Convincer Strategy

  A Convincer Strategy is how a person comes to believe something to be true. For some people, they need to see it with their own eyes.  For others, they need to hear something multiple times from multiple people before they believe it The convincer strategy has two parts. 1. Figure out what convinces someone, …

Maturity Level of Software Teams

  A software team can be at one of the following maturity levels: Chaotic Stage – the state where a team does not posses the skills, motives or vision to become a mature self managing team. Mid-Life stage – where a team possesses some skills for self management and decision making , and can make …

How to Think

  Thinking is as simply asking and answering questions.  If you want to improve your thinking, ask better questions.  Here are 3 thinking techniques: How Might That Be True When you hear something new, or information that conflicts with what you think you already know, ask yourself, "how might that be true?"  This simple question …

Career Growth

A brilliant software engineer may have the talent to become a great project manager but may also very likely make a piss poor project manager. It depends much more on your given talents than it does on how long you've done anything. Don't let yourself get 'promoted to your level of incompetence'. Instead, if you're …

Single most important thing to improve your programming career

The single most important thing you must do to improve your programming career is improve your ability to communicate. To program, you must elicit ideas from other people and share your ideas with them. Sharing ideas comes in many forms: explaining how you did something. Suggesting a new practice for the team. Demonstrating how something …

Active Listening

-  Keep your mouth closed (It's felt that if your mouth is open your ears will close). -  Keep eye contact (this helps with attention levels). -  “Listen” to the speaker’s body language. -  Put aside distracting thoughts. Don’t mentally prepare a rebuttal (counter argument) -  Acknowledgment can be something as simple as a nod …