Running a Hiring Loop That Respects Everyone's Time
The worst hiring loop I ever sat in ran seven rounds over five weeks and ended with a candidate we all liked telling us, politely, that she'd taken another...
9 min995Read →
Category: Leadership
58 articles in Leadership.
The Real Cost of a Bad Hire
A few years ago I signed off on a senior backend hire who interviewed beautifully. Sharp answers, confident on distributed systems, name-dropped the right...
9 min525Read →
Building Trust With a Team You Just Inherited
The first team I inherited had already lost two managers in eighteen months, and they told me so in the first meeting. Not as a complaint, exactly. More as a...
9 min912Read →
When to Escalate and When to Absorb
A payments engineer pinged me at 11:40 on a Tuesday night: our settlement reconciliation job had thrown an exception and stopped halfway through a batch of...
9 min390Read →
The Manager Energy Audit
Last spring I sat down with one of my best engineering managers for what was supposed to be a routine one-on-one, and she spent the first ten minutes...
9 min920Read →
Leading a Team Through a Painful Migration
The Slack message came in at 6:42 on a Tuesday morning. One of my senior engineers, a person who almost never messages before nine, had written a single line:...
10 min339Read →
How to Handle a Toxic High Performer
The first time I got this badly wrong, I kept a senior engineer for fourteen months longer than I should have because his throughput was extraordinary. He...
9 min354Read →
Presenting a Technical Roadmap to Executives
The first technical roadmap I ever presented to a board lasted four slides before the CFO stopped me. I was three minutes into explaining why we needed to...
10 min834Read →
Managing a Team That Is Smarter Than You
Early in my time running engineering at a payments company, I sat in a design review for a ledger rewrite and realized, about ten minutes in, that I could not...
9 min458Read →
Why Your Best Ideas Come From Junior Engineers
Three years ago, a graduate engineer named Priya asked me why our payment reconciliation job ran every fifteen minutes. She had been with us for six weeks. The...
10 min810Read →
Urgent vs Important on an Engineering Team
A few years ago I kept a spreadsheet of everything my team shipped in a quarter, and then I ran a quiet little experiment. Next to each item I wrote two...
10 min900Read →
Building an On-Call Rotation That Does Not Burn People Out
The pager went off at 3:42 on a Tuesday morning. A payment reconciliation job had stalled, and the alert routed to an engineer who had been on call for eleven...
10 min802Read →