career
Why do we always think our team is so great?
If you ask someone experienced what they think of their team, they’ll usually tell you their team is the best team they’ve ever worked on. It’s so rare to hear someone say they think their team is bad or even mediocre. Why is this? We rationally understand that most...
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“Professional services” for pre-revenue startups
Something I’m beginning to explore is what a services business providing programming and long-term technical guidance and mentorships for startups would look like. A business that takes the things I know I am good at — mentorship, programming, product management — and provide it to companies who need it...
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18 months of wandering
In January 2018, I left as CTO of Cozy under difficult circumstances. Those of you that know me know the story. Those of you that don’t are free to buy me a coffee or beer to hear it. I joined Cozy in 2014 as Engineering Manager, and rebuilt and...
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How the Zapier interview process is making me rethink my own
Over the last two months of looking for a new job, I’ve applied to over a couple dozen companies and interviewed with about a quarter of them. The process that stood out the most was Zapier’s. Their interview process is non-typical from start to finish. They have a great...
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How to turn a team around in one easy step
My last four roles have all been “turn-around” scenarios. At CCP Games I had three: as Technical Art Director, I turned around a group that was struggling on executing basic tooling; as Technical Director I had to turn an entire engineering department that was writing an order of magnitude...
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The most important piece of advice I’ve ever gotten
In May 2010, I had been at BioWare for about 2 years, and was ready to quit. Actually, I had quit. My Art Director at the time set up a meeting between myself and Gordon Walton, a the General Manager for BioWare Austin. Despite of being at BioWare for...
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Hiring in a time of scarcity
I’ve never understood the hypergrowth mindset that’s guided the tech industry for the last few years, and part of me is happy that the investment bubble has popped. I’m not interested in throwing around money to solve problems; my experience is this creates more problems than it solves, and...
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On choosing software by “what is best for the business”
When people are discussing what language/framework/library to use for something, the general criteria people talk about is “what best solves the business problem.” This criteria is used to justify rewriting backend services in Go, rather than sticking with Python. Or not. It’s used explain why you wrote a new...
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Could employees choose their own manager?
Someone once brought up to me a plan about enabling employees to choose their own manager. The idea has stuck with me for a while, and being in my current position of authority I’ve pondered it more actively. I’ll use this post to collect my thoughts, and maybe present...
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More effective interviews
David Smith over at baleful.net makes some interesting points about the length of most interviews: So mathematically, you will most likely get the highest confidence interval with: 1) Resume screen, 2) Phone interview, 3) In-person interviews 1-3. From the above, this should represent about 50% of the total causes,...
