Savvy software comes from savvy people.
Recently, we talked about some of the day-to-day events in a company culture that’s headed in a bad direction. Now, it’s time to examine some of the positive day-to-day practices that send a company’s culture in the right direction.
I once talked about why your selection process gives advantages to some applicants based on ethnicity and gender. That post assumes that readers want to have a diverse workplace, but today I’d like to take a step back and look at why it’s important so that you have more ammo to talk about this with your managers, clients, and colleagues.
Dear Corporate Marketing People,
I get it. The Pride parade has a massive audience. Getting your name in front of that many people can boost your customer base and your recruiting efforts. Sponsor away.
But please do not cannibalize your company’s Diversity and Inclusion budget to do it, Because what you are doing is not allyship to the queer community.
Continue reading “Dear Corporations: Read this before you sponsor Pride”
Total compensation (or total comp) represents the quantified sum of what you get in exchange for working for a company. It includes more components than just your salary, and everyone recommends that you calculate this prior to changing jobs.
Continue reading “Advance Your Tech Career: A Guide to Evaluating Total Compensation”
You already wish you had more budget for custom code. An hour of a programmer’s time costs a lot; in some cases it approaches the hourly rate of lawyers. So if your programmers pair program, that cuts the amount of code your programmers crank out per hour in half...doesn’t it?
It doesn’t. This is why.
A few years ago, Seth Godin wrote this book called Linchpin. Among other things, the book suggests that you hoard relationships, knowledge, and context at your job so it’s impossible for the company to replace you.
People who read books like this presumably want to continue to grow, learn, and advance in their careers. In order to do those things, you’re much better off enabling other people to do everything you do.
A programmer might refer to this as deprecating yourself. It’s a critical leadership skill that you will need to build a tech team, rise through the ranks, or otherwise level up your tech career.
Continue reading “Advance Your Tech Career: Why make yourself replaceable, and how?”
Bertrand’s Health Insurance has a problem. Their software system is hard to maintain.
The systems still rely on tools that had their heyday in 1990. The SOAP API doesn’t always return valid XML. The search calls take twenty seconds to return.
Bertrand’s CTO and CIO decide that it’s time to rewrite the system from the ground up.
And you’re going to lead the team that will do it. Congratulations!
Continue reading “Leading a Software Rewrite at Your Company”
Congratulations! Your startup is taking off, or it’s time to accelerate the pace of your internal project or consulting work. It’s time to hire more people to join your team. You have chosen promising candidates, and they have accepted your offers. Now all you have to do is wait until their start dates…right?
Not necessarily. If you want to get your new team members up to speed as quickly as possible, you need a system for orienting those new team members to all the important context they need to do the best possible job for you.
You’re thrilled; tomorrow, you get to pair with the one developer on your team who really knows about iOS storyboards. Or you have an excellent mentor outside of work who can squeeze in an hour and a half pairing with you twice a month. How do you make sure that you walk away from these sessions having learned as much as you can?
Continue reading “Advanced Pair Programming: Learning From Your Pair”
