Wednesday, April 29, 2015

The Average Lifespan of a Crisis

Have you ever asked your team to kick it into high-gear for an extended period of time in order to meet some major challenge?  Let me guess what happened…
They rose to the challenge!   Everyone stayed motivated, focused, and maybe even put in some overtime!  Great strides were made towards completing the goals.  But then after a week or so, that high-gear began to slip.  All that motivation and focus dwindled away.  A few weeks later you looked back and wondered if the project was any farther along than it would have been if you had just kept the status-quo.  
How did I know?  Because it always works that way.  "Why," you ask?  Well, it’s not because all developers are lazy.  Allow me explain.

Thursday, April 9, 2015

Hiring by Personality-Type

As I have elaborated in some of my previous articles, the underlying personality of a developer should be of chief concern to you. Depending on the types of products that your team develops, you should have a desired ratio of personality-types among your engineers.  For instance, if you run a contracting service that develops websites for businesses, you will likely want a higher ratio of solution-providers on your team. If you develop pattern-recognition image-processing libraries, you likely want a higher ratio of puzzle-solvers.  Before hiring a new developer, you should seriously consider the type of developer of which you are currently most in need.