Home > Work > Managing Humans: Biting and Humorous Tales of a Software Engineering Manager
101 " Panic backs a person into a corner and their only means of getting out of that corner is relying on skills that have worked for them in the past. "
― Michael Lopp , Managing Humans: Biting and Humorous Tales of a Software Engineering Manager
102 " The founders changed their pitch. “We’ll just create copies of the software in our data center! We’ll save money keeping our bits close to home!” No huge difference there? Wrong. This adjustment to our pitch changed the fundamental architecture of our product. Rather than have hundreds of customized versions of our software sitting in various data centers, we had to have one copy of our software that was configurable to each of our customers’ needs, and that wasn’t the product we designed. "
103 " Kahn’s thinking regarding “barbarians” was prescient. It not only partially inspires agile and other lightweight software development methods, but it also reinforces a theme big companies are often unintentionally trying to forget: hacking is important. "
104 " Show me all the wow for the last week”? That report alone is enough incentive for me try to remember to record my wow among all my twitchy saving. "
105 " A healthy product company is, confusingly, one at odds with itself. It has a healthy part that is attempting to normalize and to create predictability, but it needs another part that is tasked with building something new that is going to disrupt and eventually destroy that normality. "