favorites

Hazards of Being a Manager

“Dude, you just got mooned!”, he quipped. Indeed. I’m staring at my laptop in disbelief. Did that really happen?

Video chatting with random strangers, what else should I expect? But this was no Chatroulette. And these were no strangers. Au contraire. I was testing our video chat product at Spotlife, a startup company I co-founded during the dot-com boom. And I had just witnessed the naked posterior of my employee’s wife splashed in all its white glory on my screen.
Read More

7 Sins of Doomed Teams

Software development teams are not created equal. Some are great. Some aspire to be great. Some are very dysfunctional.

Here’s a run down of ways engineers can err. As dreadful as it sounds, rejoice. Salvation is right around the corner. Watch for those signs of trouble and lead the way to redemption.
Read More

My Disastrous Interview at BitTorrent

“Let’s go thru it one more time,” he said. I’m sitting across the table from Bram Cohen, the creator of the BitTorrent protocol. In front of him lays a printout with a dozen lines of Python code.

“Well, I’m not sure what this code does anymore,” I replied. I was nervous. I did not expect to be asked to reverse engineer an algorithm on the spot like that. Specially not as a first interview question for an engineering management position and in a language I knew nothing about. In fact, I did not know what to expect at all when I stepped foot in that San Francisco office.
Read More