Before we get too far along, I need you to understand the concept of a manager’s First Team. It was introduced in Lencioni’s best-selling Five Dysfunctions of a Team and has become very common leadership advice over the past two decades. The concept itself is simple: Managers need to prioritize…

A few weeks ago, a fellow manager asked me a strange question: Have you written anything about earning trust from people? Y’know… the mechanics of it? A little part of that strangeness is because it’s still a weird feeling to have managers ask me for advice after twenty or so…

My last article did well! It made it to second on Hacker News! It set a new daily high with slightly over 10k views! It’s not exactly the flood of traffic that my peers enjoy, or the sort of success that the hypesters would have you believe. Even after it…

Nature doesn’t come with identifiers. — At time of writing, I am working in the music industry. And as part of that work, we want a database of all of the songs in the world so that we can properly identify unknown songs and provide attribution so that folks can get paid appropriately. …

My company recently had layoffs. In the spring of 2023, this is not news. Companies left and right are having layoffs. And while managing through layoffs is always an exhausting ton of work, most of the time it is relatively straight-forward. …

A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. “Science Fiction” has always held a bit of an amusing contradiction for me. Most folks fixate on one of the two words. The Science group loves their hard sci-fi, that imagines…

If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it. — often misattributed to Peter Drucker Managers love their metrics. They are forever trying to quantify their business, their teams, their work. Their goals are noble! They want to unambiguously get everyone from the CEO down to the Janitor to have…

Most software engineering organizations over-emphasize technical skills. They build interview loops around them. They build leveling guides around them. Technical skills are given more weight when deciding who to promote and who to lay off. But building great software takes more than just great coding skills. …

Why a culture where people shouldn’t be angry does more harm than good. — For all of my career, I’ve been told that I shouldn’t be angry at work. It is unprofessional. It is immature. It is unacceptable — the sort of thing that leads to closed door meetings with your boss. Anger is something to be suppressed, hidden, and ashamed of. And for…