let go

I can't help but giving out pieces of advice, probably a reminiscence from the times when I used to perform as a manager - yeah, I know what you think, hell of a coach, just an old fashion know-it-all manager. (Phew ... it's just struck me this bug of mine is what drove me to subconsciously start this blog!)

Anyway, today's advice goes to former software developers who embraced a management career and can't help but performing half of their time (they wish) as a developer and the other quarter (25% of time is wasted) as a manager.

LET GO! Just be a manager, your team needs you to take care of them, this is your most important task now! Why let go? Cause you can't afford it: besides the limitations that nature put on your intelligence, you are even more limiting yourself by focusing in two different directions.

you on you

The painter in you will find the new canvas intimidating. The writer in you will find the blank sheet of paper intimidating.

The manager in you will find the immaculate-white background of the email client window intimidating ... it is supposed to hold the yearly evaluations of your directs, instead it's blank. Where to start you're asking?

Meet self evaluations: I am finding them to be the easiest way to kick off the employee evaluation process. Is it as simple as you asking your directs for their own perspective on their accomplishments, contributions but also on unmet goals and targets over the past year. (in the Romanian immature corporate culture we sometimes call the latter bad things).

Give them time to think.

Then add your own observations - you should have observed them and taken notes throughout the year. Then add the others' feedback to the mix: team members, customers, other managers that happened to interact with your guy. Then look for some facts, in your project plan, bug tracker, emails, reviews.

That's it ... fully armed now to conquer that white background!

in an immature market ...

... interviewees for your job might ask you to double their current salary without any apparent reason except they want to change houses

Begging? Are you kidding? We'll live in a big house on Harbour Road. You, me and Salim, the three musketeers. (Slumdog Millionaire)

... interviewees for your job might ask for a significant raise just because the local currency went down and car prices are still expressed in euros

There's a lot of very important decisions into buying a car. So we have to approach it as mature, responsible adults. (So Little Time)

... there is a crisis of managers

Deputy Arnold. He took a seminar in crisis management last year. (Leverage)

... if you are a smart engineer and have some above average communication skills, your employer will want to make you a manager; change the employer, same story

Me? Why me? I'm nobody. I'm the supervisor of a Nerd Herd, at a Buy More. Maybe someday I'll be assistant manager. but I don't even know if I want that job. (Chuck)

... employees are titled "senior" much earlier; the employer has to be inventive and come up with more titles ... senior++?

Oh, yes, I remember this case. A high school senior at age 12. (CSI: Crime Scene Investigation)

... some software engineers change jobs every year or so and get raises with each move they make; employers, when will you start rejecting such candidates solely based on this criterion?

To kill an infidel, the Pope has said, is not murder; it is the path to Heaven (Kingdom of Heaven)

... 10+ years of experience in the same field and you're a superstar

Travis Colt. Our local superstar. He used to race for Nascar... (Death Race)

a tool to watch my busy hdd

1. Windows TaskManager (MS): It shows a historical view of the various I/O operations performed by the processes. It's not about NOW, so this is not the tool I'm looking for:

2. ProcessExplorer (MS): there are two views to choose from:
- the column-oriented view, where you can add a I/O delta metric to show what process is doing I/O NOW; here is my ClearCase client right after starting it, clearly the top performer

- the graphical view where the process is shown as you hover your mouse over the I/O graph

This tool can do the job. But if you are a purist and consider that I/O in ProcessExplorer it's not only about the disk, but also networking and other devices, then you might want to continue your search (see below, definitely Gmail Notifier and Yahoo Messenger are not that disk intensive, it must be networking).

3. Free Extended Task Manager (Extensoft): Right to the point.

(But every tool has its problems: if you need to watch how a particular process uses the disk over a short span of time, it'll be difficult since the processes table above looses its selection after every few refreshes)

a low importance misfeature

JDoe had a long day, he's been debugging and re-installing and patching for the last 10 hours. And it all worked like magic in the end after a simple reboot. He had spammed quite a few inboxes in the process, so he is thinking now he should probably send a final email saying Hey, it all worked out after a reboot, thanks for your help.

Is this important enough to warrant a new email? Wouldn't he bother the team even more? So he decides he will send the email with low importance ... see, every problem has a solution.

... is it so? What do you do when you get a low importance email in your inbox, do you skip it? Do you simply delete it? Or you have a filter that does this for you? I admit none of the above in my case. I read all my daily 30 something emails in the order I get them, normal, high or low importance ... indeed in some cases I go to high ones first, rarely though.

Weird enough, low importance emails draw my attention more than normal ones thanks to the nice little blue arrow in front:

AND my email client pops up notifications for low importance emails just as for the others, instead of letting me focus on tasks with a normal importance at a minimum.

So,  
Dear JDoe,


I am sending this normal importance email just to you. Please save some of my time by sending a regular email only to the ones that tried to help; forget low importance emails.


Thanks,
Lucian