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After holding the survey open a bit longer than planned plus a few delays in data collection, I’m excited to share the results of the State of Work Survey for June 2020. To everyone who provided input, thank you. I’m not going to restate the entire report here. I’ll give a few topline findings. For everything else, I’ll point you to the PDF of the report. My recommendations based on the survey data are: Those recommendations are, of course, more fleshed out in the report. Conducting the survey and analyzing the results was enjoyable and informative for me. I hope… …read more…
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As anyone reading this in real-time knows, the world has looked different to most of us for the past couple of months. I’m curious what that means to everyone. For me, I started working for a pure-remote company last August, so I had very few work-related changes. On the other hand, I experienced social and family changes. No gatherings, stores and restaurants closed, and most impactful of all, schools closed. That means my kids got to be distance learners, and my wife got to be a distance educator. Obviously, my experience isn’t typical. Realistically, nobody’s experience is typical. And that’s… …read more…
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[This article was originally posted in 2020 on the now-gone Digital Solutions blog.] Swapping out the database layer of an application is rarely easy. It’s even less easy when you’re also changing the storage paradigm (say, from a document database to a relational database). It’s even less easy when you run into peripheral snags. But I’ll come back to that. At H.I. Digital Solutions (DS), we do our best to deliver a steady stream of business value. We try to limit our work-in-progress (WIP) and slice our tasks as small as we can while making sure each one delivers business… …read more…
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[This article was originally posted in 2019 on the now-gone Digital Solutions blog.] Processes are vital to modern organizations. Imagine you were asked to help improve an organization, and found that it had zero defined processes. You’d almost certainly start by implementing a process or two, then by wondering how in the world they got along without any processes. Pre-modern organizations likely had their own processes as well. As organizations began to grow, ad-hoc behavior became less effective. So the Earl of Exampleshire might have decreed that “upon receipt of a request for a replacement sword, the Keeper of the… …read more…
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I’ve been thinking a lot about policies lately. About how they’re sometimes necessary and sometimes not. About don’t scar on the first cut and about how organizational scar tissue can spread to cover related areas of the organization. I’ve been thinking about the freedom of young companies with no policies, and about the freedom of ossified companies with a policy for everything. And about how to roll out policies as effectively as possible, and how to make unpalatable policy changes more palatable, and about how to make compliance easier, and about how to communicate policies to new members of an… …read more…
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“The new intern shows up next week.” You feel excited and ready for that, right? I don’t know about most companies. I’m guessing most people are happy to have an extra worker around. And most probably don’t know exactly what they’re going to do with their new intern. Want to know what to do? Yeah, I can’t tell you. But I can tell you what I do, and why. Interns, as Joel wrote a long time ago, are a great way to get really good software engineers. That’s the number one reason for an intern program. The number two reason… …read more…
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One of my former interns, an excellent engineer, is working at a company that is transitioning to agile. He asked for some readings and resources I’d recommend. This got a bit longer than a few links, so I decided to turn it into an article instead of a direct message. Without further ado, my recommended resources (and steps to take with them) for a team or company transitioning to Agile. That’s good theory and a few resources for reference. I mentioned we’d come back to functional specs, and it’s about that time. First, a caution. Caution: Organizations adopt Scrum for… …read more…