51–60 of 322 posts
Always keep records of what you've said and agreed, people will have a different recollection of events down the line, and a written record is very handy at that point.
Open office plans, culture fits, promotions, etc. are disguised financial terms made by someone in business. Open office means they're trying to save money, culture fit means "how often will you listen to me" and promotion means "up or out"
The quickest way to shut someone up or shut someone down, is to provide them with numbers and facts corroborate by 2+ other people.
How to successfully roll out a product/site. Released "Version 2" which was an entire newly built system that we worked on for an entire year (we also thought we were "agile" btw). This completely crashed and around 10K users were unable to use the product for almost 2 weeks. We did plenty of things right but we also failed. Biggest Lessons learned: 1. Release features and changes in manageable incremental chunks 2.…
It werks
There are (at least) 3 sides to exercise: Strength, Cardio, and Stretching. They are each at least as important as the others. Go to the dentist. Even if you have great teeth.
2. Don't do premature optimizations / Measure before optimizing
3. Keep your cool when asked for estimates for something with unknown requirements / unknown team. Losing your mind or temper is never worth it.
4. Beware of the silver bullet new framework, right tool for the right job, avoid they hype on one hand and learn to move on when a technology dies out. (Hi Flash/VB/Cobol/Mainframe developers, I know you still have job security for a few years... but not forever...)
If you can't honestly answer that with "yes" you are either accommodated, or running risks higher than you realize.
The good thing is that once you get the grip of it you feel invincible. All the fear and the doubt you used to have while building a product disappear because now you know how to approach clients, and if you're smart enough you won't even start building a product without first having some feedback from potential clients.
Make things pretty. No amount of hard work and usefulness can amount to a beautiful product. I have strong feelings about Lean Startup who told me to create a MVP, which made me look like an amateur. So, listen to the marketing people and wait to release a beautiful finished product.
Seen way too may times where stuff was rewritten to look better but usability suffered.
Case in point: Walmart recently redid their self checkouts. The new system looks a lot better and I like it if it did not take 3 times as long to pay. It even took forever compared to the old one to register cash being inserted. And there were several complete lockups.
Recently it seems better so I believe they have been working on the back end but for a while I would not even touch them