Negotiation is hard. There are all kinds of books, seminars, and coaching out there, but most engineers don’t get any kind of training before being thrown into the deep end. One day they need to buy a service, contact a vendor’s sales team, and muddle their way through an impenetrable contracting process. After a few costly […]
Tag Archives: Management
Interviewing is a strange process. Most of the time you answer the same question over and over again, asked in different ways – “What kind of a role are you looking for?” “Let’s go through your job history.” “Describe the architecture of a system you’ve implemented.” But every so often there’s a new question that forces […]
Everyone wants higher productivity. Whether it’s because you want to get a high priority project out faster, or because you want to run more experiments, or because your CFO is asking why it takes your cost center team so long to get anything done, or even just because you’ve worked in higher performing environments and […]
Of course I told you. I didn’t tell you? Are you sure? Well, maybe I told your brother twice. – my mom I wish I could say that I’ve always set expectations consistently across my teams. That I’ve sat down with each of my direct reports and, based on their level, given well-defined explanations of […]
I didn’t do that well in physics. It was one of the engineering requirements for a CS degree, but I wasn’t that interested, pushed it off as long as possible, didn’t spend much time on it, and immediately forgot most of what I’d learned moments after taking the exam. Fast forward a bunch of years, […]
We completed performance evaluations in January, and one of the conversations I’ve been having with my team members is, “what can you do to be a star in 2017?” It’s an important discussion to have, for a couple of reasons. First off, most people haven’t even considered the question. They have the idea that stardom is some […]
It’s been a couple months since I got back to TripAdvisor, and while in some ways it’s been as comfortable as slipping on an old shoe, my time in startup-land has given me a new perspective, especially with respect to my own role. What, after all, does a middle manager do? I’m not the player/coach I was at […]
Most people think of networking as something to do when they need a favor – they’re looking for a new job, mentor, advice, etc., so, time to start sending out the emails. This is the worst method, of course – people like to be treated like people, not favor dispensers. Good networkers are always trying to keep up with professional […]
It’s almost inevitable. At some point your boss is going to pull you aside or ask in a meeting, “Can’t you make the team work harder?” Sometimes this is in response to a project that’s slipping, sometimes they just don’t feel that the team “has a sense of urgency.” After all, how committed could they […]
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 […]