Eric Spiegel

It was well after 10 PM and I was furiously writing code in my cubicle when I heard the footsteps behind me. My heart sank and I even felt a tingling of dread creep up my spine. An intruder? No. Much worse My manager. Let’s turn the clock back to earlier that morning. I was […]

“Where did you go to college?” Seemed like an innocent enough question when I asked it.A bunch of us developers from the consulting firm I worked with were at lunch talking tech. Then the conversation turned to college football and we were getting into friendly banter about our alma mater’s teams. I noticed one of […]

Everyone that works in IT is weird. Admit it – us techies all have quirks in our personalities and our approach to our work. The level of weirdness is just a matter of opinion, interpretation and context. Something in the techie DNA results in more weirdness than mere mortals (non-techies). Perhaps this quirkiness is because […]

“You’re fired!” Those are words that no developer wants to hear, especially with an exclamation point. Perhaps you are thinking it could never happen to you. Really? Do the following comforting thoughts cross your mind when you think about the possibility of getting fired someday? “I’m smarter than everyone else here.” “Everyone likes me too […]

This is a waste of time.” Our most senior programmer, Trey, was glaring at me across the conference room table, with a trace of desperation in his voice. I was explaining to our team that we were going to start doing peer reviews of code and unit testing results before they could submit their work […]

If you were starting an IT department from scratch today, would you hire a bunch of programmers and infrastructure engineers as employees, or would you simply hire a few core people and outsource the rest? It used to be that outsourcing or offshoring meant significant risk and limited success rates because of very limited insight […]

“Man, you are crazy if you put your college graduation date on your resume.” I was chatting with a couple of old, crusty software developers who were talking about updating resumes. The theme of the conversation had turned to our advanced age (over 40!) and the impact that being so “seasoned’ had on the marketability […]

“Where did you go to school?” I was having lunch with a new co-worker on our development team and just making small talk. Danny took a bite of his brown-bagged tuna salad sandwich, and as he chewed his garbled answer came out as “Ohio State.” I was impressed and said, “Oh, you’re a Buckeye. They […]

I do read your comments about my articles. Really I do! And it seems some of you should have chosen stand-up comedy over writing software. I also learned in response to my last article, Where’s Your Coding Happy Place?, that apparently it’s less about where you write code and more about getting into the “zone.” […]

Where’s your favorite place to write code? Leave a comment below. “Where are you?” The question was urgent. I was sitting in the office of a peer manager, who was on the other end of a cell phone conversation that I thought was absolutely ridiculous. Earlier in the morning she had left a message for […]