It's hard-earned knowledge. I have had the privilege to work with Ivan and couldn't pass posting it here because it is an awesome piece. What he outlines is equally applicable for anything that involves a lot of people. It all boils down to fixing the people issue. It is interesting that many times you do not even have to change the people to make the machine work.It almost always comes to lack of experience, lack of leadership from above, unclear goals and denial you have a problem (which is due to the lack of experience).
You brought an interesting point and I have observed it myself too. At many occasions teams would be on the track to improvement but they would crumble because of pressure from above. When a kid can't even walk, regardless of how hard you push it, it can't start running. This applies to engineering teams too.
.NET is a framework. Most devs and knowledgeable people refer to it as such. There are a number of languages such as VB.NET, C#, F# which are supported by the framework.
I means they wanted you on the team. We also do the same and accept custom requests because we want the people to join our company. We are not indifferent to people. Fo some companies, though, especially those more focused on financial engineering than creating customer value prefer the my way or the highway approach. As I said in another comment for hem you are just a number.
True. But look at it from the perspective of the big company - they thrive on process more than empowerment and creativity. Btw, don't get me wrong, I am not defending Zynga. I lost all respec for that company after they asked some early employees to turn over their shares because they did not deserve as much as they held.
That's the problem. They just didn't care enough to accommodate the change. If they really wanted the guy they would have said ok. But I guess he was just a number for Zynga and not a human being and valuable team member. While I understand why it doesn't make sense for a big company to be flexible in such negotiations I still find it sad that companies don't value enough the talent that comes their way.
Great article. I also share the view that humility is a very important trait. As an entrepreneur, you will fail many times. If you are not humble you probably will blame outside factors for your failure rather than take a deep look inside, see what you did wrong and improve on that.
Exactly - it makes zero sense for Zynga to accept all kinds of special requests and addendums so that everyone is on board. Big companies do bend but only in cases when there's no alternatives.
You brought an interesting point and I have observed it myself too. At many occasions teams would be on the track to improvement but they would crumble because of pressure from above. When a kid can't even walk, regardless of how hard you push it, it can't start running. This applies to engineering teams too.