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(This guest post is by Karen Degi.  Karen is new enough to software leadership that her idealism hasn’t yet been worn down. You can find more of her writing at https://medium.com/@sheearan. If you are interested in writing a guest post, email me at marcus@marcusblankenship.com) As a manager, it’s easy to feel helpless, randomized, and like you…

Changing Jobs, Changing Roles By Max Schubert, guest columnist I was one of two technical leads on a software development team at my previous employer that grew from 2 engineers to 14 over the course of 6 years. We had a manager who gave us a lot of autonomy, coached me very well, and who…

(This is a guest post from Mauro Chojrin.  If you’d like to write a guest post about managing programmers, email me at marcus@marcusblankenship.com) TL;DR: watch this scene from Gladiator. Long version: Ok, start by watching this scene from Gladiator 🙂 The very first thing you need to do in order to lead effectively is to…

I know it’s hard, but you can’t be an effective COACH if you’re still acting like a PLAYER. Can you imagine if Michael Jordan split his time between coaching and practicing basketball?  He wouldn’t have been a great NBA player, and probably wouldn’t have been a good manager either. If you’re leading a team, you…

I recently received an email from a reader, Anton, asking this question: How do I balance management with real work? This is a common question. What Anton wants are tools to help him manage his time and his workload. He’s having trouble “doing it all”, which is a symptom of a larger problem. The problem…