yegor256 podcast

The first thing you should worry about when you start a software project is how your product can be delivered to end-users in an automated way. Right after you managed to create a skeleton and make it "work on your laptop," start configuring the deployment pipeline. Only after it's done, demonstrate your product to your testers, partners, investors, customers, etc. Don't tell them that your produc...

I'm being asked about English speaking skills very often, that's why this video. You want to improve? Here is hot-list: 1) read English books; 2) watch movies in English, with subtitles; 3) find someone to chat with online, not about work; 4) go to the United States of America and stay there for a few months; 5) make lectures or presentations in English; 6) write in English, like blog post or anyt...

Quality management, if I understand PMBOK and ISO-9001 correctly, is all about the Plan-Do-Check-Act cycle, where we 1) plan what quality objectives are important for us and how they can be numbered, 2) let the team produce the results, 3) collect the numbers, and 4) compare them with our expectations and take corrective and preventive actions. In order to make this all happen, you need to turn yo...

Meetings are a great solution for lazy, immature, stupid, and non-professional software developers, architects, and their managers. The more you grow, the more professional you become, the bigger will be your frustration from those meetings. What is the alternative? How can we make technical decisions without sitting together in a room and talking? The alternative is a strict and disciplined proce...

When you are ready to delegate your software project to Zerocracy, you will need an architect, who will guide you through the bootstrap steps, will understand the requirements, will build the team of freelancers, and will supervise it, with the help of Zerocrat, our AI-powered chatbot. To find that architect you have to submit a Request-for-Proposal (RfP), which will be "purchased" by one of the m...

It happens very often: the requirements we have to work with are not clear. Customers, requirements providers, product owners, managers, architects, and other programmers are simply too lazy to specify them right and they just drop those feature requests and bugs on our heads. We have to deal with them. The most enthusiastic of us dive into those unclear problem descriptions and attempt to clear t...

You remember my recommendations for a programmer if the management is weak and stupid, right? Don't be loyal. Instead, use their resources for your own good. But what do you do if you are the architect and the tech lead of the project? In that case, the situation is more complicated, but it's solvable. You just need to be more careful, here is how. The full video is here: https://www.youtube.com/w...

Very often startup founders and CTOs are asking me how and whether it's possible to transition from traditional full-time management to pay-by-result and microtasking, which we practice in Zerocracy. My answer is that it's possible but expensive. It will take time, money, and nerves. Here is a short summary of why it will be so difficult and why you should use Zerocracy instead. The full video is...

Multitasking is something only senior developers can deal with, because it's stressful, results-focused, and demands a lot of skills, which junior developers simply don't have. However, the question is: What those junior developers should do? How they can contribute to the project? There is a number of possible ways. The full video is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6OHfh36zLsk

I know so many testers who think that they are QA engineers. They are so wrong that I decided to record a video about that. Testing is about breaking the software and finding bugs. QA is about watching the entire software development process and improving its quality indicators. They are two absolutely different activities. The full video is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hp4PL0AJAVo

Proper management is very rare, happens only in some companies. Others are treating people like office slaves, expecting them to do stay in the office instead of delivering results. What do you do when you happen to be hired by such a company? How do you change it? How can you improve your team and motivate your management to shift to better management practices, like microtasking, paying by resul...

Do you know what micromanagement is? It's when your manager is telling you exactly what you have to do right now in order to achieve the results he or she wants. The micromanager doesn't trust you and that's why wants and needs to control every step you make. It's annoying and unproductive, but it's inevitable unless you have small tasks and a transparent and unambiguous system of rewards and puni...

The average salary of american workers is growing 1% every year, while the paygap between similar jobs is decreasing. What do I think about this trend? Does it sound like people are getting more every year and it's good? Not at all. This trend is completely against what Zerocracy is fighting for: unequal pay for unequal contribution. We want to work with free people, who get what they deserve beca...

In order to do the project right, you need the right person, right? Wrong! This type of thinking doesn't help at all and only leads to failures. It's the management that needs to be "right," not its people. Watch this morning video about this problem: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SSZnloEHeOk

Microtasking is a great management method, provided you can break your larger scope into smaller micro-tasks. Who should do this decomposition and how much time will work by itself will take? This question I hear very often when we start talking about paying-by-results and microtasking. We've spent a few years to find the answer and the methodology invented was called Puzzle Driven Development, he...

You know how much I love microtasking and paying-by-result, but you may wonder how can we estimate the future of our projects if we deal with very small pieces of work. I made an attempt to explain it in the video. Long story short, microtasks not only make estimation easier for computers, but ensure much higher accuracy and preciseness of the result. The full video is here: https://www.youtube.co...

How do you protect your business ideas from potential theft by your own programmers? Do you sign NDAs? Do you hire only those who won't steal? Well, I believe you should do the opposite. Don't be scared of theft, just be prepared to prove that the idea was originally yours and share their success, when and if they get it. The full video is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H56jeG_Xi64

I've got a meeting with a potential investor a few days ago, which asked me to help him develop some software, in order to prove that Zerocracy is an investable business. I refused and here is the explanation of my logic. The full video is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3eRSRt-zDY

We claim that Zerocracy is an AI bot that is capable of managing people better than a human being. But very often I hear questions: How is it possible to make a computer so smart? Is AI so powerful already? In this morning video I ask you a question: Do you know what AI is? What exactly is happening in that "thinking" machines? Do they really "think" as you expect them to? No, they don't. Just lik...

If you need to demonstrate your investors that your software team is working hard on something great, you need a group of junior developers — they are easy to manage and are afraid of going into conflicts. On the other hand, if you need to develop a great product, you need senior developers. However, they are difficult to manage because they prefer to work for themselves, not for you and your proj...

I was asked to explain what Zerocracy is doing exactly, but a potential client of ours. Here is what I managed to create, in just 15 minutes (I wanted to do five, but didn't manage). The bottom line is that full-time hiring and outsourcing are two great recipes for disaster, for a young startup. To the contrary, Zerocracy is a life saver. The full video is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Goz...

Very often I hear people saying that microtasking is only suitable for junior developers, who are ready to work like "coding monkeys", while professional senior programmers can't do that. That's a mistake. Junior developer simply can't do microtasking, because it's stressful and complex. It's something that only experienced programmers can do right and make money out of it. The video is here: http...

The video is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3bjFXFRsI8

The video is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tHeXxLdGqqI

The video is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MF0xMjyKdKk