From the monthly archives:

October 2007

Nightmares before Halloween: bad dreams of the CTO/CIO

October 31, 2007

In honor of the season, I thought I’d share a few recurring nightmares, ones that unfortunately don’t seem to confine themselves to the fall time frame. All of these are chronic worries that have truly kept me up at night; most of them stem from actual real-life situations I’ve encountered.
1. Your CEO calls you [...]

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The agony and the agony: firing an employee

October 24, 2007

This may be the hardest posting to write so far, but it is a necessary bookend to my other recent posts about hiring. It’s hard to write because actually firing anyone is hard: it’s emotional and full of moments of self-doubt, before and after. And I can only scratch the surface of the [...]

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A team-oriented approach to making good hires

October 11, 2007

I made two really bad hiring decisions in a row a few years back, and I have to admit that it shook me for a while. I won’t go into details about why these two hires were horrendous (although I should note that the problem was not because the requisite technical skills were lacking), [...]

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Hiring and firing: an example of a stellar employee

October 7, 2007

I plan to make a couple of posts surrounding the very thorny issue of hiring (and firing) IT staff. To start off, here’s a recommendation letter I wrote a couple of years ago, at the request of a former employee. It shows at least one executive’s (i.e., my own) view of what matters [...]

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Career tips for the CTO/CIO path

October 2, 2007

One of the most frequent questions I’ve gotten after starting this blog pertains to how one can work up to the CTO or CIO role in IT. This isn’t all that easy to answer, other than with some platitudes. Every career is different; every individual takes a separate path. I can’t exactly [...]

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