The Berkun Blog
Management, design, and the making of good things.
Essay: advice for new managers, part 1
January 25th, 2006
Someone on the ask Berkun forum requested an essay for new managers. It’s a huge topic - there are entire books on this! - but I took a good swing and here’s what I came up with.
Advice for new managers, part 1
Part 2 will be more on tactics and specific things to do in the first few weeks.
Best of Berkun
January 25th, 2006
Essay #50 will be published today - Its been 6 years of writing these things, first for MSDN, then at uiweb and now here. Thanks to everyone that’s been reading and writing in with questions and requests for essays - hope you’ll stick around. The next book is in progress and I’ll have details soon.
For fun I went back through all the traffic logs and looked at what’s been popular. So here is a traffic determined best of Berkun thru 2005:
Essay: How to make a difference
December 13th, 2005
What does it mean to make a difference these days? How do you measure you’re own value in the things you care most about?
I think I ate too many preechy pills on this one: I hope it goes down ok on your end.
Essay: Good, evil and technology. A fun philosophical inquiry
November 15th, 2005
Are you a good person? How do you know? Most of us set our bar for good and bad awfully low. Unless you’re kicking puppies and stealing lunches from homeless children, you probably think you’re doing all right. But not being bad is not the same as being good. And when it comes to making things like software and websites the same rules apply.
New essay: Teams and stars
October 24th, 2005
You always want the best people, but sometimes the best people don’t fit together into a harmonious team. How do you manage star egos? How do you build good teams, with or without stars? I answer these questions and more.
More on why software sucks
October 5th, 2005
There’s a nice thread in response to the essay why software sucks over at artima.com.
Artima.com is an interesting forum for software development news and discussion. I hadn’t seen it before I found it in my traffic logs.
Why software sucks: an essay
September 19th, 2005
Ever wonder why so much of what’s made is so bad? Here’s some answers and advice on what to do about it. Includes two laws on suckage, the learning curve myth, the expectation gap and lots more.
Smart people, bad ideas and expertise
September 8th, 2005
An essay I wrote a few months ago, why smart people defend bad ideas, continues to get lots of feedback. People write in all the time with research, opinions or links, and here’s a particularly interesting link (thanks CCJ).
From Studies in Intelligence, a declassified CIA journal:
The strengths of expertise can also be weaknesses. Although one would expect experts to be good forecasters, they are not particularly good at making predictions about the future. Since the 1930s, researchers have been testing the ability of experts to make forecasts. The performance of experts has been tested against actuarial tables to determine if they are better at making predictions than simple statistical models. Seventy years later, with more than two hundred experiments in different domains, it is clear that the answer is no. If supplied with an equal amount of data about a particular case, an actuarial table is as good, or better, than an expert at making calls about the future. Even if an expert is given more specific case information than is available to the statistical model, the expert does not tend to outperform the actuarial table.
The full essay talks about the paradox of using teams to balance against expert bias, the role of methedology, etc. The context of the essay is, you guessed it, CIA type intelligence gathering, but in reading this essay much of it applied to any kind of complex work.
The full essay is here.
Essay: work vs. progress
August 16th, 2005
So much time seems wasted doing work that doesn’t help progress things forward. Why does this happen? What can be done? Here’s some thoughts on the role leaders play in improving the ratio of work to progress.
Essay: How to decide what bugs to fix
August 15th, 2005
There’s another new essay of mine up on one of the O’Reilly websites.
How to decide what bugs to fix
It starts from first aid and guerilla tactics, grows into triage, and part 2 will talk about early planning and exit criteria.
New essay: how to learn from your mistakes
July 18th, 2005
If you’re doing something interesting, mistakes are inevitable. How you learn from your mistakes defines what kinds of mistakes you’ll make the next time: the same ones? New ones? Mistakes that get you closer to success or move you away from it?
Ending the wars between testers and programmers
July 8th, 2005
One of the long standing tugs of war in the software world is between those who write code and those who test code. I’m sure you’ve seen your share of skirmishes and turf battles. Well, here’s some thoughts for on how to make those dev/test relationships work better:
Ending the wars between testers and programmers
This is the first of several essays I’ll be writing for www.oreillynet.com
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