career
The manager’s responsibility to review code
I believe any technical leader has a responsibility to review all the code that goes into a codebase.* I am certainly not the only person to feel this way (Joe Duffy as MSFT and Aras Pranckevičius as Unity have said the same). Furthermore, I don’t believe the responsibility to...
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What if Carl Sagan were a hack?
I was watching the first episode of Cosmos, and Neil deGrasse Tyson talked some about how stellar of a scientists Carl Sagan was and what an impact Carl had on Neil personally. Carl’s abilities were important for his advocacy, because a) it lent him credibility, and b) it allowed...
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“What did you learn?”
When something bad happens to someone (firing, demotion, bad review, big failure), it’s natural for managers to ask that person “what did you learn?“* Unfortunately the answer is rarely what a manager wants to hear, and it’s also largely useless.** Asking the question phrases it as the employee’s problem,...
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Removing external hiring as a tool (Part 3 of 3)
In this post I hope to explain how hiring externally as a tool for fixing problems ultimately leads to a weaker organization. When I began writing this post, I was having a hard time. Whereas the post talking about what a bad idea firing is was easy, the situation is...
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“Delighting customers” is Lean’s secret handshake
Whenever I see the words “delighting customers” (which is, let’s face it, an awkward phrase) in a non-Lean context like a job description, I can feel the author winking at me. It tells me “we try to be Lean and if you get our drift you probably want to...
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Removing firing as a management tool (Pt 2 of 3)
So in my last post, I wrote about the possibility of taking hiring and firing off the table as a management tool. In this post, I will focus on the firing. Firing itself has two halves: individual dismissal as a way to fix performance problems, or layoffs as a...
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Python Enrichment and PitP
When I was starting my job at CCP, I posted about some things I wanted to do as a lead. I've been through two releases with the Tech Art Group in Iceland (and for the past 6 months or so been the Tech Art Director here) and figured I'd...
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How wide are your interviews?
I’ve been a part of and interviewed at companies where the interview process was not just long but also very wide- people from different teams and departments interview a candidate. (ie, a Microsoft-style interview process) At my current company, our last two Art hires have had a much more...
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Is QA a good stepping stone?
I’ve always heard that it was difficult to move from QA into development (game design/programming/art/production). I thought this was smart- QA people should be there to be QA people, not doing a job only because they hope it would lead to something else. And at some companies, it works....
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How to deal with being a negative developer
There was a recent AltDevBlogADay post about Negative Developers and Team Stability that hit home. It’s not that I think the advice was particularly interesting (good, standard stuff), it’s that it reminded be that I’ve been a negative developer. I don’t know what I could have done differently. I just wasn’t...
