Development
The Mythical Man-Month by Fred Brooks, part 1 (CS 428, Winter 2019)
My in-class lecture covering the first few chapters of The Mythical Man-Month by Fred Brooks.
Overdoing the perks in IT
Rachel Feintzeig at the New York Times has an interesting piece on how the perk-rich environment of Silicon Valley is causing problems for non-SV companies: Years ago, it was just Silicon Valley firms that vied to outdo one other on perks, but as more companies go on the hunt for skilled workers to power their technology, […]
Remember Conway’s Law
Some years ago, I was called in to lead a team of three other people in reviewing a major project at a Fortune 50 corporation. This project, which I’ll call QUBE, was a major end-to-end re-engineering of that firm’s mission-critical systems, intended to replace all the existing legacy systems. The QUBE project was supposed to […]
How to retain IT talent with goal alignment
Back in 1990, I was hired by the principals of a start-up company (Pages Software) to build an engineering team from scratch to create a new product: a design-oriented word processor. For more than a year and a half, I acted both as head of engineering and as chief software architect — a dual role […]
“The Real Software Crisis” [BYTE Magazine, January 1996]
![“The Real Software Crisis” [BYTE Magazine, January 1996]](http://brucefwebster.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/byte-logo.gif "“The Real Software Crisis” [BYTE Magazine, January 1996]"){kind=logo}
[This commentary of mine, published in the January 1996 edition of BYTE Magazine (p. 218), used to be available on-line at BYTE.com, but no longer is, so I’ve re-posted it here. In the 17 years since I wrote it, I’ve seen nothing to change my mind.] The shortage of top-notch programmers threatens to become the […]