Want a great software development team? Look no further. How to Recruit and Hire Great Software Engineers: Building a Crack Development Team is a field guide and instruction manual for finding and hiring excellent engineers that fit your team, drive your success, and provide you with a competitive advantage. Focusing on proven methods, the book guides you through creating and tailoring a hiring process specific to your needs. You’ll learn to establish, implement, evaluate, and fine-tune a successful hiring process from beginning to end. Some studies show that really good programmers can be as much as 5 or even 10 times more productive than the rest. How do you find these rock star developers? Patrick McCuller, an experienced engineering and hiring manager, has made answering that question part of his life's work, and the result is this book. It covers sourcing talent, preparing for interviews, developing questions and exercises that reveal talent (or the lack thereof), handling common and uncommon situations, and onboarding your new hires. How to Recruit and Hire Great Software Engineers will make your hiring much more effective, providing a long-term edge for your projects. It will: Teach you everything you need to know to find and evaluate great software developers. Explain why and how you should consider candidates as customers, which makes offers easy to negotiate and close. Give you the methods to create and engineer an optimized process for your business from job description to onboarding and the hundreds of details in between. Provide analytical tools and metrics to help you improve the quality of your hires. This book will prove invaluable to new managers. But McCuller’s deep thinking on the subject will also help veteran managers who understand the essential importance of finding just the right person to move projects forward. Put into practice, the hiring process this book prescribes will not just improve the success rate of your projects—it’ll make your work life easier and lot more fun.

WINNER of Computing Reviews 20th Annual Best Review in the category Management “Tyler’s book is concise, reasonable, and full of interesting practices, including some curious ones you might consider adopting yourself if you become a software engineering manager.” —Fernando Berzal, CR, 10/23/2015 “Josh Tyler crafts a concise, no-nonsense, intensely focused guide for building the workhouse of Silicon Valley—the high-functioning software team.” —Gordon Rios, Summer Book Recommendations from the Smartest People We Know—Summer 2016 Building Great Software Engineering Teams provides engineering leaders, startup founders, and CTOs concrete, industry-proven guidance and techniques for recruiting, hiring, and managing software engineers in a fast-paced, competitive environment. With so much at stake, the challenge of scaling up a team can be intimidating. Engineering leaders in growing companies of all sizes need to know how to find great candidates, create effective interviewing and hiring processes, bring out the best in people and their work, provide meaningful career development, learn to spot warning signs in their team, and manage their people for long-term success. Author Josh Tyler has spent nearly a decade building teams in high-growth startups, experimenting with every aspect of the task to see what works best. He draws on this experience to outline specific, detailed solutions augmented by instructive stories from his own experience. In this book you’ll learn how to build your team, starting with your first hire and continuing through the stages of development as you manage your team for growth and success. Organized to cover each step of the process in the order you’ll likely face them, and highlighted by stories of success and failure, it provides an easy-to-understand recipe for creating your high-powered engineering team.

Professionals in the interdisciplinary field of computer science focus on the design, operation, and maintenance of computational systems and software. Methodologies and tools of engineering are utilized alongside computer applications to develop efficient and precise information databases. Computer Systems and Software Engineering: Concepts, Methodologies, Tools, and Applications is a comprehensive reference source for the latest scholarly material on trends, techniques, and uses of various technology applications and examines the benefits and challenges of these computational developments. Highlighting a range of pertinent topics such as utility computing, computer security, and information systems applications, this multi-volume book is ideally designed for academicians, researchers, students, web designers, software developers, and practitioners interested in computer systems and software engineering.

Managing Projects in the Real World provides clear and actionable advice to project managers for recognizing, anticipating, and overcoming challenges associated with the human component of leading others. The mechanics of project management are rational and straightforward to learn. The art of project management is irrational and complex to learn. Project managers need to develop a repertoire of soft skills that are typically hard for them, since they rose through the ranks to that position by virtue of superior reasoning skills. But if a project manager cannot adjudicate the clash of personalities, finesse the friction between assigned and preferred roles, steer clear of hidden hazards, and diplomatically resolve overlapping assertions of competing authority—that project manager is in a world of trouble. From the human perils of project management, nobody is better qualified to rescue beleaguered project managers than Melanie McBride—veteran PM and author of the Intel blog, The Accidental Profession. She sheds light on those dark, dusty places that fall between the cracks of theory and best practice out in the real world where irate colleagues, unrealistic product launch dates, and virtual meetings reign supreme and run amok. In this book you’ll find targeted discussions and specific techniques to empower you to meet the challenges that project managers face every day. The book is structured into project phases to help any project manager on any kind of project jump right to the tried and true solution for the challenge at hand.

Being Agile is your roadmap to successfully transforming your organization to an Agile culture. Veteran agile coach Mario Moreira teaches new adopters how to implement a robust Agile framework to derive from it the maximum business benefit in terms of customer value, revenue, and employee engagement. Agile is a ubiquitous watchword in the corporate world, but only a minority of companies understand and practice what they pay lip service to. Too many content themselves with half-baked approximations such as Fragile (fragile Agile), ScrumBut (Scrum but not the practices), and Scrum Fall (mini-waterfalls in the sprints). Moreira shows maturing early adopters how to bridge the chasm between going through the motions of doing Agile and genuinely being Agile. After a high-level synopsis of Agile’s values and principles, methodologies (including Scrum, Kanban, DSDM, Leam, VFQ, and XP), and roles, Moreira plunges into the nitty-gritty of how to apply the ready, implement, coach, and hone (RICH) deployment model to all phases of a project in such a way as to embody and inculcate agile values and principles at the team level and promote agile transformation across your organization's culture.

Advanced Negotiation Techniques provides a wealth of material in a winning combination of practical experience and good research to give you a series of tools, techniques, and real-life examples to help you achieve your negotiation objectives. For 25 years and across 40 countries, the Resource Development Centre (RDC), run by negotiation experts Alan McCarthy and Steve Hay, has helped thousands of people to conduct successful negotiations of every type. Many RDC clients have been business professionals who have learned how to sell more successfully. Others have improved their buying skills. A few clients have applied the RDC techniques outside the business environment altogether—for instance, in such areas as international diplomatic services, including hostage and kidnap situations. As you’ll discover, the RDC philosophy is centered on business ethics and a principled approach to negotiation that maximizes the value of the outcomes for both parties. It can even create additional value that neither party could find in isolation. In this book, you will learn: The ten golden rules for successful negotiations How to handle conflicts with your negotiating partners What hostage and kidnapping negotiations can teach managers negotiating in business settings How to ensure both sides perceive any agreement as a "win" Achieve higher-profit deals in difficult circumstances In the business world, negotiating with other companies, government officials, and even your colleagues is a fact of life. Advanced Negotiation Techniques takes you through a system for planning and conducting negotiations that will enable you and your team to achieve your negotiation objectives. This is an internationally tried and tested process, with many current Blue Chip organizations applying it daily for a simple reason: the techniques are easy to implement and they work. That makes this book essential reading for those who want to achieve their goals in any area of life.

"A great book everyone can use to understand how tech startups work." —Rene Reinsberg, GM/VP at GoDaddy, CEO and Co-founder at Locu "Finally a book non-techies can use to understand the web technologies that are changing our lives." —Paul Bottino, Executive Director, Technology and Entrepreneurship Center, Harvard University "Through the simplicity of his presentation, Vinay shows that the basics of technology can be straightforwardly understood by anyone who puts in the time and effort to learn." —Joseph Lassiter, Professor of Management Science, Harvard Business School and Harvard Innovation Lab In a way that anyone can understand, How to Speak Tech: The Non-Techie's Guide to Tech Basics in Business spells out the essential technical terms and technologies involved in setting up a company’s website or web application. Nontechnical business readers will find their digital literacy painlessly improved with each ten-minute chapter of this illustrative story of one successful technology startup building its Web-based business from scratch. Vinay Trivedi—a private equity analyst and startup entrepreneur who works at the intersection of business and tech—employs the startup story line as his frame for explaining in plain language the technology behind our daily user experiences, the successful strategies of social media giants, the bold aspirations of tiny startups, and the competitive adaptations of ordinary businesses of all sizes and sectors. Along the way, he demystifies all those tech buzzwords in our business culture whose precise meanings are so often elusive even to the people using them. Internet hardware, application software, and business process: the working premise of this book is that none of it is beyond the basic understanding of nontechnical business readers. Trivedi peels back the mystery, explains it all in simplest terms, and gives his readers the wherewithal to listen intelligently and speak intelligibly when the subject turns to technology in business.

Managing Your Outsourced IT Services Provider teaches executives and managers of organizations how to unleash the full potential of their outsourced IT services workforce and IT-enabled business processes safely and profitably. Drawing on two decades of experience managing client relationships for global IT services companies, Venkatesh Upadrista guides outsourcing organizations around the hazards of geographic distance, linguistic miscommunication, organizational mismatch, and functional disparity between receiver requirements and provider capabilities. The first half of the book describes what an outsourcing organization needs to know about the IT services providers industry in general to deal intelligently with specific providers: namely, the industry’s organizational types, strategic drivers, competitive labor market constraints, and tactics for hitting P&L targets. The second half of the book teaches outsourcers how to evaluate prospective providers, craft service level agreements, formalize best practices, and manage the full gamut of receiver─provider relationships to optimize outcome in terms of cost, timeliness, and quality of services received. The descriptions and prescriptions in Managing Your Outsourced IT Services Provider apply equally to onshore and offshore outsourcing, but examples and case studies focus on offshoring. In addition, Upadrista analyzes the advantages, disadvantages, and special considerations and caveats of single provider outsourcing and captive centers.

Compensation fairness is a universal preoccupation in today’s workplace, from whispers around the water cooler to kabuki in the C-suite. Gender discrimination takes center stage in discussions of internal pay equity, but many other protected characteristics may be invoked as grounds for alleging discrimination: age, race, disability, physical appearance, and more. This broad range of vulnerability to discrimination charges is often neglected in corporate assessments of how well compensation systems comply with the law and satisfy employee norms of fairness. Blind spots in general equity constitute a serious threat to organizational performance and risk management. In Compensating Your Employees Fairly, a respected practitioner and consultant lays out in practical terms everything you need to know to protect your company along the full spectrum of internal pay equity issues, including all the technical methods you need to optimize compliance and minimize risk. Compensating Your Employees Fairly is a timely survey and comprehensive handbook for compensation specialists, HR professionals, EEO compliance officers, and in-house counsel. It provides all the information you need to ensure that compensation systems are equitable, auditable, internally consistent, and externally compliant with equal employment opportunity laws and regulations. The author presents technical information—both legal and statistical—in common-sense terms. Her non-technical breakdown of complex statistical concepts distills just as much as practitioners need to know in order to effectively deploy and interpret the standard applications of statistical analysis to internal pay equity. The focus throughout the book is on real-world application, current examples, and up-to-the-minute information on recent and pending wrinkles in the evolving legal landscape. Readers of Compensating Your Employees Fairly will learn: Why internal equity in compensation matters How to detect intentional and non-intentional discrimination in compensation The basics of statistical inference and multiple regression analysis The essentials of data availability, measurability, and collection The criteria for assessing compensation systems for internal equity How to investigate potential problems and react to formal complaints and actions How to avoid litigation and put in place ongoing measures for proactive self-auditing What you’ll learn Readers of Compensating Your Employees Fairly will learn: Why internal equity in compensation matters How to detect intentional and non-intentional discrimination in compensation How to investigate potential problems and react to formal complaints and actions How to avoid litigation and put in place ongoing measures for proactive self-auditing Who this book is for HR professionals, compensation specialists, EEO compliance officers, in-house counsel, and employment attorneys will find invaluable the expert author’s non-technical treatment of the technical issues that are essential to understanding all facets of internal pay equity. Without a working understanding of how to make their data tell a clear story, these various professionals cannot ensure that their compensation systems are equitable, auditable, and demonstrably compliant with equal employment opportunity laws and regulations. Table of Contents Why Equity in Compensation Matters Types of Discrimination in Compensation Multiple Regression Analysis The Data Regression Models of Equal Pay Other Tests of Equal Pay Analysis Follow-Up The Changing Landscape of Pay Equity Enforcement Causes of the Gender Pay Gap Litigation Avoidance and Proactive Self-Analysis The Basics of Statistical Inference

Every day, Main Street businesses wrestle with the challenge of finding the cash to finance growth or use as working capital. The local banker often wants a credit score of 720, three or more years in business, and a fat savings account. No wonder local bankers approve only 10% of loan applications. Getting a Business Loan: Financing Your Main Street Business shares something your local banker might not want you to know—small business owners have options. And this book describes those alternative lending sources in detail, as well as traditional sources of funding like banks and credit unions. Half of all business startups don’t make past their fifth birthday—and often because they can’t find the financing required to sustain their operations. Whether you own a small restaurant, a bicycle shop, a hardware store, a small manufacturing company, or a service business, Getting a Business Loan offers easy-to-understand descriptions of loan options that can keep you going, as well as practical advice on where to look for money and how to apply. What would you do with an extra $40,000? Expand your restaurant? Hire a new employee to fulfill a new contract? Buy a needed piece of equipment? Getting a Business Loan will: Detail how bankers look at you and your loan application Explain the menu of non-bank financing options available to business owners, like asset-based lending, factoring, merchant cash advance, local “hard money,” and more Show how to locate potential lenders via the Internet and other means Show how to prepare before you visit the lender or fill out an application Main Street businesses aren’t limited by the local bank’s footprint any more. There are people and institutions all across the country that lend money to small business owners. If you want to find the money you need to strengthen and expand your business, Getting a Business Loan will show you how.