Author: esantanche

  • Designing recruitment processes

    Designing recruitment processes

    I’ll help you create a recruitment process that selects really good developers and technology professionals. I will improve your recruitment practices. I’ll devise with you practices that convey the right messages to candidates. I will take care to design the process so that it doesn’t become stressful or meaningless for recruiters. I will analyse with…

  • Tackling management by fear

    Tackling management by fear

    Management by fear is that way to organise our activities that comes from the assumption that fear will exhort people to produce more and better results. It’s pervasive in many workplaces and it can be very damaging.   Many managers think it’s unavoidable and that it really produces results. Actually, the assumption it stems from is…

  • Taming the complexity beast

    Taming the complexity beast

    Complexity made old leadership practices obsolete long ago. The times when to give orders was enough to get results are gone.   Many companies, startups and corporations alike, see their projects fail because of many problems. Some of them are: wrong practices bad developers misplaced expectations unchecked pressure disrupting deadlines misconceptions about motivation bad time management bad…

  • Are you safe from deadlines?

    Are you safe from deadlines?

    The word deadline reminds me of uncivilised times when guards were shooting prisoners who were trespassing a line, sometimes even invisible, representing a limit beyond which there was freedom. Prisoners died for going beyond the deadline. Software projects die for managing to stay behind it. What kills projects that respect deadlines How can a project…

  • Are you sabotaging your software developers’ motivation?

    Are you sabotaging your software developers’ motivation?

    You get a wonderful idea for a software product. Or it may be anything high-tech. You want the world to benefit from it. You hire the best developers money can buy. In your impetuosity, you don’t consider that now you have to deal with a black hole called human motivation. You know only one way…

  • Protect yourself from the accountability monster

    Protect yourself from the accountability monster

    It’s 1841, the 5th of October. A train is flying at full speed from Worcester, Massachusetts to Albany, New York. You are the conductor. You are happily singing because you are on schedule and everything is fine. Your happiness, however, is about to morph into terror. You see a light in front of you where…

  • The disease of running developers

    The disease of running developers

    One of the reasons for which 70% of software projects fail is that they catch a disease called “Running Developer” and die from it. A project suffering from this disease and not diagnosed in time may survive for many months or even years. Its breathing becomes eventually laboured until it stops. Is it possible to…

  • How Agile Junk Will Mess up Your Software Project

    How Agile Junk Will Mess up Your Software Project

    These days if you are not Agile you must hide yourself, maybe in a church. When there, you may find people who have pity of you and grant you asylum despite the right having been abolished in 1623. Before Agile, software projects were failing at the same rate projects meant to build skyscrapers would fail…

  • How to test a software developerˊs skills

    How to test a software developerˊs skills

    You are starting or run a high tech company and need to build software. You read that the majority of software projects fail. You are at ease with technology and maybe you wrote some code yourself, but the idea of doing it with others gives you the creeps. In this article I’ll tell you about…

  • Is Your Company Safe From Management By Fear?

    Is Your Company Safe From Management By Fear?

    I know from personal experience and from history that human beings have been using fear against others to make things happen for a long time. They use it against themselves as well. It has never worked. It has been counterproductive instead. Why are they still doing it? What prevents them from understanding its real effects?…