Have you ever noticed that pretty much anyone, when looking at something for the first time, or joining a project or new effort, seems to always think it is a big mess? And probably needs fixing, perhaps even a complete throwaway and rewrite? I have a running joke that I frequently use, along these lines. […]
Sometimes, you have to work with people that aren’t nice, that are just really, really hard to work with. I try to be self-aware enough to know that it is frequently me. I’m not always an easy person to get along with. I used to be really bad at interrupting people so I got in […]
When you’re in a leadership or management position, being “nice” and being pleasant to work with can be an interesting balancing act. When I have studied management theory and leadership in a formal training or classroom setting, it seems like most modern education leans towards “Beta” leadership, i.e. influence and consensus building, instead of the […]
I am occasionally asked for career advice by people wanting to get into the industry, for example, high-schoolers deciding on career choices. One situation that frequently comes up in this situation is people who love programming and want to get a job being a programmer. They ask, “How can I get a job as a […]
So as I mentioned a few months ago, I’d made a concerted effort to regularly author blog posts. But, all excuses aside, I was impacted by the hurricane last week and didn’t get a blog post written. Now, to be honest, I’m always a couple of blog posts ahead and I’ve authored a couple of […]
In the past few weeks, I’ve written about engineering management using landscaping as an analogy. I’ve really enjoyed it, so here’s another one. In my last blog post, I talked about Unsolvable Problems, that is, problems that don’t have any easy or good solution. Following up on another post where I talked about Training vs […]
In the past, I’ve studied and attended training specifically for systems engineering and project management, and in both cases, I was struck by an interesting concept, which is that many of the challenges faced by these two roles and disciplines don’t really have good solutions. This ended up being something I encountered again and again in my roles […]
The other day I wrote about executing engineering projects, using landscaping projects as an analogy. I really liked it and realized I wanted to write more about it. In my experience, a frequent issue that managers and leaders encounter is not understanding the difference in training and experience. In fact, I’ve seen many managers and leaders not know […]
I heard a term fairly recently, and I love it. That term is single-threaded. If you search for this term on the Internet you’ll mostly hear about it in the context of software process execution or CPU execution, where only one task or command is worked on at a time. But I’m not talking about computer […]
Image by Barrie Taylor from Pixabay Once upon a time, a company was hired to do some landscaping. There was a large yard, and when meeting with the customer the only user story given was, “Make this backyard look pretty!” OK, easy enough. The landscaping company had done these hundreds of times before. They had the […]
