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Employment is a transaction, plain and simple. The employee is seeking a number of things, these likely include things like: income, retirement income, mental stimulation, insurance, or being part of a team. An employer has something that needs to get done and not enough people to do it. An employment agreement is reached when the individual believes that the company is offering a sufficient mix of benefits in exchange for their time and effort. We know all this, so why be so explicit in stating it here?

Every company or team has the people that have been there “from the beginning” whether literally or seemingly. These employees have been critical to the success of the business by putting in countless hours and effort beyond what was expected of them. When this happens once, the leadership feels gratitude, but when it happens repeatedly for 10, 20, or even 30 years, this gratitude often morphs into a sense of indebtedness.

Hiring is among the most challenging aspects to running a company. If done correctly, it can propel growth and success that you never imagined, but if done poorly it can lead to festering infections in culture and process that will be nearly impossible to get rid of. Unfortunately, there is no single technique, or even selection of techniques, that will be a silver bullet. Furthermore, each technique will have aspects what will eliminate candidates who might have been great, while letting others through that are not. Engineers present a unique challenge due to to the above-average density of introverted candidates when compared to other types of positions, like sales or human resources.

It doesn’t matter if you are a tech lead for a small group of developers or a manager of a large team of engineers, there are a number of practices that will drastically improve the results you end up with. Naturally, this can’t capture every aspect of good management, there are hundreds of books that do that in a more exhaustive way than I ever could, but I have personally seen each of these be the difference-maker with regard to how a team is able to execute.

It is long overdue, but given the nature of the website (not asking for any of your personal information) I hadn’t found the time to set it up. That said, OpTech now defaults to HTTPS ensuring you have a secure connection.

Please contact me, via Twitter or the Contact page, if you’re seeing any issues or getting any HTTPS warnings from Chrome or another browser. Warnings like the one shown below are NOT expected.

Many ask the valid question of why we cannot vote like we live in 2016 – online. We bank, shop, work, talk, and do just about everything else online, so why not voting? Some smaller countries do it – Chile and Estonia, for example, but in general there is a substantial risk to hacking.

The unfortunate truth is that our online banking and email are only as secure as they are, which depending whether you have two factor authentication and complex passwords might not be too secure, because most of us aren’t important enough to be the focus of targeted hacking. It is often called ‘security through obscurity’ – we blend into the crowd.

There are a lot of things to consider in an election, and this isn’t a political blog, so I’ll spare you an extended piece on this… unique…. 2016 United States Presidential Election. That said, technology relies on science and facts bound in reality to exist, so therefore I have to defend the spread of science and facts.

Only one major party candidate believes that climate change is a real thing. Science and technology tell us with certainty that climate change is real.

For all of modern history, engineers of many disciplines have needed a certification to practice their trade. This makes sense — you want bridges to withstand wind, you want a city’s sewage system to work correctly, and you don’t want airplanes falling out of the sky. In most cases, this is the Professional Engineer (PE) License. It requires industry experience and a rigorous test; the result is that your bridges, cars, and cities are safe.

For several years now, a sizable portion of the technology investor and news dialogue can boil down to “There’s definitely a bubble!” and “There’s definitely not a bubble!”

Far be it for me to weigh in here, I’m no investor, and feel far more comfortable giving my money to Betterment (not an ad, I just really love what they do) than investing (all of it) myself. With that being said, I do think I’ve got enough of a hold on the technology side to participate on the periphery of the conversation.

I first noticed a few years ago that as more items are getting connected, the management of that connection becomes a burden. You’ve got companies putting SIM cards in watches now which seems unnecessary today, but soon we’ll look back at it and wonder how we ever lived without it. There are SIM cards in phones of course, but also tablets, cars, home security systems, and more.

Do you manage each of these individually with their own account? Maybe, but probably not. It’s a bit scary to think that if the devices are all on one account, a hacker could obtain power over all of the accounts that connect and secure your entire life; but realistically this is only one entry on a long list of horrible things that could happen if you don’t take security seriously.