December 6th, 2010 — Management
I am a technical manager, and work with many others. We’re people who “grew up” in the industry with our arms elbow-deep in source code. It’s not unusual for me to hear my peers complaining about “overhead” work and wishing they could do “real” work. But what they might wish for as work isn’t necessarily what their teams need them to be doing.
So what is it that we as managers do that matters?
October 11th, 2010 — Management
Working at EMC, I often run into highly technical people in management roles. Almost every manager I interact with could tell a story of transition from technical contributor to manager. It’s not unusual to have senior managers directly contributing to a product, and recently my senior director recently called in an individual contributor to discuss coding practices after he stumbled onto some things while reviewing the code quality dashboard.
With this in mind, I am not surprised when I walk into a manager’s office (or cube) and see a bookshelf with books about programming languages, software design, code quality, and so-on. I think it’s healthy, actually. In the role we’re expected to play, it’s important we be able to speak the same language, be able to detect poor practice from early signs, and so on.
September 7th, 2010 — Corporate, Management
Last time I wrote on this subject, I covered only a third of the equation of the decision to become a manager. There were still some open questions, including figuring out what skills and talents I could bring to the management table, and how to deal with the vague “ugly stuff” that most technical contributors seem to fear hides behind the manager’s job title.
July 30th, 2010 — Casual Friday, Corporate
While waiting for a meeting to start yesterday, a colleague and I swapped stories of the perils of presenting. Whether it’s a livemeeting or a projector hooked to your desktop, there’s some loss of privacy that can come with using your PC to host a meeting. For example ….
July 27th, 2010 — Corporate
I hear it all the time, from technical contributors: “I’d never want to be a manager.“ The reasons are usually straightforward. Some fear losing their technical acumen, others dislike office politics, and many just enjoy feeling in control of their own contribution and don’t want to worry about other people.
Sometimes I’m asked why I made the decision to enter management. I realized today that even though I started this blog to talk about that question, I haven’t spent much time really digging into it.
July 13th, 2010 — Corporate
I’m in the interesting and enviable position of having an open (entry-ish level) position on my team, here at EMC. Over the years I’ve brought a few people into the company, either directly or indirectly. But it’s been a while, and it’s interesting to see the state of the hiring process … and the people trying to get hired.
July 9th, 2010 — Meta
If, like me, you skirt around the edges of the fitness blogging scene, you’re probably familiar with the person who starts a fitness blog, writes about their incredible gains (in fitness) and losses (in weight) and then suddenly the blog dries up for six months or a year. You know what happened — the person hit a rough patch with their fitness and didn’t want to write about it.
So when someone who writes about today’s workplace, about corporate culture, about working at EMC, slowly dries up in terms of post count, it might be a good default assumption that they’ve hit a rough patch at work and don’t want to write about it.
June 10th, 2010 — Social Media
I sat today in a team meeting, where we talked about our long-term goal of delighting our customers. It’s an easy thing to talk about, but it’s very hard to achieve. There’s a reason people always come up with the same holy grails of customer delight (say, the iPad) … there aren’t that many of them!
I ended up speaking some with our senior director about a recent set of experiences I had with Charter Communications. I recently upgraded my services with them, and have had several small nagging issues that I never thought to call them about. Just little things that kept me from being delighted.
May 18th, 2010 — Social Media
If you’re at all active online, you’ve probably seen the recent hubbub about Facebook and privacy. Every time Facebook changes its privacy settings, the articles start floating around, but this time it’s more serious. The NY Times has dedicated space to the story, and Facebook itself has called a meeting of all its employees to discuss the issue. At least one colleague of mine is deactivating his account, and I’ve decided to take an audit on my use of the service and rethink my assumptions around it.
May 4th, 2010 — EMC World
The buzz at the office is reaching a high as last-second preparations for EMC World compete with people’s “real work” every hour of every day. I am sad to report I won’t be attending EMC World this year; I was really looking forward to the coffee at the Bloggers’ Lounge but I’m needed here in Hopkinton (the same reason my blog posts seem to be drying up of late …). But there are some exciting things happening within my organization that you might want to know about.
This is my personal blog, and the opinions expressed here are my own, not EMC's. My posts are not read in advance or approved by EMC. Though I am employed by EMC and EMC is aware of and publicizes this blog, I am not compensated by EMC for my blog posts, and all costs associated with this blog are paid by me, not EMC.
