Moving into Management

Leadership skills a growing requirement

By Peggy Albright

The computing field asks a lot of its practitioners. Its professionals must be diligent, naturally curious, good problem solvers, able to grapple with big concepts as well as minutiae and willing to think outside of conventional boundaries to develop new code, architectures and applications that will find value in business and society. Yet in today’s competitive and global business environment, computing professionals must add yet another fundamental skill to the mix: the ability to lead and manage people. In fact, developing leadership and managerial skills is no longer a career option, it is becoming a requirement, says Wade Shaw, an IEEE Fellow, editor-in-chief of IEEE’s Engineering Management Review and dean and professor of engineering at Mercer University. According to Shaw, computing professionals today can expect to supervise someone else in some capacity within three to four years of completing an undergraduate degree. Most successful computer scientists and engineers will need to augment their technology skills with management responsibilities at some point in their career.

Developer, Engineer, or Architect?

Defining the differences between disciplines

By Andrew Anguelo

Back in the day, those who wrote software applications in the business space were called programmers. It was simple to understand what the work was at a particular level. For instance, a Programmer III was more experienced than a Programmer I. But over time, the title evolved to Programmer Analysts I, II, or III. Today we have software developers, engineers, and fairly recently, the new title of architect. A frustrating phenomena occurring around these titles is that developer and engineer are being used interchangeably, although they are distinct disciplines. In my opinion, the role of software architect has evolved as a result of interchanging developer and engineer titles to segregate specific skills a software engineer typically performs during the systems engineering process.

Polishing Your Presentation Skills

Technical speakers can take tips from comedians

By Bob Colwell

You're sitting in yet another interminable conference session. Man, this chair gets more uncomfortable by the millisecond. Who's that over there? He looks like Mike Meyers from this angle. Or maybe Mini Me. What's that interminable droning sound? Oops, that's the speaker going on and on about ... Whatever his topic is. You can't remember—your mind has been wandering for the past 10 minutes.You slide back into your reverie and idly wonder if it's true that your memory gets worse as you age and whether there's anything to the folk wisdom that says you're okay as long as you can remember what you ate for dinner in the past week. I think I had grilled salmon a week ago. Or was it that you had to remember for 10 days? Uh oh, I can't quite recall. That can't be good. But suddenly your attention is drawn back to the speaker, even though you can't quite put your finger on why. Something about his cadence, or pitch, or the way he paused and leaned away from the podium. You can just sense that he has momentarily diverged from his planned course and is about to extemporize. If there's going to be anything memorable from this talk, it will be now, when the speaker is making remarks off the cuff. The earlier part of the talk could have been a prerecorded audio track, but this part is real, immediate, full-bandwidth. The speaker is operating at his peak communications capacity, and the audience senses that and reacts accordingly.