Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips When confronted with a difficult situation with a difficult customer, it is often better to step back and ask a few fundamental questions. The setting: I am a developer. I am building a system for a customer. The work is going poorly. We seem to make progress on some days, but most […]

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by Dwayne Phillips I encourage managers and other influence-rs to speak to their colleagues in the place where the colleagues are most comfortable. I encourage managers and other to speak with each of their colleagues. I find two points here: First, speak to your colleagues everyday. If nothing special is happening, talk about “the weather.” […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Often it is better to let people watch a game show at work while they eat lunch. Here is a sad but true story. In the early 1990s I worked in a big computing laboratory. At one end of the multi-thousand-square-foot facility we had a “conference” room. This room had a sink, […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Sometimes the arrangement of furniture in an office is far more important than a first glance indicates. Once upon a time, I worked in an organization that moved into some office spaces that were previously occupied by another organization. We inherited their office furniture and their arrangement of office furniture. In the […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Being a computer programmer does not make me a software engineer. Deep sigh before I begin. This is yet another post borne of frustration in talking with recruiters and hiring managers. Now that the sigh is out of the way. A computer programmer is not a software engineer. There. Wrote that bit. […]

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by Dwayne Phillips I encourage managers and other influence-rs to speak to their colleagues in the place where the colleagues are most comfortable. I encourage managers and other to speak with each of their colleagues. I find two points here: First, speak to your colleagues everyday. If nothing special is happening, talk about “the weather.” […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Sometimes projects “lose their way.” Of course that is impossible as what really happens is that people come and go and change their minds. In government, we had a phrase about projects that seemed to go forever and consume every penny in sight and produce nothing: They lost their way Some of […]

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by Dwayne Phillips This is fundamental project manager advice. Avoid at your peril. I’ve managed a lot of technical projects. These projects employed engineers, programmers, scientists, administrators, and so on. One thing I’ve learned is: People tend to keep their work to themselves. Hmm. So how is the working progressing? These people won’t come to […]

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by Dwayne Phillips One of the worst things to do in many situations is to try really, really hard. One of the best pieces of advice I received from author and consultant Jerry Weinberg is: Don’t try so hard I have to force myself to remember this when I find myself staring at something and […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Sometimes the best use of time is wasting it and the most wasteful use of time is working hard. Here is a story I heard many years ago: Story Two computer programmers came to work. They both worked hard and programmed for six straight hours to the point of exhaustion. The first […]

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