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And then, as I told you in the introduction, we all quit. And they were left with a real crisis on their hands. They had to hire a new batch of programmers to try to
deal with the huge stream of issues coming from the customer.
His intimidations made it difficult for him to hear the truth.
our team lead should not have caved in to the Friday demand.
Professionals speak truth to power. Professionals have the courage to say no to their managers.
Slaves are not allowed to say no.
Laborers may be hesitant to say no.
But professionals are expecte...
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the hard decisions are best made through the confrontation of adversarial roles.
One wonders if he’s not going to simply report back to his boss that the customer demo will have to be postponed because of Paula. That kind of passive-aggressive behavior is morally reprehensible.
My experience is that the why is a lot less important than the fact.
Providing too much detail can be an invitation for micro-management.
The higher the stakes, the more valuable no becomes.
“Firing me isn’t going to change the estimate, Charles.”
A team player is not someone who says yes all the time.
Mike: “You could work overtime.” Paula: “That just makes us go slower, Mike. Remember the mess we made last time we mandated overtime?”
Mike was playing on a team of one. Mike is for Mike. He’s clearly not on Paula’s team because he just committed her to something she explicitly said she couldn’t do.
The word try has many definitions. The definition I take issue with here is “to apply extra effort.” What extra effort could Paula apply to get the demo ready in time? If there is extra effort she could apply, then she and her team must not have been applying all their effort before. They must have been holding some effort in reserve.1
The promise to try is an admission that you’ve been holding back, that you have a reservoir of extra effort that you can apply.
By promising to try you are promising to change your plans. After all, the plans you had were insufficient.
Most of the time we want to say yes.
every feature a client asks for will
always be more complex to write than it is to explain,
They will always want more features.
The clients, despite their protestations, despite their apparent urgency, never care as much as you do about the app being on time.
John is the one who worked 20-hour days and 90-hour weeks.
What we all have to realize is that saying yes to dropping our professional disciplines is not the way to solve problems.
There are three parts to making a commitment. You say you’ll do it. You mean it. You actually do it.
Your boss wanders into the room and mumbles, “we have to move faster.” And you know he really means YOU have to move faster. He’s not going to do anything about it.
There are very few people who, when they say
something, they mean it and then actuall...
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You can only commit to things that you have full control of.
Years of experience have taught us that breaking disciplines only slows us down.
Professionals are not required to say yes to everything that is asked of them.
Being able to sense your errors is really important.
Don’t write code when you are tired. Dedication and professionalism are more about discipline than hours.
Avoid the Zone.
There is a physiological change that takes place when you work with someone.
For some reason software developers don’t think of debugging time as coding time.
Software development is a marathon, not a sprint.
Woe to the poor developer who buckles under pressure and agrees to try to make the deadline.
overtime will certainly fail if it goes on for more than two or three weeks.
Therefore you should not agree to work overtime unless (1) you can personally afford it, (2) it is short term, two weeks or less, and (3) your boss has a fall-back plan in
case the overtime eff...
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If your boss cannot articulate to you what he’s going to do if the overtime effort fails, then you shou...
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It is unprofessional to remain stuck when help is easily accessible.
programmers tend to be arrogant, self-absorbed introverts.
But the reality is that programmers do not tend to be collaborators.6 And yet collaboration is critical to effective programming.
Nothing can bring a young software developer to high performance quicker than his own drive, and effective mentoring by his seniors.
The bottom line is that TDD works, and everybody needs to get over it.
