In the last post, I talked about the language employed by Expert Beginners to retain their status at the top of a software development group. That post was a dive into the language mechanics of how Expert Beginners justify decisions that essentially stem from ignorance–and often laziness, to boot. They generally have titles like “Principal…
So far in the “Expert Beginner” series of posts, I’ve chronicled how Expert Beginners emerge and how they wind up infecting an entire software development group. Today I’d like to turn my attention to the rhetoric of this archetype in a software group already suffering from Expert Beginner-induced rot. In other words, I’m going to…
The other day, I sat in on a meeting where a large-ish group was discussing “standards” for their particular area of software development. I have the word standards in quotes because, by design, there wasn’t a clear definition as to what sorts of standards they would be; it was an open-ended exercise. The standard could…
In a recent post, I talked about the importance of having Proto-Geeks in your software group rather than Loafers and the toxic impact of too many Loafers in the group. If you’ll recall, Proto-Geeks are automaters (in other words, developers) that are enthusiastic about new technologies, and Loafers are ones that don’t much care for…
I’ve had trouble with the hosting of this site lately. As you may have noticed if you visit via the site instead of a feed reader, page load times had slowed to a crawl and sometimes the site was actually down. The hosting company, hostmonster, has provided me with good service over the last couple…
