Abstract
In the beginning of any new job, we all have great hopes and, to some extent, a reasonable amount of fear that we might fail. As a successful programmer, you have, no doubt, had your share of new beginnings on projects and at places of employment. Now that you’ve been given the reigns to lead a group of programmers, a very new and perhaps daunting task is before you. You must evolve from programmer to leader as quickly as possible to thrive in your new software development role. This will entail adapting to a new social context and adopting new ways of interacting with your work world and the people in it.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
You know what a Ninja is—this word refers to the quality of being one, as in black-belt programming.
You can look up most of these terms in The New Hacker’s Dictionary,Third Edition, by Eric S. Raymond (The MIT Press, 1998).
Ellen Ullman, Close to the Machine ( San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1997 ), p. 20.
I’m using the term “architect” here in the sense of a programmer, not a full-fledged software architect. See Chapter 6 for a discussion about the importance of architecture in the grand scheme of development.
This concept is important because one authority estimates that at least 70 percent of software cost is related to maintenance. See William H. Brown et al, AntiPatterns: Refactoring Software, Architectures, and Projects in Crisis ( New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1998 ), p. 121.
Some may prefer the term “guru” or “wizard.” I like “magic.”
Don’t you hate users? What fun we could have if we only wrote software for programmers.
I prefer the term “program anomaly” or “undocumented feature offering (UFO)” over “bug.”
Frederick P. Brooks, The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering, Anniversary Edition (New York: Addison-Wesley, 1995), p. 230. This is a timeless classic—very few books in our field are reissued after 25 years, and this one is truly worthy.
This is a Southern expression for a trip to the woodshed, usually involving a spanking.
Actually, it accuses the fool of saying this. See Ecclesiastes 9:14–19 in a modern version for the context. Try not to get too depressed when you read this.
See the New Testament, 1 Timothy 6:10, where love, money, and evil are related together in a nice, logical syllogism.
You know what “thunking” is if you’ve been under the covers with compilers. You’ll soon figure out my play on words.
Jim McCarthy, Dynamics of Software Development ( Redmond, WA: Microsoft Press, 1995 ), P. 5.
The phrase “like white on rice” is Southern for “in your face.”
Many would say that if everyone agrees then when things go bad, everyone is to blame. This may be true, but as managers we should be more concerned with fixing problems than affixing blame. Success has many parents—be one.
The initialize event in VB accepts no parameters and does not return any.
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2002 J. Hank Rainwater
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Rainwater, J.H. (2002). Adapting to Your Leadership Role. In: Herding Cats: A Primer for Programmers Who Lead Programmers. Apress, Berkeley, CA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4302-0830-3_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4302-0830-3_1
Publisher Name: Apress, Berkeley, CA
Print ISBN: 978-1-59059-017-1
Online ISBN: 978-1-4302-0830-3
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive