Engineering an Interesting Life
I’ve never been good at what you might call “life admin”, but I used to keep track of it through having a high level of 1) recall, 2) guilt and anxiety. I can’t say this system was working well, I was pretty behind on this stuff (such as… still having an Australian bank account five […]
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In February I took the building alignment workshop run by Co Leadership with my colleague (at the time) Beau. I had wanted to take one of Jean and Edmond’s workshops for some time, and it did not disappoint; it was super helpful, going beyond the normal management 101 and more deeply into collaborating cross functionally. Whilst they […]
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Maybe You Should Talk to Someone (Amazon) was one of the most impactful books I read in 2019. It was extremely readable and super insightful. Reading this book fundamentally changed my approach to therapy, helped me accelerate my progress, and ultimately finish* (*at least for now) therapy. Therapy is such a personal thing and it’s […]
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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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