Experience

Continuing on my journey through failures and the lessons that I’ve learned, we’re going to make a stop at a project that I did when I worked at a very small (but successful) development shop. I started at this shop and one of the first tasks that they assigned me was building a reporting engine for a POS style’d application that they were re-developing.  This sounded fine by me as I’d just rolled out of a company where I’d done the exact same thing.  I gathered what little info I had on the new and old applications plus the...

Experience is simply the name we give our mistakes – Oscar Wilde Continuing on my series of posts themed around failure, we’re here to look at an interview that I once did.  It resulted in me taking the job.  That was the failure.  Before we get too far into this, let’s step back to the beginning….. When I was just getting started contracting/consulting independently, I was presented with the opportunity to be a team lead for a project.  I was told that the client was very excited to have me as a possible candidate...

In our Brownfield Application Development book, and in previous posts on this blog, Kyle and I have talked about the different personalities that you can encounter while working on a development project.  Unfortunately many of the types we listed, and that you see and remember, are negative.  Because development is such a social task (whether you like it or not) conflicts in personalities, styles and objectives are easily surfaced.  Add on a heavy dose of introversion and natural social ineptness and you have a cauldron of simmering conflict just waiting to bubble over. During the hiring process HR and...