I’ve been happily working for more than 10 years in the IT industry. Just like how a child accepts the universe around him the way it is, I also accepted many things during my employment as the natural order of how work is done and organized. I did my job naively, unaware of the forces shaping the world around me.
I used to have an hour long shower every morning, that’s where I put together my day, resolve all the issues and figure out everything I’m being paid for. The 8–9 hours after the shower are just formal. During these…
In the recent months I started to see more and more how smart and talented people struggle to move forward in their careers, they struggle to get the respect and salary they deserve. They are hard working, they have clear goals, yet they can’t make it. If they have the talent, the knowledge and the motivation then what’s the problem? How come these people struggle? How come we all struggle sometimes?
When I feel that I just can’t move from A to B, the first thing I automatically do is that I start to blame others. This is our natural…
Despite of spending half of my life alone in a small room with a computer, it seems that I’ve reached my limits too. It was almost exactly a year ago when I last worked in the office and at the beginning of December I also started to experience the lockdown-fatigue like many others. It takes extreme effort for me these days to get out of the bed, to have a shower or to do anything useful (or useless). I don’t feel lonely, I don’t feel sad, I don’t feel depressed. I’m just very very exhausted. …
There are many things which have been considered as taboo and weakness at larger companies, saying sorry is one of them. I’ll discuss this topic in a series of articles because it’s important to understand the reasons why we hurt our colleagues and the reasons why is it important as a leader to learn to apologize.
Why do we hurt people at work? To answer this question we have to go back in time a few millions of years and we need have a look at our reptilian brain. The basal ganglia drives the deepest level of our subconscious, the…
When a company announces a merge or cost cutting program, it usually means that they try to find redundancies in the organization and eliminate them. They merge departments, standardize templates and procedures and they define a new hierarchy. These changes will have an almost immediate and visible effect on the numbers, the company spends less on salaries and on other operational costs, the leadership leans back happily in their chairs that they executed the reorganization successfully and the company’s future is safe.
There is one problem with this. What I’ve learned as a programmer, that the higher the level of…
What do you do when you have to work with people you have never met? When you barely speak a common language? When audio quality is poor? When lockdowns started, some people around me started to go crazy about having a TOOL, but not just a TOOL, we needed THE TOOL. Once we get THE TOOL, THE TOOL will free us from our home office into the infinite universe of virtual reality. It happened to be that THE TOOL became a whiteboard app, Miro. …
A few years ago we had a company event where one of our Business Analysts held a short presentation about the future of our profession, and he did not imagine it too bright. His vision was that we will all be replaced with a super smart, super social AI in the near-future, the customer will just tell Siri or Cortana what he wishes for and a working solution will magically appear on his device with rainbows and unicorns. However I didn’t see our future so magically tragical, I could not stop wondering about if my job has a future or…
If you look around your company, you might recognize a few people who used to carry the weight of entire projects, products or even business units on their shoulders. These people are hard working, highly committed, they never say no and they go home last. They are very reliable and they always give in 200%, seemingly everything would fall apart without them, and it’s not so far from the truth. You might be thankful for having such people in your team, but is this really the miracle your team needs?
Overtime
Before we begin, I’d like to talk a bit…
My first encounter with the dead rabbit happened when I was a junior software developer. I worked on a project which had funny but serious middle-aged project manager, he was either Spanish or Portuguese, but had a family in France and he flew home to them almost every weekend. As he was a chainsmoker I knew that if he was not in a meeting and he was not at his desk, then he was probably smoking in front of the building. His french-hispanic-english accent paired with decades of smoking gave him a pretty remarkable voice and tone, after almost 10…
I think that the more books I read and the more articles I write, I’m starting to believe that despite how cool and awesome Agile, Scrum, SAFe and all these frameworks, methodologies and tools are, they are not the key to success. All these things serve one purpose and one purpose only, to help people to interact and communicate with each other by giving them some structure, some direction to conversations and by creating reference points to have a common understanding. I appreciate this a lot, but I believe that success starts with having the right people with the right…
A Product Owner with a pen
As an IT Business Analyst and Product Owner I want to figure out how can we organize our work and life better.
