The Software Engineering Radio podcast has just published an episode with an interview with Ron Lichty. If you’re either thinking about moving from development into management or already have, it’s well worth a listen. Unfortunately there is only so much that can be packed into an hour’s worth of a podcast, but just based on the podcast, Ron’s book “Managing the Unmanageable” just found itself added to my ever-growing reading list.

As a lot of people keep pointing out over and over again, a job ad is an ad. Its often forgotten purpose is to get someone competent excited enough about your company and the job opening you’re trying to fill to send in a well crafted resume with a well crafted cover email[^1].

We all know good people who can’t get a job for some odd reason, but whenever I find myself on the other side of the table I am amazed at how people don’t even bother to follow a couple of simple steps to massively increase your chances for a response. Yes, a lot of big companies seem to have their jobs email address hooked up directly to /dev/null but small companies still make up the majority of the software development landscape. With a small(er) company, there’s a good…