Should remote workers have cameras on?

For remote workers, the issue of cameras on or off keeps coming up. There’s no question that having cameras on allows for much richer interactions. We can start to interpret body language and can pick up on so many subtle hints that just aren’t possible when the cameras are off.

Fixation errors

Back in the 1990’s, it wasn’t uncommon for people to check code into the repository that didn’t work. Sometimes it wouldn’t even compile.

Learning to say no

A team I was coaching was coming up on an important deadline. Specific functionality had been promised for a certain date that was now eight weeks away, and they wanted to know if they were going to make it.

All we are is change

We often hear that people are “resistant to change”, and yet as a friend of mine is fond of saying “all we are is change”.

Ability to deliver quickly

I was talking to a team that maintained a year-end batch process. Their code only ran once a year, on the first day of the new fiscal year.

Zero Bugs (Defects)

For many people, the notion of Zero Bugs seems like an unsustainable dream and yet the teams that do it are tremendously successful.

Validating assumptions

I was coaching a team once and I made a suggestion to one of the developers about something they could do differently. The actual suggestion isn’t important to the story so I’ll ignore that.

Premature optimization

In the early days of Java, I recall reading a book talking about performance characteristics of various things in Java. One of the tidbits that I latched onto was the suggestion that the default size of a Hashtable object was inefficient if it had to grow in size beyond the default.

Intent of standups / scrum meetings

The intent of a team standup/scrum meeting is to resynchonize on the work in progress and decide how we, as a team, are going to complete it. If your standup is horrible, then focus on the intent, not the format you’ve been doing. What would you have to change to make the meeting useful?