How to spot if your feedback mechanisms are useful or simply a rubber stamping exercise Ever wondered why review processes become so painful for everyone involved. I remember talking to a distinguished engineer at one company who was bemoaning the fact that people were complaining about the engineering review process…

How ambition pushes us towards the least useful approach and what we can do better I remember sitting in my first round of Facebook interviews and being asked what I enjoyed about management. My answer was “I love growing teams” and the response I got back told me more about…

How to plan and execute in a world where you don’t know everything yet — Hopefully, I’ve articulated the importance of having a clear view of what you’re trying to achieve. This is a prerequisite for being able to deliver something non-trivial alongside lots of other human beings. However, the next stage is harder than it sounds. Today, I will write about how I think…

Lessons learned in managing upwards, downwards, and sideways during the development of software engineering organisation — McKinsey recently published an article titled “Yes, you can measure software developer productivity” to collective gasps of horror within the industry. My own reaction was also visceral. I’ve seen the endgame of this and it’s not pretty. However, the paper answers a very real set of needs in software engineering…

The harm we cause by describing things poorly and how it traps us into repetitive and unhealthy thought patterns — We’ve all done it at some point or another. Somebody pushes in front of us and we mentally call them an idiot. We read our favourite news site and nod along when someone is described as “woke” or “liberal” or “right wing”. At work, we might describe someone as “industrious”…

Why having a vision is critical to team success and how to assess it — One of the most important skills I look for from current and future leaders is to be able to communicate vision. Without a clear vision, it’s impossible to align between members of the same team — let alone people from different teams. This is a skill everyone in the team…

How the ability to navigate ambiguity sets outstanding people apart — Recently, there has been a lot of discussion about the path to staff and above for software engineers. This is a subset of a larger discussion on judging whether someone can operate at a particular level of seniority. If we’re not careful, then we start using the scope as a…

ChatGPT is coming for Google Search, or is it? At the moment it’s hard to read anything on the Internet without coming across some article or another proclaiming that search is about to be changed forever. The culprit is ChatGPT, a large language model (LLM) that has thrown up some…

How leaders create a culture of stagnation by failing to appreciate their role Recently, a friend sent me an article about how leaders within big tech were trying to recapture the early startup spirit. It included trigger phrases for me like “being scrappy” and “be like a startup” and, to…