Notes on The Pyramid Principle.
October 1, 2018 Although it's not universally true, I've found that as folks move into more senior roles, they spend a lot more time writing. The nature of these documents vary depending on your role--strategies, presentations, memos, announcements, email, etc--but your written word often becomes your most important medium of communication. I'm fortunate to have spent a lot of time writing over the past decade, in addition to attending a liberal arts college, so this shift has generally has been something I've enjoyed.
Career narratives.
September 26, 2018 A peculiar challenge of management is trying to invest in someone's career development when they themselves are uncertain about their goals. As a manager, you may have more experience and more access to opportunities within the company, but that represents a small slice of their career possibilities. Our schooling often rewards us for being methodical, linear thinkers, but that approach is less effective outside the intentionally constrained possibility spaces.
Saying no.
September 23, 2018 Some years back, I was sitting in a room with my manager, our CTO and a crisis. An engineer on my team had mishandled two alerts, which had cascaded into plausibly the worst production incident the company had experienced to date. There were three root causes: alert fatigue, a lack of velocity context for out-of-diskspace alerts, and relying on a centralized database with little support for vertical scaling. At that moment, though, we were no longer talking about root causes. We were discussing whether to fire the oncall engineer, and I was saying no.
Work the policy, not the exceptions.
September 23, 2018 At an early job, I worked with a coworker whose philosophy was "If you don't ask for it, you'll never get it", which culminated in continuous escalations to management for exceptional treatment. This approach was pretty far from my intuition of how a well run organization should work, and it grated on my belief that consistency is a precondition of fairness.