Benjamin Garbers

You're six-feet, 190 pounds and can type System.out.println faster than most people can say AJAX. You're a person who dreams about the Milwaukee Brewers winning the World Series and the correct data structure to be used when talking about a baseball player. You've spent five years of your life writing Java code and leading Java development teams. You consider yourself an expert in Swing, Struts, XML, and XSL-FO and feel comfortable talking about any other buzzword in the Java world such as JSF, Portal, and AJAX. You've had experience as development lead on a team with anywhere from three to seven people where Java applications were rolled into production well within the scheduled deadline. Now you have received a management position on an internal Java development team. Where do you start? What things do you look at from day one? What's your role going to be as a ma... (more)

Assessing Employee Performance

My friends recently debated who the greatest baseball player was. Names that popped up right away were Babe Ruth, Willie Mays, Nolan Ryan, Cy Young, and Sandy Koufax. Cy Young had 511 wins, 14 seasons where he won 20 games and five other seasons where he won 30 games. But Sandy Koufax had three seasons where he had 300 strikeouts and in three seasons won 25 games. Babe Ruth hit 714 career home runs, a .342 lifetime average, and two seasons where he won 20 games as a pitcher. Willie Mays had 10 seasons where he batted in 100 runs, and was one of the best defensive centerfielders e... (more)