A few months back, I wrote a post on various “Astounding Sayings” that I’ve encountered in my career in information technology. It turns out that it’s been one of the more popular posts I’ve written, judging from page views, so in true Hollywood fashion, it must be time for a sequel. I am retitling it […]
Here’s a disquieting little secret that few of us ever really acknowledge, maybe because it’s rather painful and also an unavoidable part of the fabric of our existence in IT. I don’t know how to say it more eloquently (or less bluntly), so here goes: being in information technology is hard. In our day-to-day […]
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 […]
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), […]
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 […]
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 […]
One area where I feel I’ve learned and grown in my career is achieving a much clearer understanding on how to communicate with upper management. Most advice along these lines tends towards simply warning against overuse of technobabble, and I can’t disagree with that. But there’s a lot more to successful communication than simply […]
Sally McKenzie, with whom I worked when I was CTO at Classmates Online, writes a fine e-commerce-oriented blog that I read regularly. So I was especially pleased when Sally asked me to guest-contribute, via a back-and-forth interview format, on the subject of how IT folks and Marketing people can work better together. Not […]