I was just talking with a former employee of mine. He worked for me while I was at an insurance company in Des Moines, Iowa. He is based in Cleveland, OH. So it got me thinking that I really leaned a lot while I was there (all 1 year and 1 day of my employment!). If you’re in IT - you should heed my thoughts carefully:
- I learned that you cannot hire a CTO just because he worked for Google.
- You also should not hire a CTO because he was your neighbor.
- Project.Deadlines != Management.GetRandomNumberBasedOnWind();
- It’s funny to see the head of the architecture group not understand what an Astronaut Architect is.
- CIO’s that say “That’s the problem I have with this place” repeatedly should either do something about those problems or be sacked. I prefer the latter.
- Hiring Business Analysts at the last minute to meet a milestone is generally a bad idea. Keeping them after several failures is also just as much of a bad idea.
- If you love your sales organization, or just love sales, for the love of all that is technically holy, do not use SalesForce.com as a partner. Unless, of course, you really don’t care to have primary keys, you want tons of batch jobs on your own servers, and you just love having tons of code without Unit Tests or with Code Analysis warnings. For inquiring minds - I’ll blog about this one later.
- Giving your developers one holiday (Christmas) but taking away their entire month of March is extremely hazardous to your code base. Also expect an exodus soon afterwards.
- If you ever work for a company that has an EBusiness Operational Committee (EBOC) that meets for 1 hours every Monday and accomplishes nothing but causes more chaos - run like Hell!
So to kick my blog off right, I was reminiscing about some memories from the last year. I really think anyone wanting to leave that IT Third Reich is really going to be better off. The grass may be just as brown where you are going, but you will at least get your weekends and evening back!
