The Accidental Boss

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Showing posts from 2019

Tired: 10x Developers. Wired: 10x ENVIRONMENTS.

image: the mythological 10x developer, caught in its natural habitat. A 10x developer thread blew up on Twitter over the weekend. A startup/disrupter posted their tips on how to find the mythological 10x engineer and what massive rewards your organization will reap by having one. Unfortunately, their "tips" only amounted to the perpetuation of a very different type of engineer: one who can't mentor, can't be bothered to attend a meeting, knows only code (to the detriment of all other soft skills), and will insist on doing things the right way...aka their way. In short, it was a list of attributes that described a toxic developer. After having slung code for two decades...and am now charged with leading my own team of developers...here is the harsh truth of the matter: If you want to build a team of highly productive developers, focus on building a 10x environment . Build knowledge sharing into your process, so your team is actively invested in educa...

One Simple Trick To Combat Date-Driven Development

Nothing sucks worse than a company touting itself as "Agile" while failing to adhere to Agile philosophy. It's easy to spot - just pick any leader from your organization and ask them to recite one of the core values of the Agile Manifesto . Yeah, sure, let me just go grab the CEO and put him on the spot. That'll work wonders for my career. Good point. That's not exactly the smartest political move in the book. Besides, there's a far easier way to tell, especially if you're on the receiving end of task- or project-requests. Simply pop that email open and scan for the tell-tale signs of a fake Agile mentality: everything is framed around time. Any of these ring a bell? "We really need this review quickly ." "Any chance you can push this out today? " "The team is looking to have this all wrapped up by next Wednesday ." So much for the sprint, right? But even if you're using Kanban instead of Scrum (ostensibly a...

Sad Stories

How are you measuring the quality of your product management? Is it: How accurately you adhere to Scrum? How close your velocity matches your SLO? The number of bugs fixed in this sprint? None. of. this. matters. A surface level review of these metrics would seem to matter to folks desperate to boast about their Agile compliance, while failing to remember the first edict of the manifesto : Individuals and interactions over processes and tools A recent tweet reminded of this: Wow! I reported a unicode issue affecting URLs to 2 different commercial software companies. One responded in 4 days indicating it'll be fixed in a yet-to-be released new version (which requires more $$$); the other provided a working patch in less than 3 hours. — James Moberg (@gamesover) June 18, 2019 While I can't comment on what specific bottleneck is separating these two companies, I understand (all too well) the side-effect of throwing everything into a Scrum bucket. Af...