The Key to Success for your Next Job Interview

I'm been clipping some interesting posts over the past few weeks, regarding interviewing techniques and hiring technical people. Rothman's aptly named blog is always good for an insightful article at least once a week - some of the recent postings of note include: A good technical person should always be intellectually curious about how things work. This translates into wanting (demanding!) to understand "the stack", as I call it - the technology pieces from the top (ex. PHP in my…

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A stunningly direct list, suitable for self-evaluations at year end

via Rothmann (who got it from Lester) - MacLeod's list (from the prolific Wade) ... The Career Manifesto (original here) Unless you’re working in a coal mine, an emergency ward, or their equivalent, spare us the sad stories about your tough job. The biggest risk most of us face in the course of a day is a paper cut. Yes, your boss is an idiot at times. So what? (Do you think your associates sit around and marvel at your…

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The “Army Rangers” model for IT Professionals

I got a chance to read over some Gartner predictions for 2006 (available $ online). One that struck me said that the job market for IT specialists will shrink 40 percent by 2010. Hey, that's only a few years away! The article makes the point that "... IT people ... must have the capacity to move fluidly and effortlessly into multiple projects, disciplines, and processes." I like to cite, as an excellent illustration of this idea, the movie Black Hawk…

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I have nothing to say and I am saying it and that is poetry

(attrib) I was in a meeting yesterday - first time with this particular group of folks, all at same time, on this topic, although I had already established a working relationship with all. Anyway, subject matter was one that most of them had talked about at length over the past few weeks, but I was a new addition to the mix. Suffice it to say, I didn't have too much to add to the conversation, not until the very end…

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Motivating Maintenance Programmers

Interesting conversation today with one of my application managers. As we move into the new year, we're doing some "spring cleaning" of the older projects in our PMO. Two from last summer had languished - efforts to develop simple web front ends for order inquiry and dealer information - and I asked my lead web developer to audit them (make sure we've got source code under version control, check out the tech architecture for the supporting database, etc.) before "closing"…

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