Stop Mentoring First-Time Contributors

If you’re an open source maintainer lucky enough to have a significant number of contributors you need to learn to mentor efficiently. First timer issues are not the right good way to get people involved in your project nor mentoring individual first-time contributors. Instead, do things that help all of them.

Making your first startup ops hire – what founders should look for - PostHog

Most founders I talk to approach their first ops hire in a totally sensible but wrong way. Their typical approach is to look at the long list of admin…

I automated my job (and it made me a better leader)

Explore how my day as a senior leader looks now that I use 40 automations to help, and learn more about some of my favorites.

Influence without authority — Gabriel Valdivia

Some of the most influential designers I’ve worked with had no direct reports. They didn't spend their days assigning work, running performance reviews, or deciding who got promoted. Yet they could change the direction of a project, raise the quality bar of a team, and sometimes change the strategy for the entire company. Individual contributors can develop influence by giving people reasons to trust their judgment, then finding ways for that judgment to travel beyond the things they personally make.

We Hire the Best, Just Like Everyone Else

One of the most common pieces of advice you’ll get as a startup is this: Only hire the best. The quality of the people that work at your company will be one of the biggest factors in your success – or failure. I’ve heard this advice over and over

The Bet On Juniors Just Got Better

Why genies can make hiring juniors more profitable, & what you need to change to get there

It’s Never Too Early to Fire | Andreessen Horowitz

I have never fired anyone too early. How many founders have been in the position of hiring a senior executive — having gone through all the interviews, reference checks, board approvals, and negotiations — only to have doubts creep in all too soon after they start? Your hire doesn’t seem to be delivering on the...

Inside Automattic’s remote hiring process

How can Automattic consistently hire the best people without ever having a single voice conversation? Let’s face it, hiring is tough. When you ask startup founders what their biggest challenge is, …

Now Hiring: Senior Open Source Maintainer

A rare opportunity to make a real impact in a fast-paced, high-visibility role.

A Decade of Remote Work

Intro While still in college (go Broncos!), I teamed up with Alex (@slevenbits) to create a startup. We were young, inexperienced and naive. Our first …

Staff archetypes

Most career ladders define a single, uniform set of expectations for Staff engineers operating within the company. Everyone benefits from clear role expectations, but career ladders are a tool that applies better against populations than people. This is particularly true for Staff-plus engineers, whose career ladders often paper over several distinct roles hidden behind a single moniker. The more folks I spoke with about the role of Staff-plus engineers at their company, the better their experiences began to cluster into four distinct patterns. Most companies emphasized one or two of the patterns, and one pattern only existed in companies with many hundreds or thousands of engineers. A few companies didn’t feature any technical leadership pattern and pushed all their experienced engineers towards engineering management. In literature, recurring character patterns are called archetypes, such as the “hero” or the “trickster,” and the archetype term is helpful for labeling these frequent variants of Staff-plus engineers.

What I've Learned in 45 Years in the Software Industry

BTI360 teammate Joel Goldberg recently retired after working in the software industry for over four decades. When he left he shared with our team some of the lessons he learned over his career. With his...

Hire managers of one

When you’re hiring, seek out people who are managers of one. What’s that mean? A manager of one is someone who comes up with their own goals and executes them. They don’t need heavy direction. They don’t need daily check-ins. They do what a manager would do — set the tone…

Why Good Managers Are So Rare

Gallup data shows they have a combination of hard-to-teach traits.

Eight Habits of Expert Software Designers: An Illustrated Guide

The best designers employ specific habits, learned practices, and observed principles when they work. Here are a few of them.

Hiring (and Retaining) a Diverse Engineering Team

Stories from six engineering leaders who succeeded in building and growing diverse teams. Hiring approaches, retention tactics and strategies.