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 […]

Here’s a little party trick for true geeks. Take your company’s coding standards. Count the number of times an ‘_’ character appears in it. Multiply this number by the maximum number of lines allowed per function. Add the number of times the word “comment” is mentioned in the document. Divide the result by the number […]

A couple of days ago Kathy Sierra wrote about the difference between who companies say they want to hire and who companies actually want as their employees.
When I read Kathy’s post it sounded awfully familiar. Sure, I have seen the exact same phenomenon with my own eyes: companies allegedly looking for smart, innovative, independent people, […]

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 […]

Stop whatever it is you’re doing. There’s a new buzz in town.
In our ultra-dynamic industry, yesterday’s Holy Grail is today’s old news. A couple of days ago I wrote about Googlism as the new emerging religion, and what do you know, I’ve just discovered the signs of a new one, already creeping into blogs, articles, […]

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 […]

When I was a child, one of my favorite TV shows was The Time Tunnel. The concept of being able to go back in time and try to fix the things that went wrong fascinated me. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if someone from the future could come back and fix whatever it is we did wrong?
Maybe […]

We are always in a hurry! That’s what modern life is all about. Always trying to move faster, to make it first, or better still to make it now.
Somewhere along the way, we have forgotten that life (and business) shouldn’t be a race. It should be a journey. And like any other journey, we […]

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 […]