One day, long in the past and far from here, a stonemason finds himself summoned before his king. The king leans forward on his throne, “Stonemason, I have a project for you. The wall at our northern border needs to be bigger. Ten times bigger! Enough to impress our allies…

Career ladders are a poor model for personal growth. People don’t take pre-defined steps, and they never go in a straight line. — Let me tell you a secret. I use the same interview for software engineers, regardless of their level. Can you write code? Can you design software? Can you lead people? What are your strengths and weaknesses? The actual mechanics vary from company to company. Some will use take home tests…

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…