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Spontaneous combustion of rancid management
01 November 09 07:00 AM | ericbrec | 3 Comments   
What's good for you isn't always good for your group. Obvious, right? You can call it local versus global optimization. You can get geek philosophical about it and say, "The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few…or the one." Or you can simply Read More...
Hire's remorse
01 October 09 07:00 AM | ericbrec | 0 Comments   
Looking for that perfect candidate to fill a role? Good, that means you'll never steal a great candidate away from me. I love it when industrial-strength stupidity renders my competition comatose. You can't hire the perfect candidate, but please keep Read More...
Right on schedule
01 September 09 07:00 AM | ericbrec | 0 Comments   
My older son can now drive. This adds two new worries to my life—how ancient I feel and thoughts of my son in a ditch somewhere. To mitigate the second worry, my wife and I enforce a curfew and insist my son call if he's running late. The other night, Read More...
20 years together
01 August 09 07:00 AM | ericbrec | 2 Comments   
Eric Aside It's my 20th Wedding Anniversary. My wife and I are celebrating in the San Francisco Bay area, where we first started living together a few blinks of an eye ago. We'll watch a ball game, see some sites, and visit Tesla Motors to check out a Read More...
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The VP-geebees
01 July 09 07:00 AM | ericbrec | 0 Comments   
It's the end of the fiscal year. Most engineers associate this time with performance review season, but for principal-level engineers and higher it's also executive review season. Time to waste weeks of your life writing slides for executive presentations Read More...
I hardly recognize you
01 June 09 07:00 AM | ericbrec | 6 Comments   
The annual engineering awards are being given out this week at the Microsoft Engineering Forum. Annual reviews will soon follow. These are great opportunities to recognize impactful work. It's too bad most managers are tragically ignorant of how to recognize Read More...
It starts with shipping
01 May 09 07:00 AM | ericbrec | 4 Comments   
Call me "old school" but I believe in shipping. Trying isn't enough. Getting close isn't enough. Good ideas aren't enough. You've got to ship. It used to be that interviews started with, "What have you shipped?" If you hadn't shipped recently, "Why?" Read More...
Your World. Easier
01 April 09 07:00 AM | ericbrec | 4 Comments   
During difficult economic times like these, people tend to whine less about common complaints that now seem trite. Mostly, I'm relieved not to hear how much e-mail is in Ingrid's Inbox, how Brian broke the build again, and how Suresh's service schedule Read More...
I'm listening
01 March 09 07:00 AM | ericbrec | 5 Comments   
It's Midyear Career Discussion time at Microsoft. Perhaps you just finished, but more than likely you're still trying to squeeze yours in. How'd it go? How will it go? For you? For your manager? Well, that depends. It depends a bit on your prior performance Read More...
Green fields are full of maggots
01 February 09 07:00 AM | ericbrec | 7 Comments   
As I said in Nailing the nominals , the two keys to successful big projects (100K+ LOC) are thinking ahead and defining done. Thinking ahead is about design and planning. Defining done is about setting a quality bar and sticking to it. Yet many big projects Read More...
Sustained engineering idiocy
01 January 09 07:00 AM | ericbrec | 5 Comments   
Plumbing channels waste water into a series of larger and larger pipes till it is expelled. That's because sewage flows downstream, which explains the quality of goods that test, operations, and sustained engineering teams receive. After all, they are Read More...
De-optimization
01 December 08 07:00 AM | ericbrec | 2 Comments   
Why? Why! Why do managers make stupid decisions that cause devastating churn and tawdry results? And it's not just managers, though they are particularly proficient at promoting poor performance—architects, leads, and individual contributors flood the Read More...
NIHilism and other innovation poison
01 November 08 06:13 PM | ericbrec | 15 Comments   
Is innovation the act of creating something new (as the dictionary claims) or is it building upon the work of others? To me this is a fundamental question that Microsoft as a company and as a culture has gotten horribly wrong. We deal with the consequences Read More...
Nailing the nominals
01 October 08 07:00 AM | ericbrec | 7 Comments   
People are always looking for that amazing breakthrough technology or process that solves all their problems—enhances their love life, trims their waist, and improves the productivity of their development team. That's why process manias like Agile and Read More...
I would estimate
01 September 08 07:00 AM | ericbrec | 6 Comments   
When I'm discussing challenges with fellow engineers, the first topic that comes up isn't estimation—it's career and people challenges. That's why those issues are so rampant in these rants. However, "How do you generate task estimates?" is always among Read More...
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