My software career path has been a planned affair for many years. It started out as a happy accident with some exposure to a very early internet startup and an opportunity to build out a few web sites. It only took a few months to determine I really liked doing web development and I [...]
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Everyone relishes the confidence of a having a backup plan if everything falls apart. For myself as a manager it was knowing I could always go back to development if something unexpected came up. After 10 years as a development manager, I got the unfortunate call to follow my director to an unannounced meeting first [...] As a new manager recruiting for the first time you’ll find HR will usually provide you with a job description template. You’ll read it, laugh at how generic it is, and then try to do a bit of modification. That’s a futile effort. (Though depending on the organization you may have to leave pretty [...] I came across a note of mine from last year on my baseline expectations for developers: All code is checked into source control on an hourly basis or at most daily. Every project has an automated build. (Maven, Ant) All projects are setup in continuous integration (Hudson) All code follows the current Java/Groovy coding [...] Not too long ago a local recruiter noted at a JUG meeting: “I don’t care what else you have on your resume, but you have to have Spring and Hibernate. I know it was all EJB and SOA just a few years ago, but now if you don’t have Spring/Hibernate you’re not getting past [...] I know you wonder why developers come charging into the help desk right after you’ve delivered the sparkling new machine with 8GB of RAM, dual monitors and a quad core processor. They start babbling about how they need admin access or you might as well give them there old Pentium 4 box so they [...] Land the Tech Job You Love turned out to be a good read full of actionable advice for job seekers who just happen to be techies. It covers everything from creating three versions of your resume to preparing a portfolio of work products to take with you to the interview. All of this is good [...] As a hiring manager the world has gotten easier with respect to getting some independent information on a given developer candidate. For many years now I’ve taken to doing a bit of googling for any candidate that passed the initial resume screening test. Back in the early to mid 2000s this search often didn’t [...] About half my career has been inside professional service firms. The work has quite a few perks and you’re constantly pushed to learn new things. Having spent quite a bit of time within IT departments as a manager I did sometimes missed the wealth of different clients and projects you’re exposed to as a [...] Unit testing is a practice that takes years to sink in. For many the first experience with the green/red bar is interesting, but not life altering. Maybe it was just a quick demo. They go back to the normal debugging patterns in the IDE or with printing output to the terminal. They try testing [...] |
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