Management

What Motivated programmers?

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I will start with a question, if you have a spare £400 in your development budget do you A) Reward your star programmer with a £400 bonus or B) Buy him/her a 24 Inch 1920×1200 LCD screen?
I previously asked […]

31Dec2007 | Nick Halstead | 39 comments | Continued

What de-motivates programmers?

I wrote ‘What motivates programmers‘ several months ago and at the time it caused quite a stir. The basic idea was that programmers are not motivated by the same things as everyone else, they are a complex bunch and in general are more likely to be motivated by a nice big 24 Inch Screen than […]

21Oct2007 | Nick Halstead | 27 comments | Continued

Cybercar Human Problem

I was reading about a scheme to bring Cybercars into towns in England today. The idea is that they create dedicated paths for these little electric cars and put up Cybercar stops at which people can press a button and summon a car. They then tell it the destination (no idea how) and then the […]

27Sep2007 | Nick Halstead | 4 comments | Continued

Interview First Impressions

My first interview as a programmer was a telephone interview. Here is a short
transcript as I remember it (it was 17 years ago so it may not be accurate, as in storing PI in 3 bits accurate.)
(pleasantries have passed… and now I want to know what this job involves)
Me: So what kind of responsibilities will […]

22Aug2007 | Nick Halstead | 3 comments | Continued

Crunch Time

Firstly thanks to everyone who helped get the word out about fav.or.it the level of support and overall interest in the project has been amazing. We are planning on revealing a few more secrets about the project over on the fav.or.it

20Aug2007 | Nick Halstead | 0 comments | Continued

Interviewing Programmers 101 - Part 3

In the murky past I wrote two article about interviewing programmers. The first covered the basics of interviewing itself and gave (hopefully) a good grounding for those who have never had to interview before. The second was all about the kind of testing you can do to filter out candidates before you commit to doing […]

13Aug2007 | Nick Halstead | 8 comments | Continued