Leadership

Ethical Leadership

In the recent years the technology industry has seen numerous cases of unethical practices from toplevel executives. Elizabeth Holmes, the CEO of Theranos put the lives of thousands of people into danger by hiding that the blood-testing technology she was promoting was not providing accurate results while on the same time she was hiding the truth from the company’s investors (Carreyrou, 2018). Uber’s CEO and Founder Travis Kalanick reportedly got involved into scandals about sexual harassment (Kleinman, 2017) that led to his resignation. In 2020...

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What I read during the lockdown

As the lockdown measures slowly ease, and we are getting back to some short of normality (at least temporarily), I was kinda reflecting on what I did the last months. I became a dad recently, and I was already 1 month at home on parental leave to help my partner and just the moment that I was supposed to return to the office the German government announced the lockdown and thankfully the company I worked for decided to ask us to work from home, so I am...

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Thoughts on rewards as a way to boost productivity

Just some thoughts related to monetary rewards as a way to boost employee performance. Have you ever done an activity that you truly enjoyed until someone else wanted to pay you for the work, where you suddendly stopped enjoying the activity? Have you ever got a bonus about something you did, just to see with great dissapointment that the same activity didn't lead to a bonus the next time you performed it? Have your performance dropped after it?

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Working on vacations (as a Lead)

These are some random thoughs/tips, related leadership and working on vacations. If you are team-lead/manager/supervisor/whatever-you-call-it: ...

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Compensation does not guarantee motivation

Let's start with a story. A few years ago I was working in a start-up, the company had just started, and we were working on the first ever product. There were hundreds of bugs and performance issues, the server was crashing every few minutes...

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Giving praise

Just some thoughts on giving praise. One of the biggest mistakes that you can make as a manager/team-lead/head-of-whatever is to give praise only to a few of the people who worked on a project...

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Implementing feature toggles for a React App using Webpack

Feature switches/toggles are an important technique that can help us deploy code in various environments under different conditions without blocking other developers in the team (or other teams) from releasing their features...

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