Some people are hard to read. Some situations are complicated, with pieces moving behind the scenes in a Rube Goldberg mess of not-quite interlocking puzzle pieces. Sometimes people intentionally withhold information – maybe they were told in confidence, or perhaps there’s an HR reason for keeping a secret. Sometimes it’s none of your business. Or it is, […]
Category Archives: Management
Interviews are weird. Of course there are the nuts and bolts – getting there early enough but not too early, dressing nicely but not too nicely, the technical and behavioral questions, and so on – but more interestingly, every so often someone asks you a question that really forces you to reflect seriously on your experience or worldview. […]
Note: This is the first post in a series of musings and reflections on my first year in startup-land. The most important goal for any manager is to ship product, and the highest leverage task toward that end is to build a great team. I’ve had the privilege of working in companies with great engineering […]
There’s this local restaurant I go to a lot – it isn’t much to look at from the outside, and truth be told, the inside is kind of dingy. The menu is a mess of misspellings and grammatical mistakes inside a cracked, yellowing plastic sleeve, orders sometimes get lost, and one of the waiters is actively […]
I love to cook. I love wandering through a grocery store looking for interesting ingredients, paging through cookbooks, chopping vegetables, measuring, mixing, sautéing, baking. As a programmer / manager, I don’t have that many opportunities to make something physical, but cooking is an intensely pleasurable experience, especially when the results match the intentions. Unsurprisingly, I don’t like […]
It’s been a couple of months since I left TripAdvisor, and as I’ve been coming up for air, I’ve been going through the necessary process of re-evaluating the conventional wisdom I’d come to accept over the past six and a half years. Some of it was great – generally applicable best practices that I’ll use for years to come. […]
In 1997, Clay Christensen published the landmark book The Innovator’s Dilemma. In this book he went through a variety of industries (hard drives, backhoes, steel mills) and demonstrated the frustratingly similar pattern of how companies innovated, then stagnated – for entirely rational reasons. The key graph looks like this: The idea is that for any product, […]
I came to IM late. As a GenX-er, it wasn’t one of the communication tools I’d grown up with, and for whatever reason, it hadn’t caught on at the various companies I’d been at before my startup. So when a girlfriend suggested I get online so that we could chat during the day, I didn’t […]
The swamp is vast, dark, and deep, and passage will cost you dearly. Small bands of travelers with even the most rudimentary instincts for survival will do anything to avoid entry. They recognize it for what it is, redefine their destinations under the shadow of this impenetrable barrier, and either simplify their goals, or turn away toward other ends. Armies […]
“What’s your management style?” It seemed like an innocent enough question. After all, I’ve been managing teams of engineers on and off for fifteen years, and have spent the last two and a half years organizing my thoughts on the subject. Easy. “Well, you know, I’m, uh… Hmm.” Yes, that sound you just heard was all […]
Dan Dreams of Coding 