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It’s tempting to air your grievances at your exit interview. Don’t. There’s almost no upside to speaking up, and tremendous potential downside. Avoid exit interviews if you can. If you must go, be totally bland; say nothing negative.
Salaries in tech are going up, and many people are looking for new jobs or reevaluating the ones they have. However, many tech workers have no idea what their labor is worth on the open market. There’s a huge information asymmetry here: employers have access to detailed industry data on salaries, but workers don’t. In…
It’s well established that estimating software projects is hard. This is true, but you should learn how anyway.
If you have a problem with maintainers getting paid then you have a problem with me and I suggest you let that one marinate.
A question I’ve never been able to answer to my satisfaction: how do you manage people who are nice but can’t do the work?
A criticism of some of my writing is that it’s too mercenary. Some see my advice as coldly calculating, too focused on individual outcomes over collective ones, and implicitly distrustful of others. I think this is fair criticism! It’s not exactly what I’m going for, but it’s a fair reading. However, there’s more to…
Three simple tricks product I’ve picked up that help me be more than completely useless when I need to wear a Product hat.
A pattern of short tenure – multiple short jobs over a small period of time – can be a red flag, but necessarily. I’ll dig into short tenure in this article. What’s “short”? What’s a “pattern”? When you’re thinking of switching jobs, when and how should your tenure factor into the decision? For hiring managers, when…
<p>Like many engineers, I got thrown into management without any real guidance. I thought management was just telling people what to do. I thought there wasn’t any real science to it; you just needed to feel your way through it. I was wrong: there’s a whole field of study here, and you can learn a lot by…
How should you structure a larger engineering organization, one with dozens (or hundreds) of engineers? There are many tradeoffs to consider, and no single right answer. But, there are some structures that work better than others.
A series sharing some of the questions I use when I interview for technical roles. I’ll unpack the question, when to ask it, and how to evaluate answers.