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So you wanna be a Management Star – Introducing Scott Berkun

ceciiil — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 07:38:17 +0000

Here is the thing : after a while in the IT tech area, one feel like stepping to another level. What is it going to be ? Architect ? Consultant ? Marketing and product definiton ? Manager ? This is a post for the ones that made the last choice.

Next stop : management

Most of the times we’ll think this is a natural career move that doesn’t need anything special to be prepared. “Well, I know the job, I know the technology, I know the guys, I know the industry, I know the company : it just going to be a walk in the park“. Well I tell you : it won’t. Especially in the IT industry where we are used to work with 0 and 1s. Working with people is a whole different story.

In the IT world we tend to think that Manager is not a real job, that we all have the soft skills required, probably because there shouldn’t be too many anyway, they are not measurable and quite blurry. We tend to cheat ourselves believing we already have put them in practise.

Believe it or not, there are quite a lot of clearly identified techniques and know-how to master : here is where techITeasy steps in and provide guidance on where to look to become a good, fair, understanding and yet efficient manager : Scott Berkun’s blog.

Scott Berkun

Scott used to be a Project Manager for Microsoft, working on versions 1 to 5 of Internet Explorer. He knows what he talks about when it comes to issues in managing very exposed software projects. He wrote the best seller “The Art of Project management“, which, needless to say, is a must read for managers or wannabes.

Even more interestingly, Scott writes essays (there’s about 60 of them), mostly on project management and these are invaluable assets.

Team, Bullshit and objectives

In Advice for new manager part.I Scott asks the most important question : why to manage. This helps you finding out if your motivations are pure, young Jedi. Advice for new manager part.II addresses more day to day issues especially if you manage a team of people you don’t know in a new environment.

Work Vs Progress allows you to set up and monitor clear objectives. How to learn from mistakes and How to give and take criticism will allow you to become a better professional and a better person altogether.

If you courageously stand up and honestly say “This is my mistake and I am responsible” the possibilities for learning will move towards you. Admission of a mistake, even if only privately to yourself, makes learning possible by moving the focus away from blame assignment and towards understanding.

Hilarious How to detect bullshit and assertive Why smart people have bad ideas gives you some hint on how to step back in some tense conversations not to get misguided to incorrect decisions. How to interview and hire people shows you the do and dont and the real goals of an interview while Team and Stars discusses the tricky issue of managing ego inflated developers (which happens more with the raise of the Alphageeks).

All-star teams lose. While it’s an honor to be chosen to an all-star team, it’s miserable to play on one.

Sharing knowledge

What makes these reading worthwile is how efficient they are in achieving their objective : sharing knowledge and experience on a very specific topic. Scott puts a huge effort in making sure his words are concise and clear and each issue and is addressed thoroughly and perfectly. In addition, these are a 15 minutes read : they come in very handy.

His theories are supported by every day life examples first and then office experience second, starting with being quite general (and usually quite funny) about the subject and then getting more precisely to the point. A fun yet optimal read for all the wisdom and know-how that is nicely packaged and freely distributed here.

So if you plan to become or a manager, do yourself a huge favor and be prepared. Make sure it’s not for bad reasons and know what is waiting for you. As Scott puts it, this is a great and rewarding job as

“There are thrills in bringing a team together and making good things happen, at a scale larger than you can do alone (…) When the project is completed you’ll look at the work done by many people at share pride for the whole thing“

But before that :

You will be asked, on a daily basis, to make decisions that impact the lives of other people, (…) Some of your best moves will be out of your team’s view, and the positive impact you have won’t always be acknowledged. Despite any pay raises or perks that come with the job, it’s rare to be fully compensated, in financial terms, for the challenges and tough choices that will inevitably be yours.

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Happy Blog-Day – 5 Blogs for you!

Vincent van Wylick — Thu, 30 Aug 2007 22:15:33 +0000

Hello everybody,

Today is blog-day, the day we geeks celebrate the new digital age, where every word, thought, sight, and sound is digitised and broadcast to millions of households. So what blogs to we love? After some intense debate (not), and in no particular order, here are five blogs that I would like to extend the digital roses too:

New Music Strategies

Artists face challenging times with the internet and the consequences it has had on the valuations and consumption of music. Andrew Dubber helps navigate this confusing world, and does so in a human, personable way. I would especially advise people to check out his manifesto, which he published in the form of a free ebook.

T.L.L.T. – Things That Look Like Things

The world needs more people like Christian Ceres Merry, who through some weird mental twists and turns always manages to find pictures on Flickr that blow me away.

Fortuito.us

Matthew Haughey, the founder of the infamous MetaFilter, has to update his blog more often. I would just like to make that a public statement. However, the few blogposts he did write (5 I think) are all digital gold.

Start-up Review

Nisan Gabbay, founder of SUR, and the other well-esteemed bloggers are creating a public service for everyone with their case-study-styled blog on today’s web-start-ups. They, to me, represent all the potential that new media can have and I hope we can someday follow in their example. [/end gush]

And last, but not least!

Paleo-Future

Another quirky blog, one that reminds us of futures that never were and the infinite potential that our minds have. The author, Matt ??, has an amazing eye for this kind of content and I’m always wondering what he will uncover next.

So, that’s it! I sincerely hope you liked it! While these blogs may be very diverse in nature, they represent the limitless potential of user-generated content, simple creativity, and altruism (edit: typo).

Please, feel free to suggest other blogs you have enjoyed in the comments. I’m sure the blog-authors will appreciate it!

Your dedicated Tech IT Easy team!

Some last minute maintenance for 3l0g day: http://technorati.com/tag/BlogDay2007 and http://www.blogday.org/. I will also notify the authors that didn’t comment yet about their “nomination.”

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How can Tech IT Easy recover its glorious past Web rankings ?

Steve Danino — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 23:00:30 +0000

A few weeks ago, Tech IT Easy has switched from its previous URL (http://www.jeremyfain.net or http://jeremyfain.wordpress.com) to the current one (http://www.techiteasy.org), thus acknowledging the fact that the very nature of this blog has dramatically shifted – previously a personal blog with occasional outside contributions, now a truly collective blog, capitalizing on our original “out-of-the-box” approach and our diverse and complementary blogger profiles. This, besides, was perfectly in line with Jeremy’s expectations, back in January 2007, when I was first approached to participate to Tech IT Easy.

So far so good. But in the process, we partly lost something we were dearly attached to: our Web rankings. Our traffic is still largely satisfying for our egos (having slightly decreased though), our reader base keeps expanding steadily, and posts tend to be more and more commented. However I personnally still find unsatisfactory our visibility through search engines, at least in comparison of what it was before the migration. More precisely, the numerous trackbacks (featured on a variety of blogs, the ones of regular readers – O. Ezratty, Joseph Cargo, etc… – as well as more exotic ones) helped us reach a significant ranking: now, these trackbacks are inoperant. The blogposts which were all highly visible have now been discarded by Google, which should not come as a surprise since their URLs are now obsolete. Nonetheless, a majority of them have not yet “recovered” and been restored through their new address. So I will ask two simple questions :

1) How on Earth are we meant to operate (through WordPress or whatever) in order to restore the visibility of all the previous posts in search engines, now that they have a different URL ? Is there any way to do so, except waiting for Mr. Google, Yahoo and Live Search – OK, just kidding, this was just to please Jeremy – to crawl the integrality of the blog once again ?

2) Would new, up-to-date trackbacks help us to get to this point faster ? If so, shall we ask our fellow bloggers to update their trackbacks – and if we do so, will they fulfill our demands ? Or should we just strive to provide ever more better posts, in order to obtain further recognition, something we should do anyway ?

Thank you for your insights. SEO specialists are a rare species, since it implies evolving as fast as Google, which is non trivial.

Steve, also a proud member of the Middle East geopolitics-focused think-tank AFIDORA, is a co-author on Tech IT Easy. You can find out more about him on this blog’s initial announcement.

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"Guess who I am?" N.3 – good luck!

Jeremy Fain — Sat, 16 Sep 2006 13:52:12 +0000

I waited up to now for the US to be awake, or this would’ve been unfair. Coming back from Apple Expo or should I say iPod Expo. Paradoxically enough, I had a nice chat at the Microsoft booth…There you go with this week-end “Guess who I am?” game, a bit trickier than the two last editions:

“I’m from Eastern Europe, and in my late 20s. Despite my young age, I’m the Head of Operations of a Europe-born start-up company that has revolutionized my industry so much that we’ve been bought out by a California-based big player late last year. We’ve been so disruptive, allowing for business opportunities in devices but smashing established business models, that multinationals are shaking when hearing the name of my 11-million-customer-strong company (I’m no owner or founder though). I started my career as a programmer, dropping corporate communication studies after one year at University because I had founded my own time-demanding software business. Jeremy has written some posts about my company, and I was granted a business portrait in the British newspaper The Economist in the August 19th 2006 issue. Who am I?”

Update 6:56pm: congratulations to Ole Begemann for recognizing Sten Tamkivi behind the preceding description. Ole is German currently travelling throughout South America. He takes wonderful pictures and I recommend that you take a look at the website he devised himself clicking on this link.

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Java development: Yakov Fain, a fine blogging homonym

Jeremy Fain — Wed, 13 Sep 2006 22:04:40 +0000

As some of you may know, I’ve started again to learn Java recently. I’m a bit lost with the herculean amount of references online, and hence have been solely focusing on Sun Tutorials and some forums. But as a blogger myself, I just couldn’t let down my peers. And more than a peer, I found a homonym. Yakov Fain is a professional Java developer, working at a Wall Street financial services company, and writing for the Java Developers Journal. I’ve been watching his blog for a few weeks, and it definitely deserves to integrate my blogroll for the diversity of the topics discussed. Check it out: Zidane, his dreaming of Jonathan Schwartz asking Yakov about his vision of the future evolutions of Java, his children teaching him new English words, recruitment, etc.

Yakov Fain and I not only share our last name: I recently spent 6 months in New York City (it’s a pity I hadn’t come over his blog when I was there), the city where Yakov is working (apparently, Yakov lives in New Jersey, basically like my family in the US!), and both of us blog in English – definitely not our native language. By the way Yakov, my father was born from a Polish mother and a father born and raised in Vilnius, Lithuania (at the time Russia, where the name Fain comes from: Fain in old Russian became “fein” in German and “fine” in English – “raffiné” in French ). Where are you from Yakov? (I guess Israel, but who knows) See you some day perhaps…Always a pleasure to meet homonyms (apart from me, there are two other Jeremy Fain in the US – I never met them either).

To all my readers interested by Java development or not, and I insist, check out Yakov Fain’s excellent blog.

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