Interviewing from the Other Side

Today was a first in my career — I sat on the other side of the interviewing table.  In others words, I was the job interviewer, not the job interviewee.

To be fair, it was an internal interview and I also knew the guy and encouraged him to apply.  I’m also not a  decision maker.  My manager asked me and other members of the team that weren’t decision makers to sit in.  His reasoning was that we were going to be working with the guy and he would like our impressions.  I was up front with my manager — that I encouraged him to apply in the first place (though he asked me about the position first) and he said he was fine with that and said he’d still like my impressions.

So I went. It was a little weird not being the one that is nervous,  but trying to see how this person will fit in with the team was hard.  As well as, “What did he mean with that answer?”

The Incredible Shrinking Me

I’ve struggled with my weight my entire adult life. You have to understand that to understand what follows:

Around the beginning of the year, I started making a list of “things I want to accomplish”. Not quite resolutions, but things that absolutely needed to be done. I put “Lose Weight” at the bottom of the list, not because it’s so important, but the other items were more immediate and short-term. I’ve also not come up with a weight-loss strategy that has worked for me more than a few months. I didn’t want to add a diet and exercise regime into a mix with a lot of other things that I want do . I already had enough to do without all the stress of watching my weight. If I just could maintain it through the next year, I would be happy.

Fast-forward to the end of May. I ran into someone that I don’t see very often and he said that he could tell I was losing weight. I kind of flaked it off, thinking that he just hasn’t seem me in a while. A few days later, someone else made the same comment. And then, a few days later, yet another person mentioned it. I stopped to think — surely there was a pattern here.

I didn’t feel any lighter, but I decided that I maybe needed to be more observant. When I got dressed for work the next day, I grabbed a pair of pants that used to be a tad snug so I hadn’t worn them in a while. Sure enough they were fitting better. Quite a bit better, in fact. That day, while waiting for the bus, someone else mentioned that they could tell that I was losing weight.

This is actually quite crazy, because I’m not doing one thing to lose weight. In fact, my diet is probably worse than a year ago. I used to be more careful about what I eat, but lately I haven’t even been paying attention.

So what’s happening? Do I have a tapeworm living inside me? I hope not. After Gina and I racked our brains, we came up with something: the garden and by association, the yard.

It seems that all the work in the garden and yard has been enough consistent exercise that it has helped me shed some pounds. My embracing the hobby of gardening (which was on my “Must Do” list for this year) seems to have put me on the weight loss path. Who would have guessed? And what will happen next year, when Gina and I expand are garden? Yes, that plan is already in the works.  Who knows?

But, then again,  I just saw Dave for the first time in months and he didn’t say anything about it, so maybe I’m just getting excited over nothing.

The Accidental Feature

My manager was able to squeeze in another last-minute feature into this sprint.  When he told me what it was, I wasn’t too happy about it.  That part of the code isn’t the greatest, and I knew that we have some issues in that part of the functionality anyway.  I scheduled about 3 days for that task, which is quite a long time for me.

So, this morning, I decided to get it over with.  Thought about just changing the code, and I decided that I needed to walk the talk and wrote the unit test first.  I ran it, thinking that things would go up in flames. The results shocked me.

The test pass.  The feature was already there!!

I wasn’t sure how or why.  I took a look at the code and figured that it was wrong it how it did things, but it must have been wrong in the right way.  Or two wrongs made a right or something, because the feature was already in there.  I decided that I shouldn’t just cross all three days off my list, but instead cleaned the code up some, re-ran my test and it still worked.  So I checked it in and I was done.

Thus is the beauty of Test-Driven Development — you know when you are done.  And, with the unit test checked in, I knew that the Accidental Feature would always work.

Even when it shouldn’t.

Seven Habits of Highly Effective People

Just before the Memorial Holiday, I took a class through work officially called “Effective Leadership” but it was actually “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Managers” and it was taught by an instructor from FranklinCovey.  I went into the class not thinking that it would be very good, but left knowing that I could change how I handled some things that would not only make things better for me, but for those that I work with.  I’ve been focusing on what other people have been doing to make things difficult for me, but I have only recently been focusing on what I can do to make things better.  Not only for me, but for the people I work with.  In other words, I need to be committed like the Pig.  

By the name, you can guess that the class was based on The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. I hadn’t been officially introduced to the Seven Habits before, but as we went through them, I had heard most of them in one form or another.  Some items I probably won’t do in the near future, but others I have always done and with good success.  And I won’t be buying a Franklin planner anytime soon!

The instructor we had was especially good — he was personable, energetic, and honest about things from his past experiences.   He kept the class at a fast pace but also kept it very interactive.  The interaction between my co-workers was my favorite part.  When you work for a large company like I do, you don’t get much exposure to other departments.  But this class was company-wide — not just IT.  In fact, there was only one other person besides me in IT that took the class.  The rest was from many other departments.  Hearing fresh perspectives on our problems, and hearing validation on the problems we see, was all good. Of course, I had to relate this all back to being a better ScrumMaster.  What can I do to make my role as a ScrumMaster better?  Here are some points:

• Asking for feedback and what I am doing.  And lately I haven’t even had to ask for it.
• Planning my meetings better.   We waste a lot of time in our meetings.  The class gave us some tools for making our meetings better.
• I’ve never really struggled with being proactive, but am trying to improve my  goals.  But, no, I’m not planning on writing a personal vision statement anytime soon.
• Put First Things First.
• I’m working hard to get our team to Synergize more.

With Love . . . and a CDL

Bart on his latest mission:

we get to make things up as we go along, and take chances on people that nobody else would take chances on, and hold our breath together. And we get to do all that with the almost giddy confidence that all the love in the world is on our side.

You may not always agree with him, but he genuinely loves the people he has promised to serve.