Zach on Leadership

There are few things that make an engineer’s guts churn like corporate politics. Let’s face it, engineers are pretty rational people for the most part. We like decisions that are made by reason and facts, not emotion or politics. But the reality of all enterprise-scale organizations is that politics play a part in the decision-making process at least some of the time. And that of course, irks us. While we understand that we will never find a politics-free workplace, we…

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This article is about networking. Actual in-person, human-to-human communication. You know, in meatspace. For the those of you that don’t know what meatspace is, I’ll define it for you: It’s real life. The term is derived from the Terry Bisson’s famous 1990 science fiction short story, They’re Made Out of Meat. As technology professionals, we live digital lives in cyberspace. Meatspace can be a special challenge. Let’s face it, we went into the technology profession because we like talking to…

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Hackers are bad, scary, criminal, and worst of all, they wear hoodies, right? Hackers don’t belong in enterprise technology teams, right? Wrong! Personally, I’ve been fascinated by hackers my whole life, probably since I first saw WarGames. While I don’t consider myself a hacker, I’ve done some light hacking over the years. Shortly after I went to school and learned Windows networking, I visited a friend’s house and he showed me his new computer. I noticed he had high-speed internet (somewhat…

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Some technology leaders come from the business. Other technology leaders come-up through the ranks of technicians, engineers, and developers. For those of you in the second category, this article is all about how letting your “geek flag fly” can help you be a better leader. You may think that being a geek isn’t an advantage, and you need shed your geeky ways to fit in with the mainstream business leadership crowd. While aspects of that may be true, I’ll argue…

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