We’ve all heard this question before. Heck, it’s even printed on magnets. When your quote gets to magnets, you must have a good one.
There are a million silly answers to this question — “Go rob a bank! Duh! You’d be rich!” Right, right. But let’s set those aside for now.
Instead, here are the two answers that I just keep coming back to:
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While in school at the University of Illinois from 1995-2000, I spent some time working at NCSA. This was just a few short years after Marc Andreessen had worked there, but even by then, the stories about the development of Mosaic were starting to become legend.
His work on Mosaic with Eric Bina changed the world forever, and he’s clearly a brilliant guy, so I’ve always enjoyed hearing his thoughts on things.
His talk with Charlie Rose on the February 19 episode of The Charlie Rose Show is a great one. There are few conversations I enjoy watching more than when these two hook it up. You will, too. Give it a look.
Without fail, if you work at any small software company long enough, you will one day end up in a meeting where someone is introducing new ideas or new tools to “keep Engineering on track.”
“It seems like we’re slipping deadlines a lot lately. With this tool, we’ll be better able to communicate the current status of Project XYZ and keep that from happening.”
This will undoubtedly have followed weeks of rumblings about how “the Engineering team is talented, but just seems to be a little off track.”
In my experience, when this happens, you can almost always bet that the Engineering team isn’t lacking process, it’s lacking passion. And if there’s one thing I know for sure, it’s that process can never replace passion. Never.
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