© Michael Lopp 2021
M. LoppManaging Humanshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-7116-2_49

49. Free Electrons

Care and feeding of the highly productive
Michael Lopp1  
(1)
Los Gatos, CA, 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 was ...

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