Every engineering hire is a miracle. – Etsy CTO Kellan Elliott-McCrea on the Craft of Hiring Engineers When you’ve reached a certain scale, hiring entry-level engineers becomes a fairly deterministic process – you go to university career fairs, gather resumes, schedule interviews, and hire N members of the graduating class. Yes, it’s a huge oversimplification, and I’ve […]
Category Archives: Management
As I look back on my time at TripAdvisor and HelloShopper, and think about conversations I’ve had with various startups, one of the recurring themes has involved building and managing engineering organizations, particularly during rapid growth phases. From five to fifteen, to twenty five, to seventy five, to a hundred fifty, and so on. Each of these ramps […]
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, […]
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 […]
Dan Dreams of Coding 