Posted on February 7th, 2008 by Buu Nguyen
What are the attributes that every leader, be she a mid-level manager or a CEO, need to have to be highly effective? Technical competency and domain knowledge? Obviously, although these are different for different industries or functional areas. Below is the list of industry- and functional-independent attributes which I think a good leader must possess. I will not go into deep details for each of the attribute because that would make this post very long. Therefore, I will leave the elaboration of each of the attributes to subsequent posts. Read more »
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Posted on November 23rd, 2007 by Buu Nguyen
In the last few posts on interviewing, I discussed mostly about the technical aspects of the interviewing process and some readers had raised the concern that whether technical competence alone is sufficient for doing programming job well. Well, it’s definitely not. In this post, I will discuss on the three most important factors, besides technical skills, that people must care about when evaluating candidates for a programming job.
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Filed under: Management, Self Improvement, Software Engineering | 9 Comments »
Posted on April 9th, 2007 by Buu Nguyen
Last month, I wrote about autonomy being the number one characteristic of any employee and that the boss should be able to expect his/her staffs to produce satisfactory work all the time as long as they are clear about the objectives. Some people commented back saying that while autonomy is a good thing, such expectation from the boss is unrealistic and the boss should not rely on his staffs’ work product without examining it thoroughly him/herself. And I did express my disagreement in my responses since it is my belief that any project in which the boss cannot expect his staffs to be autonomous, and anybody can assume that s/he can product any mediocre pile of work and there will always be some other people (e.g. the boss) to review his/her works and spot out the problems for him/her then that project is already destined to be doomed. And while I still hold my position on that matter, I realize that I missed one key variable to make my point better argued: competence.
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Posted on March 5th, 2007 by Buu Nguyen
When we are assigned with a task, we are usually expected to:
- Provide an estimation of how long it will take to finish the task
- Go ahead and start working on it
- Report problems and issues preventing the work from being done
- Finish the task and report the result
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Posted on January 23rd, 2007 by Buu Nguyen
Behind closed doors - Secrets of great management, by Johanna Rothman and Esther Derby, walks the readers through a story of a mid-level manager, Sam, who turns a group of “disconnected” people into a single jelled team who works together to achieve the organization goals. Read more »
Filed under: Management, Read List, Self Improvement | No Comments »
