A slightly silly history of leading programmers

Long, long ago in a place far, far away the Managers told people what to do. This seemed perfectly natural because the Managers were smarter and knew more than the Workers. Few Workers contested this, having been trained since infants by the…

The uneven distribution of onboarding

Onboarding might be defined as, “A process of experimentation necessary to learn the unspoken rules, expectations, and norms in a new environment.”

Never heard that before? I’m not surprised, as I just made it up. But, let me explain it.

On Minesweeper and bad hires

Hiring programmers is hard, expensive, and takes forever.

4 Surprising Effects of Programmer Specialization

Everyone’s talking about it, but no one’s doing it.

For the past five years, I’ve been helping engineering managers become better leaders, one at a time.

Thus far, I’ve adopted mostly a B2C approach: I sell leadership development products and services to managers who…

When they don’t know what to do, they’ll do what they know.

My team once took on Project X, which was vital to the department’s success.

We had quite a few other projects going on, so I paused the other projects so we all could focus on it.

Making Software Development Teams Hum with Ron Lichty

Episode 41

Is your team running so smoothly that it hums? In this episode of Programming Leadership, Marcus and his guest, Ron Lichty, discuss what makes high-performance teams versus what makes…

13 questions to get more feedback from your team

“No one can see their own back.”

Some of you wanted to know how to get more feedback from your team, so you don’t feel like you’re driving blind.

How Agile Work Actually Works with Allen Holub

Episode 44

How do organizations actually work with Agile? In this episode of Programming Leadership, Marcus and his guest, Allen Holub, discuss what organizations get wrong about Agile. Allen has been an Agile…