After eight years with the same company, I spent the last sixteen months with several.
For those of you interested in Agile software development in NY I can tell you first hand that there is work.
The best opportunities exist for people who can demonstrate they get it — not just the practices but the values behind the practice.
And the best way to find opportunities is to work alongside people who are good at what they do and earn their respect and trust.
Trying to gather what I can from Bob Woodward’s column in the NYTimes, 10 Take Aways From the Bush Years. Basic management advice extracted the hard way from the record of our first MBA president. Among the lessons:
Here’s to competence, experience, courage and tremendous luck.
It’s my final day on the Big Island after HICCS-42.
Unfortunately, I was a ghost at the conference. I spent most of the week tightly tethered to my East Coast work day. Much sleep deprivation, anxiety and coffee consumption.
I did see the Agile/Lean presentations chaired by Jeff Sutherland and Gabrielle Benefield and participated in the Ethics sessions in which I presented my paper. These were the main reasons I took this very expensive non-vacation and so I’m grateful for how things worked out.
Sounds like there may be an Ethics minitrack again next year. Apparently, this is a relatively unique thing in IT conferences academic or professional and an indication of why HICSS is such an unusual event.
The conversation around my paper may have sparked research interest. My “ask” of the largely academic audience was:
We need all hands on deck. We need to learn from other, more established disciplines. We need better data gathered with greater rigor and without the coda of a sales pitch.
How can we build software with consideration for benefit and harm as well as business value in the interests of society and our users as well as our employers and stakeholders?
How do we evolve from head count to the engineers/craftspeople we need to become?
A December episode of This American Life starts with an interview with Will Felps.
He placed college students on teams with an actor alternately playing a “jerk, slacker, and depressive”.
The “bad apple” not only wrecked the team’s performance, the other members began to think and act like him.
Here’s a Google book preview of Will Felps’ paper, How, When and Why Bad Apples Spoil the Barrel: Negative Group Members and Dysfunctional Groups