Back in March I had a brush with Nokia in Oslo and Qt Software. I made a bad pitch, and the following comment about it here was one result.
A far worse offense was that I also missed Joel Spolsky’s post How to be a program manager which gives a very nice ‘software product’ view of what a program manager is (and is more interesting to read than the Wikipedia entry that I offered up as a definition).
I wish I had access to the sort of team and environment that Joel describes. He works out of a city with almost half the population of the country that I live in. The state (NY) as a whole actually does match that country’s population (Australia).
I’m afraid that here in Brisbane Australia, many large companies and government departments are as far away from Joel’s description of ‘enlightened software development’ as they could possibly be. This sweeping comment does beg forgiveness of the many excellent agile ‘software product’ shops that operate here. Maybe that is why Joel’s own company exists and is possible, he went independent and is going against the grain by doing things the right way!
I will also add that Joel and his company are small (‘ish) fish in a very big software pond. Our pond has a few huge sharks and the minnows are running scared ;-) [Ed: we reserve the right to ignore any jokes about bait, legs,...]
