Amidst the tension, I was making every rookie management mistake in the book. Except I didn’t even have a book. I had no management experience and no training, nor did anyone around me. I made hiring mistakes. We were offered a course on Behavioral Interviewing, (which was the best thing I learned and saved my book, 20+ years later, pictured here), but even with the training, I put the wrong people in the wrong jobs. I recall my QA Manager being a disaster. There were other performance issues on my team. Wondering what to do when I found an employee sleeping under his desk. I didn’t know how to handle any of them. I tried to use my engineering skills to fix the problems, but you can imagine how that turned out.
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