Hello, world.
For many leaders the hardest job they have is getting comfortable with not knowing. It is natural to feel like you have to understand everything about the area that you lead. And that’s a feeling that often cascades down through hierarchies. My boss expects me to be able to answer an arbitrary question on the spot, in order to accomplish that I need to be an expert on an increasingly large number…
As leadership, Q+A serves several important functions.
A model I return to a lot when talking about engineering processes is Push and Pull. Often when we design a new process or system we struggle to get buy-in. That lack of buy-in can often be traced to having forgotten the Push, the Pull, or both.
I recently sat down with Brett Berson for a wide ranging conversation about engineering leadership for First Round’s In Depth podcast.
Shopify continues to attract attention for it’s ridiculously reductionist takes on productivity, from meeting armageddon to more recently a meeting cost calculator.
Last year, after I left Dropbox, I spent some of my break interviewing people in industry about the state of software development. I started a blog series based on those notes. I had always planned to finish publishing it over on the personal blog, and then clean it up and bring it here to the “work” blog. But that plan has lapsed because I got busy, and because I’ve held off on publishing the 4th…
How to plan? How hard could it be? 4k words scribbled down on a sunny October afternoon for people in tech observing the Season’s Traditional Annual Planning Process, inspired by a recent interview question (and 25 years of variously painful planning processes).
It appears that the pace of layoffs in our industry, after growing throughout much of 2022 to peak in June, is slowing (at least according to layoffs.fyi). Now seems as good a time write down some quick notes on layoffs without seeming like I’m sub-blogging (is that a word?) any company in particular. This is not a complete guide to doing layoffs. I think there is room and need for someone to…
Interviewing for a new job mostly sucks, but the fun part is you meet a whole lot of new, smart people, and also are called upon to reflect on what you’ve learned. Here’s a question I got asked recently in an interview and some thoughts on it. (adapted from the original Twitter thread ) Question ( from memory, not verbatim ): I’m leading a team, I understand my goals, all I really need from my…
There was a recent poll on Twitter about whether you should discount the engineering leadership advice from leaders whose in the field performance is perhaps less than ideal. Got me thinking about why writing about engineering leadership is hard. I came up with at least 4 reasons.