alanmackenzie

Work on making people feel safe with the situation before asking for direct feedback.

A few examples of how this could be done:

  Give them more than a few weeks to get comfortable with you and the company culture.
  Give concrete examples of things that have improved due to employee feedback.

It's hard to offer better advice through a HN post but easy to observe in person. Perhaps you can hire an external consultant to help or ask a mentor or advisor to fill this role by spending a few days in your office.

I don't have a suggestion for an aggregator but ...

I find Harvard Business Review to be my best source of management and leadership article, both the books they publish and the quarterly magazine.

Another source I like is Software Lead Weekly mailing list.

Make sure your acceptance criteria for the deliverables and definitions of done for each stage in your workflow are explicit.

In future design your hiring test filter out candidates who don't understand the bars for quality that you require.

If you want staff which are "switched on" and learn things like the above through observation you may need to pay more to hire better quality staff.

There's a number of excellent resources suggested in this post by others already so I wont repeat them.

One unique thing about becoming a PHP expert is the contempt you'll occasionally run into from others in the technology world.

Remember engineers get paid to solve problems for the business and success has very little to do with what the current flavour of "cool" is.

These are all valid points but many organisations are not at the level of maturity where the inputs to the engineering team are of the high quality you're describing.

Additionally there's an element of negotiation or dialogue around requirements which can often lead to cheaper/quicker to market/better solutions with input from engineering.

Both of these are much easier to do in person.

As a London based developer for BBCWW who grew up in Glasgow I can tell you this is definitely a good thing, the BBC is far too London centric.

Being in a similar situation to you I was grossly confused with Ruby until I ran update-alternatives, then things started to make more sense.

Just when you think there's a dearth of good jobs in Scotland you get a nice surprise.

Great links.

Thanks, that was an incredibly helpful link.

Challenge accepted, thanks for the answers.