Managing Humans: Biting and Humorous Tales of a Software Engineering Manager, Third Edition

© Michael Lopp 2016

Michael Lopp, Managing Humans, 10.1007/978-1-4842-2158-7_43

43. Free Electrons

Care and feeding of the highly productive

Michael Lopp¹ 

(1)Los Gatos, California, USA

Back in my Borland days, we were working hard on Paradox for Windows. I was a QA engineer testing the database creation and modification functionality. Jerry, my counterpart in engineering, was working hard, but getting absolutely nowhere.

We were mid-to-late in a 1.0 product cycle, and most of the engineers were slowly moving from development into bug-fix mode, but not Jerry. He was still implementing . . . over and over again. You are screwed because you’ve given a critical task to someone who is utterly unable to complete it.

Now, let’s first give Jerry a break. He ...