Category: Career
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Values Aren’t a Moral Imperative
One of the most impactful exercises in DRI Your Career has been the values exercise (Jean wrote about it here). At first this surprised me, but then I thought about it more. Even when you haven’t named your values, they are part of you. They shape how you see the world, and often feel like…
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A Season of Learning
There’s a concept in computer science called explore vs. exploit. Exploitation means using what you know to get reliable returns; exploration means trying new things at the cost of those returns. Most algorithms skew too hard toward exploit. Humans have also been known to do this – including me. The known path is comfortable. My…
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Wired for Change: When Tech Stopped Being “Safe”
For a long time — especially in software engineering — there was an unspoken promise: if you were smart enough, fast enough, or technical enough, the rest would work itself out. That promise no longer holds. I had the chance to talk with Amy Yee on her podcast Wired for Change about what’s changed in…
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The First Cohort
Earlier this year, Jean and I ran the first cohort of DRI Your Career — a course we’d spent the better part of a year building together. We had high hopes. But the first time you do something — you can believe in it, but you can only really hope. I am so happy with…
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Announcing: The Engineering Manager Survival Guide
One of the biggest issues I saw running remote teams for the past decade+ was the lack of good engineering manager training. With a global team it’s harder (and more expensive) to get everyone in the same place at one time. With a small team, the cost of doing anything custom is infeasible. To help…
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Performance Reviews Are the Scorecard of Capitalism (And Why That Should Free You)
Every review season is an emotional rollercoaster. Anxiety. Self assessments. Anticipation. Disappointment. As an IC, I felt like how much it impacted me was a personal failure. As a manager, I learned that review season trauma is pervasive. The worst thing about all of it, I think, is how much people take it out on…
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Scaling Teams: People, Projects, and Process
Scaling teams is one of my favourite things to do – probably because it’s where people meet systems, with ever-changing questions about what makes teams effective and how to balance now versus next. Sometimes this gets presented in a pure numbers way, but I like to come at it from a systems perspective: Engineering teams…
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From Chaotic Learning to Intentional Growth
Before the pandemic I was always on the move, and I would have told you always learning. I found myself at various events, talked to many different people, was always reading something, and my job changed frequently, even within the organisation I was in. I also wrote a lot, which helped me consolidate and clarify…
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Resisting Capitalism’s Shoulds
I’ve been feeling pretty mad about capitalism lately. One of the core things I’ve been angry about is realizing that capitalism is a huge source of “shoulds” and fake productivity. The goal of capitalism is to keep us running, keep us consuming, and to distract us from what is actually meaningful to us as human…