Cory Foy has posted on JoS that his company is moving to a system of forced ranking, where each employee is classified as an A, B or C performer. (Aside: This practice is known as Differentiation and was famously used by Jack Welch during his tenure as the CEO of…
Christopher Hawkins
Andy Budd really gets it. Andy recently wrote a brief article entitled 10 Bad Project Warning Signs, and it is spot-on. Reading the article, I felt as though Andy had opened his mouth and my words came out – I identified with his article that strongly. I feel that Andy’s…
I’ve told you once, and I will tell you 1,000 times more in my career: if you are not 100% unavailable for at least 2 hours a day, you probably aren’t getting much done that’s of any importance. Although I not-so-famously disagreed with Jason Fried on the issue of functional…
Since I’m constantly writing about what developers do wrong, it seems only fair to address problem clients as well. I recently had to terminate my business relationship with a couple of clients, and a couple more may be on the way. I know I’m not the only one, so perhaps…
Revised on 13 May, 2015 I found a good post about functional specs when I was reading Ian landsman’s blog this morning. Ian notes the different opinions on whether or not writing functional spec is a good idea – one camp claiming that spec is purely a political appeasement move,…
Having a great conversation with Val the C# Gal, thought I’d share. So, Christopher . . . Not to back you into a corner, but if you had your druthers, how small would you like projects broken up? A month of requirements gathering, followed by a month of spec writing,…
In my self-appointed role as an effectiveness fanatic, I often ponder the process of setting goals for a project, or for my personal life. Setting goals is tough. “Wait a minute” you think. “What’s tough about goal setting? You state a desired outcome, and BAM! You have your goal. Right?”…
2004 has come and (nearly) gone. I can’t say I’ll miss it much. Not that 2004 was a bad year – but it was a trying year. Growing a business is hard, solitary work sometimes. I’m starting to see my company’s growth curve start to take off, and I am…
Not too long ago, a hard drive failed in my primary dev machine. It turned out that although I had been backing up most of my important files, I had not been backing them all up. Net result? The fruits of about $50,000 worth of my labor was gone. That…
I just read an interesting message posted by Pi Guy on Joel Spolsky’s site. This fellow works as a developer but does not like any of the non-coding aspects of his job: I’m a “programmer” at a small web development company. We do web design, asp/asp.net/sql server applications. I generally…