A recurring theme for my clients is knowledge transfer from one group to another. With these transfers’ regularity, one might expect a certain level of expertise in these transitions, but more often than not, they are full of challenges and surprises...

Often I wind up working with teams and managers who want to know more about how to get started with automated testing or realize their efforts are backfiring. For the last of those cases, it is almost always because they adopted the ice-cream anti-pa...

It winds up for almost everyone that you’ll have more than one job in your career. This is especially true in software development. For myself, I changed jobs nearly every single year! The shortest time I was at a company was five months, and the lon...

Ever wondered why you don’t get an interview at some companies? The answer is that your resume wasn’t good enough. In this article, I will take a few moments to explain why that is and a few things you can do to stand out more. The truth is that resu...

At some point, you’ll get a message from an external recruiter. Maybe it’ll be clever and have some Star Wars reference because all technical folk love Star Wars apparently. It might also be full of misspellings and so off-mark that you wonder why th...

Today the company that produces Basecamp and Hey released an announcement to the world about how they will be changing direction in their leadership and culture. If you want a sense of the response, listen to the podcast some of its employees produce...

It happens all too often that I’m working with teams that need to pick up a new set of tools while under delivery pressure. Often companies lean on phrases like, “We hired smart people,” as a way to excuse an absence of any support for the team to le...

You’ll inevitably hear some question that you don’t know the answer to during an interview. How you handle that moment can either leave the interviewer nodding in approval or unsure if you’re ready. Before I jump into how to handle this, I want to po...

Saucy title aside, I was thinking of various projects I’ve been on that had that extra bit of pressure on them. The kind where someone might lose their job if it fails. That led me to the topic of performance, not in the team sense, but instead of t...

Estimating projects, huge ones, seems to be an activity that causes groans and protests. I understand why. Often there’s a tension between accuracy and knowing that they can’t be accurate. When confronted with estimating a large body of work, I emplo...