Recently in Management Category

Nothing more than a link to the question on stackoverflow.com. Worth a read by anyone who's in, or going to be, development management.

I found shipitontheside.com recently and more specifically the entry Three Stupid Software Startup Mistakes, and knew that I had to pass comment on it.

Every. Single. Word. Is. True.

Except for the title.

I initially wrote this post with the title "Three Stupid Startup Mistakes", revised down from shipit's title, then revised it down further to "Three Stupid Mistakes" as above as they really do apply to any company, whether software producing or not, startup or not. I've seen all three in companies of varying sizes.

The Development Abstraction Layer - Joel on Software

This really made me smile, particularly the quote "Management's primary responsibility to create the illusion that a software company can be run by writing code, because that's what programmers do. And while it would be great to have programmers who are also great at sales, graphic design, system administration, and cooking, it's unrealistic. Like teaching a pig to sing, it wastes your time and it annoys the pig." -- comparing developers to pigs, well that might stretch the analogy a bit, but still it is a good analogy.

Heather Leigh of Microsoft has an interesting few words to say regarding hiring for potential. Well, most of the article isn't directly about hiring for potential, but it's the bit that caught my eye.

When recruiting for my team, I've very infrequently looked solely at academic results. In fact, one of my recent candidates had a 2:1 Oxbridge degree, but was very ropey in the interview, got 9/30 on the aptitude test and didn't have that "spark" either. So, qualifications aren't everything.