Recently I came across a brief statement on Facebook about the well-explained evils of stack ranking, with a half-hearted Devil’s Advocate argument about how impact can absolutely be an objective metric, measured and ranked[...
In modern tech companies, there’s a dual career ladder structure for software engineers: they can either progress more technologically (as senior and lead engineers) or advance on the management side (as engineering managers and...
I really like this quote from Organizational Culture and Leadership by Edgar Schein, courtesy of this article from Stratechery contrasting cultures from familiar tech companies: If one wishes to distinguish leadership from management or administration, one can argue that leadership creates and changes cultures, while management and administration act within a culture. By defining leadership...
A couple months back, I wrote about how promotions typically work inside of midsized to large companies. In short, they’re usually descriptive in nature, so the individual only gets the new level and title...
If there’s any truth left to the cliche that middle management adds little more than bureaucracy and communication overhead to an organization, then Slack’s manager bot product should fix that market inefficiency pretty quickly. Status reports and work broadcasts are ripe to be automated and the future points to an eventuality of AI-generated...
We’ve started to take our 2-year-old toddler to preschool this week. Parents will already know that this can be a rough process; kids don’t like to leave their parents, and most kids — like...
