Last week marked my six-month anniversary at Ride, which also marks six months of being a manager. It coincided with my team being in Medellin all together for our offsite. It was amazing to have everyone here, and this was part of something I have been thinking about since I started this job – how […]
I read Leadership and Self Deception (Amazon) years ago, several times. It was a book that profoundly changed the way that I think about things, the way that I approach the world. When some conflict arose at work, I saw how the ideas in the book would help, and tried to get everyone on my […]
The two hardest things about becoming a manager have been: 1) the emotional exhaustion, and 2) letting go of the part of my identity that was tied up in writing code. I accepted that writing code wasn’t the best thing I could do reasonably quickly, but it took longer to finally stop saying I was […]
I 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 […]
We did a podcast.
Processes: Daily 123 in slack: 1 – what definitely will happen today, 2 – what will hopefully happen, 3 – what I’m filling in the gaps with. Daily standup: this is separate from 123, which I find is a better way to share?what. Standup is a little more about?how. Pairing: this just means “working together […]
One of the (many?) things my team may be tired of hearing from me is “empathy is part of our job”. What do I mean by that? Well as mobile developers, we are the closest to the humans that use our product. We need to have empathy for our users – what do they need? […]
My first month as a manager I barely had time to think about how I didn’t really know what I was doing, because there was so much that clearly needed to be done. So I accepted that stuff was not writing code, and got on with it. Month two opened, and I kept getting on […]
We 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 […]
Some 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 […]