History doesn’t move in a straight line. I remember growing up in the seventies and eighties, and even as a child understanding that the world could end at any moment due to forces beyond my control. A computer might misinterpret sunlight on high altitude clouds, a world leader might make a stupid joke, and the […]
Tag Archives: Management
Writing a blog is weird. You have some idea that you want to express, and you use declarative sentences that make it sound like you know what you’re doing. Meanwhile, you’re still going through your normal life, making mistakes, trying and failing to meet the bar that you describe. One of the most important things […]
Learning piano is hard. Like, bizarrely hard. To really excel takes years of practice – hours every day of finger exercises, practice pieces, recitals, lessons with beloved teachers and taskmasters, running fights with parents, lost opportunities to do other activities, and on and on. When you look at an accomplished pianist, you see the end […]
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 […]
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 […]