I ran across this on Flickr today. It made me smile.
Caught on Flickr!
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Young IT Workers Hard to Hold
Young IT workers disillusioned, hard to hold, survey says
I’m amused that the woman interviewed in this article thinks that the solution to the problem of retaining IT workers is for the workers to change their expectations. I wish her good luck with that. If you would like to find some more realistic ways to improve retention, come out the January Engineering Managers Support Group meeting.
Engineering Managers Support Group – January Meetup
Retaining Key Contributors: What Works…
Retaining key employees can make the difference between success and failure. This month we will examine what works, and what doesn’t work, when it comes to retention. Have an opinion? Some insight gained from experience? Join us on Wednesday, January 23rd. We will be starting a half-hour earlier, at 6:30 PM. We will once again enjoy the hospitality of Rearden Commerce, as they provide us with great facilities and tasty food. Rumor has it that we will be enjoying some fine Middle Eastern cuisine this month!
A Helicopter, a Bejillion Volts, and a Faraday Cage
Sometimes I wonder if I should find another line of work. You know, something a bit more thrilling…
Navigating Performance Reviews
A struggling young cruise line offers a cruise from London, bound for Miami. At the very beginning of each trip, the captain and the two helmsmen make a navigational plan for the voyage. It appears that a straight line, southwest along a compass heading of 220 degrees, will get them to Miami. They plot their course on a chart and file it away, eager to get on to the real work of sailing the ship.
The helmsmen work alternating 12-hour shifts watching the compass closely and adjusting the rudder any time it moves away from their heading of 220 degrees. The work is grueling, but the helmsmen are diligent.
Agile Estimates, Release Planning, Sprints, and Kanban
Karl Scotland has an interesting post over on the Agile Practitioners Forum. He describes how and why his team moved to a Kanban system.
Engineering Managers Support Group – New and Improved!
The The Bay Area Engineering Managers Support Group is celebrating our six month anniversary. Things have been good, and they are about to get even better…
Joel on Software… Demos
Joel has a good post on doing software demos. High points include:
- Tell stories!
- ‘Accidentally’ bump into all the nice little “fit and finish” features of your product
If you really want to get serious about doing a great sales demo, check out Peter Cohan.
My First Week at Geekaplex: Integrating a New Hire
My friend Peter started working at EvilEmpireSoft on the same Monday that I started at Geekaplex. That Friday, over beers, he told me that he had spent most of his first week waiting for his laptop to show up. When it finally showed up, it had an outdated version of the development environment installed which couldn’t compile the code he was supposed to be working on. On top of that, Outlook was misconfigured and wouldn’t even think about connecting to the mail server. He spent an afternoon figuring out the configuration only to discover that his email account hadn’t been activated yet! “It’s as if they were surprised when I showed up for work on Monday. Maybe they forgot that they hired me? I spent the first morning waiting in HR until someone was available to give me paperwork to fill out. After that,” he went on, “I spent the afternoon wandering around looking for an empty cube to claim.”
What Makes Agile Projects Succeed (or fail)? – Code Camp
Approximately 30 people came together Sunday morning to examine the question: “What makes agile projects succeed (or fail)?” This was one of my sessions at Silicon Valley Code Camp 2007, an open space conference that had over 900 registrants.
We generated and clarified almost 50 success or failure factors. Next the whole group participated in ranking the factors into tiers, from most important to least important. Dot voting was used to allow each participant’s experience to count equally, resulting in a result that reflects the collective wisdom of the group present. We managed to do all of this in less than an hour and a half! To learn more about the process and how to use it, click here.