About a month ago
- Everyone knows that lying to your team is bad. Only a complete sociopath would argue that lying to your team is a positive, happy activity. But there’s a particular form of lying that many of the most experienced, compassionate, and honorable managers indulge in all the time:...
- Engineers often complain that visibility should be their manager’s job. In other words, they think engineers should be able to focus on the code, while their manager figures out who’s doing well and rewards them.
- What makes a remote engineering team work isn't where people sit—it's how they communicate. A conversation on the Overcommitted podcast about async-first culture, decision durability, and the ideas behind Open and Async....
about 1 month ago
- Open and Async is the practical playbook for making remote and distributed work actually work—two habits, working in the open and communicating asynchronously, drawn from a decade of remote-first lessons at GitHub....
- Hey, Niki here. This is a bit unusual. My sabbatical is coming to an end, and I am looking for a new opportunity. Full-time or contract, startup or research, remote or Berlin, individual contributor, ideally—tight team, ambitious product. I am a software engineer first and...
about 2 months ago
- In an office, some of your visibility is free. Go remote and it drops to zero. Working loudly makes your impact visible as you do it—not after the fact in a status update nobody reads....
- Software engineers are often told to “start playing politics”, but most engineers have no idea what that means.
- Taste used to be a byproduct of the reps. Agents took the reps. So if you're junior you now have to go get the taste and judgment on purpose. A builder's look at the weakening entry level, the two debts we now owe, and concrete ways to build judgment when the machine writes the...
- Do you struggle with knowing what you want? For me, it shows up in career stuff. Do I want this job or that? What kind of role would I like? I had this revelation over the weekend. “What do I want” is the wrong question. I was reading The Obstacle is The Way. It didn’t site...
- AI gets good at anything with an answer key. Your career is everything that doesn’t have one. If the AI layer gets good at anything, it will be anything that has an answer key. School used to be answer keys all the way down. School is the ultimate anchoring of success, because...
- Every time I have given up on America, it has been a mistake. And yet, America has never, ever given up on me....
2 months ago
- Stating the obvious is surprisingly useful. Most of your knowledge lives below the threshold of conscious awareness, so it’s possible for a piece of writing to remind you of what you already know. It’s common to know you don’t like something without being quite sure why, and...
- Building a great organization is all about finding skills that complement each other. People tend to think everyone can do everything—especially at the leadership level. VP and above, the assumption is that for the amount they’re paid, leaders should be great strategically,...
3 months ago
- Programming tests used to be our primary filter to separate profiles. In software engineering, they historically differentiated three distinct ones: the engineers, the ones who solve the fundamental problems. the developers, the ones who apply the right patterns and orchestrate...
- In thirteen years at GitHub I was part of 25 reorgs—almost one every six months. Reorgs are a constant in tech, not a crisis. Here's how to navigate them....
- Many engineers should be doing less work. I don’t necessarily mean producing less code or fewer changes, but literally working fewer hours in the day. When they do work, they should be working at a slower pace. I like to aim to be running at 80% utilization by default: unless I...
- Massive demand for the role at Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic. The latest version of the FDE role looks like the consultant / solution architect role done by many early-junior engineers....
- The engineer who says no all the time is a real archetype among senior and staff engineers. Their role is to slow things down, to block the development of features that add complexity, and to ensure that as little code gets written as possible (since code is a liability).
4 months ago
- The most influential piece of writing about staff engineers in the last decade has to be Will Larson’s Staff engineer archetypes. He argues that the “staff engineer” title covers at least four very different roles: the team lead, the architect, the solver, and the right hand....
- I’ve been thinking about speed which is why Chris Coyier caught my attention in his latest piece discussing how AI might be 10✕ing the speed with which we code, but it’s not making our software 10✕ better: Faster individuals don’t make a fast company My mind immediately went to...
- Most 1:1s waste your team's only protected synchronous time on status updates. Here's how to run ones worth showing up for....
- Here’s the best career advice I ever received as a product manager: “product-manage your own career.” I wish I’d internalized it sooner. Early in my career, I stayed quiet and did good work, assuming the right people would notice. Spoiler: they didn’t—not because the work wasn’t...
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