Feb 17Process Has Value; Focus On Process Drives Mediocrity“No plan of operations can with any certainty reach beyond the first encounter with the enemy” — Helmuth von Moltke the Elder “Plans are worthless, but planning is everything” — Dwight D. Eisenhower “Everyone has plans until they get hit for the first time” — Mike Tyson I am a…Leadership8 min readLeadership8 min read
Sep 1, 2022The Problem with Performance RatingsOne of the hallmarks of any performance management system is the performance rating — a single descriptor summing up what the company thought of your last 3, 6 or 12 months of work. …Management7 min readManagement7 min read
Aug 25, 2022How Staff+ Engineers Frustrate Their ManagersManaging Staff/Principal engineers, or those aspiring to be so, is genuinely a joy. They autonomously solve problems, want to be given opportunities rather than instructions, up-level everyone on your team and challenge you in all sorts of interesting ways. It can also be frustrating as get out. Given there has…Management And Leadership11 min readManagement And Leadership11 min read
Aug 18, 2022Interviewing for Conflict ResolutionA friend recently asked me how I interview leaders, especially senior+ engineering managers, on conflict resolution and management. I outlined some thoughts and it looked post-shaped, so here they are in a post. What Is Healthy and Unhealthy Conflict? Conflict is necessary — in fact, “Absence of Conflict” is the second of Patrick Lencioni’s Five Dysfunctions…Conflict Resolution5 min readConflict Resolution5 min read
Aug 11, 2022Reward Difficulty, not ComplexityA recurring conversation in performance reviews and calibrations is: “this is good work, but is it <Level> scope?”. One of the ways we deal with this is to talk about how complex the deliverable is, referring to huge design documents or RFCs, trawling through reams of hard-to-parse code, and so…Management And Leadership5 min readManagement And Leadership5 min read
Aug 5, 2022Make performance reviews more useful with written evaluationsIf you’re a manager at a company larger than a seed-stage startup, you probably have to deal with a regular performance management cycle. We could debate whether we should abolish them entirely or radically overhaul them, but for most of us they’re a fact of life. The biggest problem I…Software Engineering9 min readSoftware Engineering9 min read
Nov 16, 2021Message Crafting for software engineersOne of the key insights for staff/principal engineers is that the job is at least as much about people as it is about tech, increasingly so the more you grow your career. You have stakeholders to manage, junior engineers to mentor, peers to butt heads with, and so on. Most…Messaging19 min readMessaging19 min read
