Five for Friday – May 31, 2019

I come across this frequently enough that I’m sure I’ve blogged about it before, but context dictates that I do it again. The story I hear goes pretty much like this: My team really needs to improve X, but nobody is taking responsibility for it. The fix is obvious – we need our exec /…

Not only am I back for another week of FfF, but you are too! Thanks for reading. First up this week – in a title that’s obvious, but an article with substance. The Key to Retaining Young Workers? Better Onboarding. This is something I need to ask Brent about. Microsoft considers pay raises to stay…

Every year, Microsoft’s Engineering Excellence group holds an internal conference – five days of talks, panels, booths and receptions (in other words, it’s just like any other conference, except only Microsoftees are invited). This is the first year since 2004 where I’ve been at the conference and not in the EE group. You’d think that…

I left a few of my Nest devices in the old house, but after some shopping around, decided to re-up my Nest usage with a v3 thermostat, and a Nest lock to augment some of the replacement devices. We’ll see how it goes. Other than soccer, I don’t watch a lot of TV. But I…

My last post dove into the world of engineering teams / combined engineering / fancy-name-of-the-moment where there are no separate disciplines for development and test. I think there are advantages to one-team engineering, but that doesn’t mean that your team needs to change. First things First I’ve mentioned this before, but it’s worth saying again….