I recorded this talk for the previous round of LeadDev Together. You can access it here (requires signup). All the penguin imagery in this talk are photos my mom took in Antarctica.
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Talk: The Culture of Process
The first point in the mentality of Being the DRI of your Career is expecting more from your career and less from your job. Your current work situation – good, bad, or fine – is just a moment in your career. Expect less from your job and more from your career. Your life is more […]
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The Rent Versus Buy of Career Growth
The topic that got the most attention in my previous post about being the DRI of your career is the concept of rent versus buy when it comes to managing your career. Distinguish what your employer rents versus what they buy. I find this particularly relevant when it comes to things like “personal brand”. My […]
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The Habit of Adequacy
I think about habits a lot. That my word for 2021 is habit is a product of this, and a useful lens to cycle back on it. I think about habits, how to intentionally build and maintain them, and then I remind myself that I set it as a priority for the year for a […]
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Book: No Rules Rules
I read this on a recommendation, I was a little skeptical about the whole Netflix culture thing. Like most people I knew about the “fire the people who you wouldn’t fight to keep” and it seemed a little too cut-throat. In the end, I found the book fascinating – there was a level of nuance […]
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Being the DRI of Your Career
At DuckDuckGo, there’s an expression: “You are the DRI of your career” (DRI: Directly Responsible Individual). I like this, both as an individual who has always felt like the DRI of my own career, and I like it as a manager because I think it makes the boundaries of what you can and can’t do […]
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Remote Meetings Panel
I was on a panel recently – well, we ran it like a meeting, which was fun – about remote meetings and making them suck less. It was fun and I got some nice ideas from my fellow panelists! Watch it here.
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Book: Off the Clock
In my current round of “argh what has this pandemic done to my life” I have been thinking a lot about time. Feeling too scheduled – at work, and outside of work needing to schedule every little thing (ok, mainly the gym) was really getting to me. I came across another book from Laura Vanderkam […]
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Book: Trust Your Canary
I started reading Trust Your Canary (Amazon) to better understand the concept of “incivility” which had come up as part of some of our DE&I work. It was pretty helpful around that, but probably the majority of the value I got out of it was in the first few chapters. It also made me consider […]
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The culture of process
My latest in LeadDev… One of the challenges we face as engineering managers is how people react to process differently. Sometimes it’s like we’re talking about entirely different things – we propose something we expect to be lightweight, and people react like we’re instituting TPS reports or time-tracking in six minute intervals (normal for lawyers, […]