Return to Office - 2003

A quick post on my own story on going through a “return” to office mandate - 22 years ago.

Why don't I like your resume?

You hit all the points on the job description. Why aren’t you getting a call? It’s not the Applicant Tracking System (ATS) filtering you out. It is not the Talent Acquisition (TA) team. It is one of the hiring managers, maybe myself. How do you “get by” me?

I know creating a resume is stressful, you get conflicting advice, and you might be doing it when you are out of work and all that stress and contradiction will try to overwhelm you. In this article, I hope to help a little by taking a swing at explaining what I think when I review resumes. As always: Warning- Opinions Ahead!

Ghost Engineers: What is Productivity?

Look! Yet another study about developer productivity! This time, it is a Twitter post made by a Stanford researcher who claims 9.5% of software engineers do almost nothing and are “Ghost Engineers.” In this post, I consider a couple of my own development anecdotes in light of this and the experience gained examining productivity within various teams over the years. The long and short of it: looking at code is not a valuable measure of individual productivity and individual productivity should not be what we are measuring anyway.

AI Generated Programming Language Experiment

While messing around a little bit with prompts in Bing Copilot, I asked it to create a programming language that was easy to code and hard to debug. What did I get? The results were surprisingly unsurprising.

Thoughts: Developer Lead Resumes

Thought: If you’ve got a position listed on your resume that says “Software Development Team Lead”, the description of the role should start out with things you did as a leader.