Leading by praise: How to use a carrot when you really want a stick.

Many naive leaders believe they have two ways to enact change in their followers.  The first way is "the carrot" aka praising good behavior. The second way is "the stick"  aka criticizing bad behavior.  In my experience, the stick is extremely ineffective. I'd say the only time the stick has any positive impact is when the follower doesn't realize she's doing something wrong, or how serious that wrong thing is.   The goal of this post is how to use a carrot when you want a stick.  First lets recall how to use a carrot effectively in general: Keep it timely, short,...

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Google killed the video store

As a younger man I remember arguing with a co-worker about the death of local storage. Me: Who wants to store data themselves?  I can store all data in the cloud, where it will be preserved forever!Wiser co-worker: What incentive does this cloud have to keep your data? I'll keep my data on my local hard drive thank you very much!  8 years later my co-worker was  correct. I got the following letter from Google today:Later this month, hosted video content on Google Video will no longer be available for playback. <snip> We’ve added a Download button to the video status page,...

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Software Engineering “The Soft Skills”

To date, I've focused my blog on the "computer" parts of software engineering. However, as I've grown as a software engineer, one of my largest aha moments is the realization that software engineering is all about people. As such, I'll start posting articles dealing not just with computers, but also with communication, people leadership and management. These "people skills" are as important to a software engineer as the ability to crank out a design specification. For the hardcore among you that think people skills have nothing to do with software, consider th...

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Impedance MisMatch: IEnumerable<T> to DataTable

I had to work with a class that consumed a System.DataTable today. DataTable is an old class that pre-dates generics in the CLR. DataTable carries typed data as an array of System.Object - double plus yuck! As you can imagine the code I use these days has compiler verified type safety by using IEnumerable everywhere. So how did I convert from my beloved IEnumerable to the yucky DataTable? With reflection of course! This simple method solves our problems: public static DataTable ToDataTable(IEnumerable rows){ var tableToReturn = new DataTable(); // get properties of T var properties =...

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