Some people just can’t catch a break. It’s never their fault, but things just seem to go wrong around them. Projects spin out of control, bug counts skyrocket, hardware breaks, people quit. Whenever you look at a specific problem, there’s always a good reason – the scope was increased, the agreed-upon technology turned out to […]
Tag Archives: Management
It turns out, car theft is a bulk business. There’s a whole ecosystem around it – the thief, the chop shop, the fences, the salvage yard – there can be a lot of people involved, which means that the individual profit is smaller than you’d think. And so, professional car thieves have to work in […]
My wife and I were recently talking about one of our mutual friends, a researcher in a “soft money” position. This means that instead of getting paid by the university from general funds, she’s responsible for bringing in the money for her salary, research team, facilities, etc., through writing grants. This has become increasingly difficult over […]
When I joined TripAdvisor, I’d been out in the world as a professional coder for a decade and a half. I’d had significant management roles at a prior company, and had just come off of six years of running my own company. I was used to being in charge. And so, when my soon-to-be-boss asked […]
You’ve seen this before, perhaps even lived it. A new person starts at the company, and from day one, she’s on fire. Everything she touches turns to gold: her projects magically complete ahead of schedule, she’s able to pull the thread on long-standing intractable problems until they’re worked out, everyone enjoys working with her, and […]
Learning a language is hard. In addition to grappling with a new grammar, bizarre pronunciations, unfamiliar vocabulary, and in some cases an alien writing system, you also have to build an entirely new set of skills. Chief among these is the ability to memorize massive amounts of completely random data. No matter how smart you […]
A couple of years back, one of my team members wrote a job that caused load on one of our live site databases to spike. When the problem was traced back to him, he laughed, looked into it, and fixed the problem. OK, no biggie, everyone makes mistakes, we knew not to do that again […]
Procrastination is triage with a machete and a blindfold. Hackers are min-maxers. Python is the programming language equivalent of juggling one ball. In order to exceed expectations, you first have to meet expectations. The bottom always eats the top. You have to be nice before you can be mean. With very few exceptions, every single […]
TripAdvisor has been growing ever since I joined almost five years ago. In that time we’ve gone from around 80 to 200 engineers, and occasionally I’ll be asked in an interview whether I’m concerned about how fast we’re growing. The thing is, I’ll reply, there are two ways to scale an engineering organization – fast, […]
I screw up, all the time. Mostly little stuff, but sometimes not. Most of the time I’m letting myself down – not working out when I’d planned, snacking at work, staying up later than I should because I’m surfing the internet (do people even call it that anymore?). Nothing, though, equals the gut-churning feeling of […]