Author: Marcus Blankenship

Where other technical coaches focus on process or tools, I focus on the human aspects of your Programmer to Manager transition. I help you hire the right people, create the right culture, and setup the right process which achieves your goals. Managing your team isn't something you learned in college. In fact, my clients often tell me "I never prepared for this role, I always focused on doing the work". If you're ready to improve your leadership, process and team, find out how I can help you.

Its all engineering, but not all of engineering

Today in the Tech Lead Mentoring group, Sarah* mentioned that next Tuesday her team was having a “no code day.”  Suddenly it got quiet, as everyone stopped to listen. I asked, “Oooh… what’s that Sarah?”  Sarah explained that a “no code day” was a day set aside to work on non-coding engineering activities.  Some folks […]

The brilliance of

Guillermo wrote me back yesterday to let me know how he solved the “demotivated, disconnected programmer” problem.  I’ll let him tell you… I started seeing this behavior in my developers, so what I did was to introduce a “Customer Support value hour.” Programmers have to sit with the CS people for an hour and see […]

"They just want to be left alone and code."

“Jamie just wants to be left and code.” Does this sound familiar? If so, maybe you have a developer who: 1. Doesn’t openly participate in retrospectives or team meetings 2. Complains meetings are a waste of time because they reduce engineering time 3. Doesn’t offer features suggestions or ideas to the group 4. Hates dealing with […]