Simon Sinek gave a passionate explanation as to why he hates the term ‘Soft Skills’; A majority of experts surveyed were against the term; Even the U.S. Army has a problem with referring to leadership and communication skills as ‘Soft’.
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Category: Articles
Non-Technical Development Managers Are Like Head-Chefs Who Can’t See, Taste, or Smell
I have made no secret of the fact that that I find non-technical managers useless in the delivery of software, but today while recording a podcast, I realize they have another fatal flaw: they can’t evaluate the performance of their team.
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Email Is the Worst Form of Internal Communication
Email is the worst form of internal communication in common usage today. The only redeeming characteristic of email is to create proof that at some point in time, you tried to inform someone of something. In this way, it is very similar to its direct ancestor: paper mail delivered by the postal service, and it is just as obsolete. Unfortunately, as remote work has become an immediate necessity for millions of people worldwide, email has become a primary form of communication.
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Conference Call Sins: By Example
The following audio clips are examples of the most common mistakes people make during conference calls.
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Agile History: Kent Beck vs. Alan Cooper
It can be argued that Scrum is the compromise Beck and Cooper had such trouble reaching in the following interview. As the original website where this was posted no longer exists, I copied the contents from the Internet Archives and reformatted it to improve the reading experience.
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Defending “Never raise a problem without a solution”
I want to offer a soft rebuttal to the article The Problem with Saying “Don’t Bring Me Problems, Bring Me Solutions. By “soft” I mean to say that I do not disagree with the thesis, only some of the implied assertions. Bear in mind that critiquing “Implied assertions” can be deeply unfair in a work that is intended to be taken literally.
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The Danger of ‘The Dark Sage’
JP Ventura left an intriguing comment on The Sage that I’d like to explore:
Considering each coin has two sides, what would be the dark side (i.e., opposite) of the Sage?
What I find interesting about this question is the fact that I had not given much thought to the “dark side” of the 12 Underappreciated Developers. The Sage, in particular, can have several dark manifestations as ostensibly, they are supposed to be a benevolent master whose primary interest is helping the members of their team grow. If we look at someone who is pretending to act in a way that could be confused with The Sage but is, in fact, the opposite, we get something like this:
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The relationship between determining technical feasibility and productivity
This is an answer to a question asked by Ashvini Chaudhari in the “Agile and Lean Software Development” LinkedIn group:
Read More »Dear All , I m pursuing my PhD in Agile Software Engineering. I have a question regarding spike solution ” If we add spike in project development will it have effect on team velocity? and if yes what could be the parameters ? All the responses will be consider as a general opinion in my PhD thesis.
CoffeeScript is my Bullwhip
Define your problem before picking a solution
Our industry revels in coming up with solutions, but is quite poor at defining problems. This has resulted in an vast constellation of technological solutions, but with the majority of investment capital being centered around a small handful of banal consumer problems (Hailing Rides, Shopping Convenience, Entertainment, etc.) If we are to solve problems that are worth solving, we’re going to need to get better at defining our problems before we pick solutions.
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“Artificial Intelligence” is deeply disappointing, and so are we
The term “Artificial Intelligence” transitioned from Science Fiction to Product Marketing with very little time in-between to consider what exactly qualifies as “AI”. While tackling this definition has been done ad nauseam for hundreds of years, I believe that the modern definition of “AI” and those from Science Fiction are worlds apart. This is my attempt to bridge that gap.
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Why management will not change their open office layouts
The first study of how open offices affect communication has been conducted, and the results should not be that surprising. Open offices negatively impact productivity, and we’ve known that for a very long time.
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My response to “As a team lead how to handle project going off the rails?”
This is my response to a question posted on HackerNews.
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How important is code quality vs. getting things done?
Anyone who lacks the knowledge of how to build quality software, as well as the wisdom to know when code is good enough to ship, does not have the experiential background to have a valuable opinion on the code quality vs. getting things done debate.
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Are we working or playing?
Recently I’ve been talking to companies that want me to improve staff productivity. The opening conversation tends to be about the same: they pitch me on their company and what a “great place to work” it is. They brag about how smart the people are, how much fun everyone has, and how it’s more like a family that a bunch of co-workers. They describe all the perks like massages, video games, beer-on-tap, coffee bars, and how much everyone loves them. “Sounds like you have it all together,” I say after hearing all of this. “Well,” they reply, “I just wish we could get a bit more out of them.”
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My Response to “How to *never* complete anything”
The following is my response to Ewan Valentine’s blog post “How to never complete anything” that I discovered on Hacker News. Once again, I ask for people’s indulgence for posting a reply on my own blog rather than in the Hacker News comments. I find writing on my own blog a bit easier than wading into the surf that is the sea of many perspectives.
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My Response to “Are we over complicating software development?”
This question was posted on HackerNews by ian0:
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A Far Too Brief Rough Outline of How to Approach Single-Date Estimation
In my previous “An Attempt at a Pragmatic Framework for Defining a ‘Senior Engineer’”, in the “A Process to Estimate Work” section I said:
“It is beyond the scope of this post to describe everything that goes into making a good estimate, but suffice to say a senior engineer views estimates as a difficult challenge to be surmounted, and as a result will normally ask for dedicated time simply to come up with the estimates.”
A commenter asked that I write an article on estimation, and this is my feeble attempt to do so.
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An Attempt at a Pragmatic Framework for Defining a “Senior Engineer”
Brandon Hays’ article “The Conjoined Triangles of Senior-Level Development” made me reflect on all of the Senior Engineers I’ve worked with. If I were to guess, these would be the shared traits that lead others to declaring them “Senior Engineers”:
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