management
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Thankless Emotional Labour as Management Training
→: Thankless Emotional Labour as Management TrainingMy 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…
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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…
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The Hardest, Shortest, Lesson Becoming a Manager
→: The Hardest, Shortest, Lesson Becoming a ManagerThere’s something we all talk about in becoming a manager – and that’s the process of writing less code. We bemoan it because it’s hard to let go of that part of our identity. But also because it’s so quantifiable. Today I wrote X lines of code. Today I deleted Y lines of code. Today I…