Back in December of 2015, I was in a meeting with HR, and we were arguing about retention, stock grants, or something similar. I was making no progress in explaining my nuanced point. Long pauses and blank states usually mean my spoken words have nothing to do with the valuable idea in my head. Ok,… more
You’ve had a small number of career-defining moments. These are the select few moments in time when the trajectory of your career changed instantly and drastically. I have two buckets of these: ones I expected and ones that completely blindsided me. While the surprise and subsequent scrambling involved in being blindsided are chock full of… more
I’m rewriting The Business for the next book. This piece is almost 15 years old, much has changed in negotiating an offer letter, and I have more advice on how to analyze those offers. So much advice that I am idea paralyzed™ trying to rewrite this piece. So, this is just a section of the… more
We remodeled the downstairs of the house several years ago. Two rooms had walls moved to make way for additional rooms. Deep construction. Months of noise, plastic tarps, dust, and decisions. When they start applying the drywall, it starts to look like your house again, and you begin to hope for dustless silence. Drywall is… more
By my count, we’ve got 14 candidates for the Democratic nomination in the United States. There will be more.1 This morning I went to all the websites of each of the candidate and grabbed their primary logo. Fascinating to see the different moods conveyed by the different marks. Forgetting about the candidates, I find the… more
I just finished the pitch letter for the third book. Unlike the prior two books, the next book is primarily based on material never published before. My goal is to finish the third book of the leadership trilogy this summer which means a fall publication. Yeah, we’ll see. Enough about the future, let’s review this… more
From a recruiting perspective, the best engineering manager I’ve worked with established her reputation with two hires. It went like this: ME: “We need to build an iOS team, and while we have talented engineers, we don’t have time to train the current team on iOS, it’ll be faster to hire.” HER: “Great, who should… more
Those candidates got a study guide, free books, and an open invitation to proceed with the process whenever they were ready. The $80 in books we sent candidates had one of the best ROIs of any investment we made anywhere in the business. Some of our best hires couldn’t have happened without us bringing the candidate up to speed, first.
(By Thomas H. Ptacek via Quartz)
… Engineers are tired of being spammed by recruiters and rarely respond to their emails.
On the list of ways to generate a guaranteed negative knee-jerk reaction from an engineer, I offer a single word: process. Folks, in order to make sure that we hit our ship date, we have a new bug triage… process. You’ve heard the groans and you’ve seen the rolling eyeballs and made the fair assumption… more
