I have been quiet on here lately because I’ve been focused on writing a book. The book proper will come out in early 2024, but section 1 – what it means to be the DRI (Directly Responsible Individual) of your career – is now available for early release. You can see it on the O’Reilly website [subscribers only]. As part of this section, I want to include other perspectives, so if you have a story about a time you learned to DRI your career, please submit it via this form, and it will be reviewed and considered for inclusion. There’s a full list in the form about the types of stories I’m lookin ..read more

We talked about hiring directors, the fallacy of “servant leadership”, and what makes teams great [listen ..read more

I recorded an episode of the DOU podcast with Oleks. It was an interesting and fun conversation ..read more

CC BY 2.0 aeroix When I talk about Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI), I’m typically coming at it from an angle of systematic change. The purpose of DEI, as I see it, is to dismantle a rigged system and move to something more equitable. This is why the concept of “no politics at work” is seen as antithetical to effective DEI, because what does a person do when their entire existence has been politicised? The frustrating thing about DEI, is that often when organisations talk about DEI what they mean is the performative type of DEI. The appearance of progress, without the challenge of systema ..read more

I bought Thinking in Bets (Amazon) a while ago, April 2020 to be precise. It finally made it’s way out of my endless “to read” pile because I was having something of a crisis of confidence about my own decision making. Some key thing that stood out. Separating analysis of the result from the decision itself. The analogy throughout the book is poker, which is a combination of skill and luck. It’s an example of the key bias humans have – to associate winning with good skill, and losses to bad luck. Learning from decisions means separating out the luck and the skill, and focusing on improving sk ..read more

I recorded an episode of Console‘s DevTools podcast, talking about privacy engineering. You can listen to it here ..read more

I’m unsure what I think about Machiavelli for Women (Amazon). There were things that I appreciated, and things that were infuriating. To be fair, the things I found infuriating were mostly also things the author herself notes as infuriating, saying her goal with the book is to articulate what works as things are, not what should work if things were more equitable. Some highlights: “Cinderella syndrome”: where you’re not told no, but rather told to do a lot of work and then yes. Avoids difficult conversation, gets that work done, Cinderella never goes to the ball. “Hotbox”: being trapped betwe ..read more

Image by suju-foto from Pixabay One of my coaching clients and I developed this framework to help him think about the kind of impact he wanted to have as a Staff+ engineer, and since then I’ve taken it to other clients and direct reports in a way to think about engineering growth outside of any particular job ladder. The four growth dimensions are: Scope Complexity Output Agenda Scope What it means: Scope is the size of the problem or responsibility and is relatively straightforward to quantify in LOC (Lines of Code) or people involved. For ICs, this often goes bug -> small feature -> ..read more

Photo by Luis Villasmil on Unsplash The wonderful Tanya put together this spreadsheet that helps you track where you are on the 5 Signs It’s Time to Quit Your Job. I love this idea, because it pushes us out of the moment into the long term, which makes it easier to be rational. There’s the risk in the short term decision, when we don’t have time to think about what we’re really optimizing for, and in this case I always think about this guy I worked with at Google who told me, “I rage quit Facebook, but this is worse”. Then there’s the risk of the long term decision, of staying put too long whe ..read more

My Energy Management for Newer Managers post has been turned into an exercise on Yerbo. You can find it here ..read more