Career
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I’m a Terrible Mentor: Here’s Why
→: I’m a Terrible Mentor: Here’s WhyI hate mentoring and I don’t want to do it. This is mainly a product of me hating three things. One-directional relationships. Other people’s priorities not my own. Giving advice. One-directional relationships are so exhausting, because you can’t really be open. Being a manager has – oh the irony – made me less open to…
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On Saying No
→: On Saying NoIn the nearly four years I spent at The Conglomerate, I did a lot to try and improve the number of women working in engineering. It’s not clear how much effect this had. But I spent a lot of time and energy on it. Eyes open, I knew this wasn’t always the best career move.…
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The Trouble With Women’s Events
→: The Trouble With Women’s EventsThere’s a theme emerging in my backchannel lately, as my girlfriends and I discuss why we aren’t doing certain events. And often, these are events for women. We used to retreat to these events because we weren’t welcome – or safe – anywhere else. But now, we see lots of technical events working really hard…
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That Remote Work Think Piece Has Some Glaring Omissions (A Rant)
→: That Remote Work Think Piece Has Some Glaring Omissions (A Rant)When I started thinking about what would be next for me after my year of funemployment, remote work weighted pretty highly on my list. People who know me might think that it’s because of my geographical indecision, and yes, that was a consideration, but the biggest factor for me was not actually that. I didn’t want to…
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Interview Prep Tips
→: Interview Prep TipsI have done a lot of technical interviews. And mainly I think that interviewers have to change, but I do have some suggestions for interviewees. Ages ago I wrote up my prep list for interviewing at The Conglomerate, which is comprehensive, and frankly excessive. This is the short version with the benefit of spending more…
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Bad Interviews are a Company Problem, not a Candidate Problem
→: Bad Interviews are a Company Problem, not a Candidate ProblemWe know technical interviewing is a problem but rather than asking interviewers to do better, a lot of suggested solutions push that problem off onto people we interview rather than those who are doing the interviewing. This comes up a lot because the hiring process is the second most popular place to improve “diversity” after…
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Advice for White Men
→: Advice for White MenSome famous white dude in tech tweeted an inane remark that erased a significant portion of the population, and one of my friends was really mad. I asked why. Because my observation is that this guy dispenses advice for white men. In long form, and in trite remarks on Twitter. He tells them what they…
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2016: Scale
→: 2016: ScaleFor 2016, I chose the word “scale”. Couple of reasons for this: As a new manager, I feel like this is the biggest thing I need to work on. I really want to focus on projects that have the best ROI. Scale, to me, means eliminating the good-but-not-great. What does “scale” look like? How do…
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A Story
→: A StoryWhen I worked at The Conglomerate, I used to interview mostly women. Not slightly more. We’re talking a 2:1 or even 3:1 ratio. Why? Well The Conglomerate was (probably still is) a Pipeline Organization. They believed that the problem with diversity was that they just needed to Hire More Women. And so they would want…