Hank Wallace

Ted Neward wrote "Agile is treading the symptoms, not the disease" and talks about the need for a simpler development tools. I don’t understand why he is mixing Agile and the complexity of the current technology stack together – they seem like separate issues to me. Regardless, it is a thought provoking read.

Phil Haack wrote "Software Externalities" as a response and Ted follows up with a response to his response (who’s on first?).

Phil makes an interesting point: Agile is less about managing the complexity of an application itself and more about managing the complexity of building an application.

Ted’s response to Phil is great.

End users will always use a simple tool to build what they need. How many Excel “applications” have you seen? They used Excel because that is what they knew, not what they thought would be the best tool. You can’t expect them to start with .NET, VS2008, nHibernate, etc.

I re-read The Hardest Interview Puzzle Question Ever by Jeff Atwood today. I have interviewed many, many programmers (and non-programmers) over the years and have always felt that it is, by far, more difficult than any of my daily responsibilities. Hiring good people is a critical factor to a company’s success, yet many people are really bad at evaluating others.

Jeff’s post made me think about the types of questions I usually ask and what I am looking for in a candidate. The questions differ based on the skills of the candidate, but here is what I am usually looking for:

• Is the person passionate about something? I don’t care if it’s work related or not. I just want to know that they can get excited about something.
• Do they have a need for continuous self-improvement?
• Can they admit when they don’t know something? Nobody knows everything, so don’t guess or BS me. I would rather they admit they don’t know and then tell me how they will find the right answer.
• Would the team enjoy working with this person?

What I was missing is a concentration on their communication skills. No matter how smart they are, they will not work well with other members of the team if they don’t communicate well!

I have been thinking about the format that I post items to Interesting Finds. In addition to being my own personal “what I find useful” list, I hope that they are also useful to others. If you are reading them, please take a minute to comment.

Is the author more important than the title? I currently show author first.

Are tags important? I used to put Technorati tags at the bottom of my posts, but have questioned their usefulness.

Anything you would like to see more of? Less of?

You might have been wondering why my posts have been very few and far between lately.. I joined a startup at the end of January and have been very, very busy. I will try to get back to posting Interesting Finds at least a few times per week.