CHAPTER30

Free Electrons

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 was a fine programmer, but he had two major strikes against him. First, Jerry had never programmed for Windows, so he was learning while he was coding. ...

Get MANAGING HUMANS: BITING AND HUMOROUS TALES OF A SOFTWARE ENGINEERING MANAGER now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.