Engineering an Interesting Life
My latest in Quartz… It is truly a difficult and emotionally exhausting time to be a manager. Even those who are used to managing remotely are having to navigate the shifting expectations and chaos of disrupted lives and disrupted businesses. Of course, some people deal with that level of disruption by trying to increase control. […]
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My latest in Quartz… With a few other people, I run a Slack chat group for engineering managers. We’ve made some deliberate choices—for example, we don’t have a channel for #inclusion. Every so often this comes up, and we invoke our argument: Inclusion is central to good management, so all channels are inclusion channels. We […]
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My latest in Quartz… Over the past couple of weeks there has been so much conversation about how to work remotely, missing the key phrase during a global pandemic, which I’m not sure any of us has the answer to. Meanwhile, a lot of people are struggling, even those who already have been working remotely for awhile. […]
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My latest in Quartz… When given the opportunity to establish a process, we’re all biased to advocate for one in which we would be successful ourselves. In hiring, this plays out in two main ways: “A” players build monocultures, hiring people just like them, and “B” players hire “C” players, hiring people who won’t threaten […]
Read MoreLast week Nicole Sanchez of Vaya Consulting and I ran a webinar on remote management, you can find the video below. It was super fun recording it! There was also a summary post on WordPress.com. Tweet your questions at us with the hashtag #rfrw.
Read MoreOn my weekly todo list, there is an item “do something nice for a friend”. Last week, I assembled a care package. I asked myself, “what does a useless man need but won’t buy for himself?” – the answer, incidentally, was an exceptionally fluffy blanket, some really nice chocolate, vitamins, and assorted skincare. As I […]
Read MoreI’m in this book Living By the Code, talking about engineering management. Ray helpfully pulled out some of his highlights from my interview: 1) Keeping a team productiveI loved the section where you talked about orienting the entire team toward continuously delivering use value. It sounds so simple when you say it, but it’s so […]
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I sent 44 WTHIC letters from 14 countries on four continents, and had ten articles in Quartz. I was also interviewed in the BBC. This blog was seen by a smidgen over 40K visitors for just under 60K views, and I published 22 posts (many of which just linked out to the proper post elsewhere). […]
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In 2019, continuing on from 2017 and 2018, I continued to post a photo every day mirrored between photo.cate.blog and instagram (364 in total apparently, I must have missed one day). This year I experimented with more abstract things, text and positioning, and made heavy use of some new film style filters. I also posted a lot of […]
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“The best leaders master multiple leadership styles”, blithely comments some post on leadership. OK, including one written by me. But how? Many leaders are overly reliant on a style and this can hold them back. Generally leadership styles are a function of emotional intelligence, and working on emotional intelligence, such as working on becoming more […]
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