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…
Questionable Advice: “How can I sniff out bad managers while interviewing for a job?”
A few weeks ago I got a question from Stephane Bjorne on twitter, about how to screen for bad managers and/or management culture. This is a great question. I’ve talked a lot about my philosop…
Why Good Managers Are So Rare
Gallup data shows they have a combination of hard-to-teach traits.
The Multi-Path Career
TL;DR * From executives to individual contributors, we all make one career bet at a time. * This is poor “portfolio theory” (to use a phrase from investing), meaning that this is not a balanced “po…
The unreasonable effectiveness of one-on-ones
When I started dating my partner, I quickly noticed that grad school was making her very sad. This was shortly after I’d started leading an engineering team at Wave, and so the “obvious” hypothesis to me was that the management (okay, “management”) one gets in graduate school is totally ineffective. Most graduate students, including Eve, start school right after college, i.e., without much clue about how to effectively do self-directed work.
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…
17 Reasons NOT To Be A Manager
Yesterday we had a super fun meetup here at Intercom in Dublin. We split up into small discussion groups and talked about things related to managing teams and being a senior individual contributor (IC), and going back and forth throughout your career.
Which Way Do You Run? | Andreessen Horowitz
The difference between a good CEO and a great one? Trusting your gut and confronting your fears head on.
Brian Jones's Manager Readme
Brian Jones, Engineering Manager at Anonymous: Mission Statement In order to understand how I approach leadership and management it may be helpful to set for...
How to write (actually) good job descriptions
Ask yourself: Am I trying to attract the right people or keep out the wrong people? It's impossible to do both.
Hiring Remote Employees: How You can Avoid Major Challenges
Hiring remote employees + managing them presents many challenges you may not be ready for. Learn what they are & how you can overcome them
Intentions have a surprising amount of detail
Auteur managerialism, the myth of one-shotting, and the chindogufication of engineering
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
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.
one of the only people i've ever worked with who consistently and intentionally hired junior / early career people, and prioritized their mentorship.
Jimmy Lee
One of the highlights of my life is finding incredible webmaster youths to transfer all my remaining skill and resource to ✌️🙌⚔️ Thanks for everything
