Management: Organization Size May Not Be As Important As You Think

I recently interviewed with a company who was looking for a senior engineering leader, and the conversation took a surprising turn, so I want to take a few minutes with you good folks and think about what makes a manager qualified to build or lead an organization of a certain size.

Posted by Howard Wednesday, October 12, 2022

The Win-Win of Mock Interviewing

Hosting new devs for mock interviewing provides development opportunities for both the interviewer and the interviewee.

Posted by Howard Tuesday, December 19, 2017

On Change and Career

Change is both inevitable and good - this includes career changes. However, in moments of decision, make sure you're balancing the short and long term.

Posted by Howard Thursday, September 7, 2017

Technology Divergence and Conway's Law

Conway's law is an observation that "Any organization that designs a system (defined broadly) will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization's communication structure". As a developer, it's easy to believe that this dynamic is the result of management decisions - however, sometimes the reality is more nuanced.

Posted by Howard Sunday, February 5, 2017

Reading List: Business and Management

I was asked by a colleague recently to share my backlog of business and management related books, so I wanted to share them with you as well.

Posted by Howard Tuesday, November 29, 2016

Growing Pains

If there’s one thing that I want for the 10 of you that read this blog (hi dad!), it’s that you know that I want to be as transparent as humanly possible with you - about both the successes and failures. I started with Concur as a development manager about a year ago and was promoted to director a few months ago. This is post is an update of what’s gone well, what hasn’t gone as well, and some areas where I’m not really sure whether what I’m observing is good or bad.

Posted by Howard Thursday, October 8, 2015

9 Months In - Reflections on Teams and Agile

I’ve been a dev manager now for about 9 months and I have to say that I’m really enjoying this role. It’s not a job without frustrations, and I haven’t escaped the all of the frustrations that I had as a PM - particularly that of trying to balance writing code with “other duties as assigned.” However, when it’s all summed, I think that I’m a much better fit for operating on the engineering side of the house than I am at the business side.

Posted by Howard Monday, May 18, 2015

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ABOUT ME
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I’m into a bit of everything. Some might say that makes me attention-deficit - I like to think it gives me the ability to see things from more angles. I’m a huge technology enthusiast, and while I've worked for some pretty large tech companies, my interests are pretty broad. The opinions here are mine alone.