Requirements bloat fighting

Requirements proliferation must be fought, by both birth control and infanticide.

Frederick P. Brooks. The Design Of Design. 2010. 

Experience and promotion

I recently came across a couple of articles on how promotion and experience are managed in two different (maybe not so much) software development companies.

The first of them is Why I ran a flat company by Jason Fried. I like his position on keeping the organization as flat as possible and the idea of self-managing teams. But what I like most is what he points out as horizontal ambition. "We always try to hire people who yearn to be master craftspeople, that is, designers who want to be great designers, not managers of designers; developers who want to master the art of programming, not management.", I find this quote to express the concept quite clear.

The second article is Why I never let employees negotiate a raise by Joel Spolsky. He explains the compensation policy that they follow at his company and the rationale behind it. He defines a salary scale based on experience, scope of responsibility and skill set. So for each employee, three factors are measured and his/her final level defines the salary.

There is this quote that made me nod my head: "If you worked as a receptionist for six years, for example, you aren't credited with six years of experience; I give you credit for one year." It somehow leverages what I think about experience.

Paternity leave

So it's been a while since I wrote my last post here. The reason is that I've been too busy since February 20th, when my daughter was born. My wife and me have been taking good care of her and that, as any parents already know, requires a lot of time and energy.

This blog is a personal project, thus one of the first things I had to take aside. It's been almost two months since then.

I'm glad that I had the opportunity to invest all those time and energy in my family. It's been hard to adapt to the new situation. Now it's time to take it back.