Management
There are 5 entries for the tag
Management
Aaron Lerch talks a bit about what it takes to be a technical manager. He enumerates five characteristics that he feels are essential for a technical manager (personally, I think that they are better classified as skills because they’re learnable and improvable). Here’s his five:
Communication
Technical Savvy
Organizational Skills
Priorities
Humility
It’s a good list for the good times, I think. As long as things run more or less smoothly, a manager with those traits will be in good...
In many companies developer career progression is deceptively straight-forward; Jr. Programmer, Programmer, Sr. Programmer, Team Lead, Architect, Sr. Architect, Bob (Bob being the semi-mythical entity referred to in obscure comments, worshipped by now-extinct aboriginal tribes, and rumored to haunt the sub-sub-basement).
The differentiation between these positions starts off with how much you know. A Sr. Programmer is a Jr. Programmer who knows his tools inside and out and can complete assigned tasks quickly and without a lot of supervision. Around Team Lead time, however, progression stops being about what you know and starts revolving around your ability to choose wisely...
I said yesterday that
The skill sets [of developers and QA people] aren't simply unrelated—they are, to an extent, opposed.
I think that deserves some explanation because for some reason this is not obvious even to people in IT.
The reason that developers and testers require fundamentally different skill sets is that they have fundamentally different responsibilities. What it comes down to is that it is a developer's job to make software work and it is a testers job to make "working" software break. In fact, I knew I had found the right QA Manager for XanGo when one of the first...
I wrote last month about winning arguments in IT. Earlier this week, Phil Haack asked a question (through Twitter) about things he could do to help convince a company to create an in-house QA department. Well, it turns out that I did exactly that at XanGo—successfully pushed for and oversaw the installation of an in-house QA department. I thought it might be a useful follow-up to the previous post to use this as an example of how I "won" that argument.
Concentrate on What is Best for the Company
This is the key, the whole key and nothing but the key to winning...
Have you ever found yourself in a situation where you know what's the best thing to do, but are unable to convince anyone else that you are right? Developers know that even simple problems have more than one solution. Developers who have worked on a team of more than one have probably been in a situation where they just knew that the team was heading in the wrong direction and that they had a solution that was more elegant, easier to program, and better to maintain.
Higher profile developers often find themselves trying to explain their solutions to non-technical people...