Stories about: Boss

"As an IT manager, are you going to put your reputation on the line that five guys from a small startup in Vancouver are to deliver for your organization," asked Jevon MacDonald, blogger and co-founder at StartupNorth.ca.

Remember when the services and practices the CIO presided over seemed so arcane that those CIOs might as well have been high priests, officiating over some mystifying ritual intended to raise the dead

In many ways, managing a developer is just like managing any other employee. Developers want managers who'll help them solve business and technical problems, who'll protect them from unnecessary office politics and who will help them meet their personal career goals. But programmers are...different. Like musicians, these creative folks can alternate between big-picture thinking and persnickety detail in a heartbeat. They can be sidetracked by silly toys, and convinced to work overtime by the promise of pizza and a T-shirt. Trying to understand and motivate these people can drive managers-particularly nontechnical managers-to distraction.

Facing a potential onslaught of baby boomer retirements and a smaller pool of Generation X employees to replace them, IT managers who want to create or sustain a Best Place to Work environment will need the additional help of another group of professionals: Generation Y. Also known as Millennials, this group consists of nearly 80 million individuals born roughly between 1979 and 1999. They are the workforce of the future.

A new website, Glassdoor.com, offers insights into employers, what they're paying and what staff members think of the boss. If, like me, that's too attractive a combination of voyeurism and cash envy to ignore clicking on, have a look and read on.

Five years ago, Jean Ritala was dating a businessman who started to demonstrate Jekyll and Hyde-like behavior. Well-spoken, charismatic and successful, he could also be manipulative and bullying, telling her that it was "his way or the highway."

Open-source solutions used to be adopted quietly by company boffins who snuck in an Apache Web server or an open-source development tool suite under the philosophy "It's easier to get forgiveness than permission" (not to mention "It's easier to do it with open-source tools than to get an IT budget").

Top technology executives implore ambitious IT executives to stretch beyond mere management, to develop themselves and their talented teams

If you're interested in learning how a hiring process can create a stronger IT department, and if you need effective techniques for assessing a candidate's cultural fit, you must read this interview with Harvard Business School CIO Stephen Laster

So you accept that new position, and within the first couple of weeks on the job, it all becomes clear: Your boss is an idiot. Now what?

It's a management axiom that the smarter the employees are, the harder they are to manage. Employees with a high degree of left-brain intelligence, which is common among IT professionals, can be demanding, blind to the opinions of others, easily bored and bent on being "right," according to the people who manage them.