, which is what got me that far in the […]

A car is a wonderful tool. It can get you from one place to another quite effortlessly (well, assuming the two places are within reasonable distance). For most of us, cars are cost-effective and convenient. They serve their purpose amazingly well, at least until some higher form of transportation emerges.
There’s a lot to consider when […]

What do police officers, vultures, hunters, guards, predators, and cleaning people, have in common? And what they are all doing in my blog?

[Warning: not too good metaphor ahead] When I was a teenager, I thought all teachers have one purpose in life: to hunt me! And guess what, all my friends felt pretty much the […]

Well, it has been three days since my Hiring Great Developers? post. During this time an interesting discussion took place both on this blog as well as on others. I usually try to respond to most of the comments posted here, but this time I’ve decided to step back and let the discussion roll. Now […]

When I started reading Steve Yegge’s latest article I was optimistic. The title sounded promising. The quote from Wikipedia was great. And the arguments against the Agilism religion were well articulated. The first couple of pages were really a great read.
Then, as I began to read Steve’s description of “the Google experience”, my enthusiasm started […]

Here’s a pop-quiz: what do [take a long breath] Agile, Peer Reviews, JUnit, Pair Programming, SCRUM, velocity charts, burn-down charts, Bugzilla, Subversion, lint, ClearCase®, RequisitePro®, ClearQuest®, RUP, UML, MDA, TDD, BDD, XP, ISO, CMM, and (my personal all-time favorite) Refactoring have in common?
OK now, let’s see. If you found it easy to come up with […]

There’s a huge gap between how software development is discussed in books, articles, blogs, and forums, and the way software companies actually run their R&D operations. It’s as if we live in two parallel universes. In one universe most of us know exactly what we should do to develop better software – software that has […]

Many companies face a motivation problem. Some of them are aware of the problem, which is, of course, a good start. But even these companies often tend to sweep the problem under the carpet. They don’t really ignore the problem. They just try to solve it using the easiest possible solution — a solution that never works. […]

Whenever I talk with managers about office politics I get this apologizing, yet sometimes accusing, look saying: “What can we do? If you’re not a politician around here you do not exist”. And this is probably the case. Managers have to be politicians to do their job well. Is that bad?
Politicians are generally not highly […]