KBall's Blog

The Human Systems around our Technical Systems

2024-05-15T14:30:57Z

Human Skills 031: Taking Control of Yourself and Your Career

2024-01-02T15:00:55Z

Human Skills 030: Organizational Change

2023-11-07T15:01:00Z

Human Skills 029: Fully Asynchronous Teams

2023-10-31T14:01:03Z

Human Skills 028 - Conflict and Swagger

2023-10-24T14:00:39Z

Human Skills 027 - Thriving in the Tech Industry

2023-10-17T14:01:13Z

Human Skills 026: The Importance of Caring

2023-10-10T14:01:56Z

Good resources for new managers

2023-10-03T14:01:16Z

Human Skills 025: Improving Processes as an Engineer

2023-09-26T14:14:59Z

Human Skills 024: Operationalizing Values

2023-09-19T14:00:31Z

Human Skills 023: Teams as Complex Systems

2023-09-12T14:00:39Z

Human Skills 022: Vulnerability and Leadership

2023-09-05T14:00:18Z

Human Skills 021 - Stakeholder Management

2023-08-29T14:00:12Z

Human Skills 020 - Decisionmaking

2023-08-22T14:00:37Z

Human Skills 019 - Making Choices Explicit

2023-08-15T14:38:16Z

Human Skills 018 - Creating Clarity From Ambiguity

2023-08-01T14:00:18Z

Human Skills 017 - Learning to See Power

2023-07-25T14:00:19Z

Human Skills 016 - Magical Teams

2023-07-18T14:13:27Z

Human Skills 015 - Throwing the Gauntlet

2023-07-11T14:00:38Z

Human Skills 014 - Thriving with Diversity

2023-06-27T14:00:14Z

Systems and Routines for Consistent Progress

2023-06-08T14:00:00Z

Life is chaotic. Things change. Kids get sick. Parents get old. Friends need help. Companies change priorities without warning.

So how do you maintain productivity and effectiveness in the face of all that chaos?

I had a friend ask me this question recently, asserting that I'm good at it. My first reaction was to deny that I'm good at it. And in some ways that's true - I'm not natively good at it.

My brain is a sieve, I am easily distracted, often have strong emotional reactions that disrupt my days, and a tendency to overcommit and get too busy. But upon reflection I realized that over the years I've put together a pretty big toolchest of systems and routines to keep me consistently moving forward.

This post is an attempt to outline those systems and routines, in case they might be useful for anyone else.

Set aside time for retrospective and planning

This forms the foundation on which most of the rest of my routines sit. I specifically set aside time both to look back at what I've done and to look forward at what I need to do. And I try to write it all down and think of how/when I'm going to make it happen, and put it into systems that will help make me follow through.

I set aside this time a weekly, monthly, and annual basis.

Every Monday, I have an hour long block on my calendar for weekly planning. If I get to it before that block, fine (sometimes I'm already thinking about my week on Sunday and if the kids are busy and I don't have a conflict I can do some planning), but if it doesn't happen before that block it happens then.

Once a month, that block is half an hour longer and includes monthly planning.

Once a year (usually either around my birthday in November or at the end of the year) I do a yearly version. This usually is long and spread out over several days

Typically these planning sessions involve a bit of a retrospective (Looking back at the last [week/month/year], what happened that was good, what happened that was bad, and what do I want to learn/take away from this. And then they involve looking forward to the next [week/month/year], identifying what am I trying to accomplish.

The fidelity of the forward looking plan varies based on the time frame, but usually it's around 2-3 high level themes or goals I'm trying to accomplish, and a rough outline of when I think I might do those things.

Todo lists

I keep lists of todo items mostly in my universal notes application. Which I have. It used to be a paper notebook (well, many notebooks over time), but now I use a web and mobile application called RoamResearch for this. Notes aren't honestly the best tool for a todo list, but they work all right and I already have a habit of looking at them regularly.

When I do my weekly plan, I'm often filling out todos for each day of the week (though I hold this pretty lightly - todos can move around, or sometimes I decide I'm not doing something after all).

Also when something comes up that I want to handle, I add it to a TODO list, either for today or for a future day if I know when it is.

Calendering

I use my calendar(s) HEAVILY, to block time for myself, to give myself reminders, and of course for scheduling meetings & the like.

I use calendly to let people schedule with me. It has some very nice features around not only letting me set available time, but also looking across my multiple (personal, work, shared) calendars to determine availability even if it is only adding to a single calendar.

Phone reminders

Similar to calendaring, if I need to remember something during the day, sometimes I reach for my phone and set an alarm. Especially if I'm not going to be at my computer much that day, because I find the alarm gets me more reliably than the phone calendar notification.

Habit chains

I try to build habits on top of each other. I don't have massive numbers of habits, but when possible I try to link them together to make sure they happen. For example, during allergy season in order to remember to take my allergy pill regularly, I linked that to my morning habit of shower+toothbrush. I always do dishwasher unloading & related work when I make breakfast in the morning.

Prompting

Calendaring, phone reminders, and habit chains are forms of "prompting", which is basically, "When X happens, do Y". There isn't always a good habit or specific time/day calendar thing to hook into, so instead sometimes I'll just think ahead about what will be a good prompt for something that needs to happen. An example here is any time I have a day without a lot of meetings, I check to see if I need to run laundry. Why? Because if I don't have a lot of meetings it will be reasonable for me to be taking random times to move laundry around, fold things, etc.

Recurring commitments

The last trick I can think of is just committing to other people about something happening, and particularly happening on a regular basis. My newsletter goes out on Tuesdays (a previous one I ran went Fridays). I commit to that, and then am motivated to make it happen. Sometimes it isn't ready until the last minute. But I've committed to when it's going out, so it goes out that day. The deadline/commitment makes a difference.

Similarly I wanted to be doing research on LLMs, so I set up a weekly study group with some other interested people. We review 1 paper together each week on Wednesdays at noon. If I didn't have that, I'd have a lot more trouble getting myself continually making progress in that area.

Creating your own systems

I've cobbled these various tools together over the course of years, but my pace of creating and adopting systems for myself (and coincidentally also my overall happiness and sense of effectiveness) shifted dramatically around 2017-2018. This happened due to the coincidence of three factors:

I was running my own business, so nobody was setting my schedules and expectations for me.
I had two kids and my parents were having health issues, so the level of chaos in my life had ramped way up
I worked with a coach for the first time. She was incredible at prompting me to think about and think through what was holding me back and how I could set up systems to move forward.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, that experience was also part of what set me on the path to becoming a coach myself.

I dunno what your factors might be, or what chaos your life is throwing at you, but if this resonates with you and you'd be interested in working with a coach to help you set up your own systems, that is something I do now. You can learn more about my services here or sign up directly for a free exploratory session here.

ChatGPT: Climbing the Engineering Ladder Requires More Than Just Code Generation

2023-05-04T14:00:00Z

Like a large number of other folks in the tech industry, I've been going down the rabbit hole of understanding ChatGPT and other recent Generative AI improvements.

There's a tremendous amount of hype coming out, but underneath that hype there's also a lot of reality. These are super powerful technologies, and they are already changing the way that software engineering is done.

But I think it's important to highlight where the hype has gotten way out ahead of reality.

In the first episode of the Latent Space podcast, Logan Kilpatrick from OpenAI asserted that ChatGPT's capabilities, when it comes to programming, were going to climb from being a junior engineer to being a principal engineer by getting better at code generation.

This is a fundamental misunderstanding of what higher levels of engineers do. ChatGPT is indeed climbing a learning curve to generate better code for well-defined problems with a well-defined context. But beyond the senior level, most of engineering is about problem identification and definition, working with a large set of implicit often poorly defined context.

Understanding Staff-Level Engineering

To understand the complexity of engineering roles beyond the senior level, let's explore some examples of what staff-level and higher engineers do:

Maintaining Contextual Knowledge: Staff-level engineers create and maintain a large set of context in their heads, blending explicit written content (current state of codebase, written design docs, etc.), explicit verbal content (conversations about what needs to be done and why), and implicit information (mental model of the current state of the business, business goals, relationships with stakeholders, relative importance of different timelines).
Clarifying Outcomes and Constraints: Using the context they have, staff-level engineers ask key questions to clarify desired outcomes, constraints, and decompose problems into useful chunks. They also estimate the difficulty of these tasks in their company's unique context.
Reframing Business Problems: Staff-level engineers find ways to reframe or constrain business problems to translate impossible or very difficult challenges into things that are understandable and achievable.
Identifying and Solving Complex Patterns: Staff-level engineers identify patterns and recurring problem areas, which typically occur at the boundaries of systems and interfaces. These issues are frequently not well documented and may have combinatoric complexity. Staff-level engineers diagnose these issues (commonly using very incomplete data and logic to debug scenarios that have never or rarely been described or documented before), using experimentation and iterative problem solving, and design solutions.

The Realities of Advancing in Engineering

It's important to note that nowhere in these examples is "write better code" a key aspect. Being able to write code (even relatively complex, full systems) is what will advance you from junior to mid-level and mid-level to senior. However, it is merely table stakes when it comes to the upper levels of engineering.

ChatGPT is a solid code-generation tool. So are tools like Github Copilot, and the various open source alternatives that are growing. They can phenomenally improve our productivity as engineers, and once problems are well defined they can make generating code to solve them much faster.

But we shouldn't overestimate what they can do. Advancing in your career as an engineer requires you to move up the conceptual stack from straightforward implementation to problem identification and definition, coordination and translation between engineering & other domains, and interpersonal leadership.

These are not skills that ChatGPT is likely to replace soon, if ever.

Note: I actually used ChatGPT (with GPT 4) to help write this post. Once I knew what I wanted to say, I was able to prompt it to get a solid first draft. But that draft needed a fair amount of editing. And without the guidance of what I wanted to say, it wasn't able to generate something very useful. Generic prompts or questions around the premise of chatGPT replacing principal engineers generated very uninformative responses. This is a very similar situation to writing code. Once you know what you want, the AI is a phenomenal assistant. But the work of defining what you want is the core problem to start with.

Where to get career guidance in tech

2023-03-14T14:30:00Z

Where do you get the guidance you need to keep advancing in your career?

You could, of course, get it nowhere. Follow your curiosity, let serendipity be your guide, and wander from job to job as opportunity strikes.

That was me, during the first decade of my career. At first I was so happy to have a tech job, I didn't care. Then I followed my curiosity and opportunity, meandering through scripting languages, compiled languages, moving into web dev, and onward.

It served me well, until it didn't. Sure, I burned myself out in my first 3 jobs, but I also had a lot of fun along the way and was reasonably successful.

But at some point I started to get stuck... and I realized I would do better if I had a bit more guidance.

This post is me sharing what I wish my younger self had known about growth and career guidance.

Who can give you career and growth advice?

I've seen three different places that folks tend to get career and growth advice in a structured way: Manager development coaching, coaching from an experienced peer or mentor, and working with an external coach.

There's also sometimes industry-related ways... some conferences have career focused workshops, or if you're lucky you might find a peer coaching group at a local meetup. But those tend to be more ad-hoc and infrequent.

For purposes of this post, I'll just break down the big three.

Manager development coaching

This is one of the most common ways to get help as grow, especially as you start to grow beyond just technical skills, is to receive coaching from your manager.

Having your manager involved with helping you grow and develop can be great, especially if you have a good relationship with your manager and they are skilled at coaching.

Benefits of manager as coach

Visibility
Your manager typically has great visibility into your work. They are able to provide very specific context for you, and tune recommendations very precisely.

Logistics
Adding developmental coaching to an existing manager relationship is logistically simple - it can piggy-back on existing 1:1s or complement them.

Alignment
Your manager also often has visibility and/or control over work coming down. This means they can help align the work with the areas you are working on.

However, having your manager be your primary source of developmental coaching also has some significant drawbacks.

Drawbacks of manager as coach

Power Dynamics
Power dynamics can get in the way of you growing the way you want. Suggestions from a manager implicitly carry more weight than from a peer or external coach. Unless the manager is extremely skilled and careful, this can result in them pushing you towards their agenda rather than yours.

Incentive Mismatch
The manager also has mixed incentives, which can lead to challenges. They are ultimately responsible to the business for some sort of outcome, and that outcome isn't always aligned with what is best for your growth.

Coaching from an experienced peer

This is possibly the best growth setup you can get - a more experienced peer inside of your organization, but preferably not too closely aligned with your work so they're able to have a little bit of distance from your direct outcomes.

Benefits of an experienced peer as coach

Organizational Context
A senior peer in your organization will have great organizational context and can help you with situations tied directly to your work and organization, how to navigate particular individuals and processes.

No Conflict of Interest
Hopefully they're distanced enough from your team or individual outcomes that you don't end up with conflict of interest / mixed incentives, they can be focused on your success. If they're on your team, they do have a little bit of a conflict of interest, but hopefully less than a manager would.

Drawbacks of an experienced peer as coach

Logistical Challenges
Getting coaching from a peer can be logistically challenging. They have their own work, and may well be quite busy, such that it is hard to find the time to set up.

Rare
Finding a more experienced peer who is both skilled as a coach and has the time and energy to coach you is extremely uncommon.

Coaching from an external coaching

This is an approach that is less commonly used for engineering ICs, but much more common as you go up the promotions ladder. Executive coaching has become extremely common, and large organizations increasingly offer coaching as a benefit for directors and managers.

Benefits of an external coach

Focus on you
While a manager or even a peer has their own incentives within the organization, a hired coach is focused entirely on you and helping you achieve your goals.

Expertise in coaching
An external coach is someone who has particular experience and inclination towards coaching. They likely have trained specifically to improve their coaching skills, and have chosen coaching as a profession.

Matching
While you may not get to choose your manager, or have a great candidate for peer coaching, you can try out different coaches until you find one who's experience, style, and skills are a good match for your needs.

Drawbacks of an external coaching

Lack of context
Compared to working with someone inside of your company, an external coach will not have specific organizational context or knowledge of the individuals you are working with.

Cost
Unlike working with someone inside of your organization where they only price is your time, working with an external coach costs money. That said, many organizations offer career development benefits that can defray the cost, and most engineers make enough money that hiring a coach is within reach. Hiring a coach is a real investment, but can pay off rapidly if it accelerates your growth towards a promotion or raise.

It's not shameful to look for guidance

The tech industry is filled with independent-minded people who are good at self-guided learning. As a result, there can often be a sense that you "should" be able to figure things out on your own.

There's also a focus on delivery, and on-the-job learning.

These are not bad things. It's good to learn on the job, and to be able to do things on your own. But most of us can also benefit from a little guidance. What should we be learning on our own? How can we better align our work and our longer term goals?

These are things that someone more experienced - whether your manager, an experienced peer, or an external coach - can help with.

And it's not shameful to ask for that guidance. Ask your manager for more guidance. Or look for that experienced peer. Find out if your company offers benefits like BetterUp with internal access to coaches.

Or if you're not getting what you want internally, look for an external coach.

But what you shouldn't do is assume you can't get any guidance. Because that's blantantly false.

Did you find this article useful? This blog is new, so there aren't many other posts, but it has an rss feed! you can subscribe to get more posts, or you could follow KBall on LinkedIn.

Feeling stuck? Want some help to get un-stuck? KBall is available as a coach. Not sure what that would look like? Book a free exploratory session and try it out at no cost.

How to activate your network after getting laid off

2023-02-07T14:00:00Z

Layoffs suck. There's no way around that.

I've been through layoffs on both sides - as a survivor and a victim - and there is no way to make them not suck.

And right now, there's a lot of that suckage going on. If you've been through a layoff, and you're financially able, I definitely recommend taking a few weeks or even months to process before you start looking for a new job.

Grieve. Relax. Get bored. Whatever you need.

But when you're ready to look, then comes the question: How do I find my next job?

It's common advice to "use your network" to find a new job, but what exactly does that mean?

I've been in this situation a number of times in my career, and been able to use my network to find jobs and other business opportunities for myself and laid off coworkers.

I'm able to do this not because I'm particularly extroverted or good at networking, but because I've developed a framework and set of tactics for how I go about it.

The three steps to activate your network

There are three key pieces that I use to activate my network for opportunities:

An announcement
Individual outreach
Exploratory conversations

For each of these, the clearer you are on what you are looking for and what you are good at, the easier of a time you'll have. I'll lay out the templates I use for these below to make it easy to do this outreach, but throughout the goal is to be clear and ask for help without being needy. It is valuable for people looking to hire to find the right person just as it is valuable for you to find the right job, and with each step you are asking for help to try to find the right match, not asking anyone to give you a job.

The announcement

This is where you let your network broadly know what is going on and that you are open for new opportunities. This may be a post on LinkedIn, on Facebook, your blog... wherever you are connected to folks.

The goal of this is to provide a bit of a rallying point for people who are already energized to help out (sometimes folks will jump straight into connecting you with folks), and to start to get your face in people's thinking again as someone who might be looking for a job.

DON'T expect this to generate much in the way of leads right away, though it may. This is mostly about "priming" your network.

Announcement template

Hey all,
Unfortunately I too have been impacted by the layoffs sweeping through the industry. My last day was [xyz] and I'm now back on the market looking for a new job.

As frustrated and sad as this makes me, I'm also excited to find some new opportunities and meet new people. I'm looking for opportunities as a [Job Title], and I've found that I particularly thrive in [XYZ environments]. 

If you know anyone hiring in these domains, please point me their way!

The outreach

The announcement is good, but it's where most people stop, and is only just barely scratching the surface of what you can do with your network.

Because the reality is, most people scan past posts. Or if they don't, they maybe spend a minute or two thinking about what is top of mind, but they don't think deeply about you as an individual or what might be a good fit for you.

The next step is key - individual outreach to a wide range of friends and former coworkers.

The method is simple:

Go through your social media lists for folks you have worked with before or who are in companies/fields where you would like to be working.
Collect a list of all of these folks.
One by one, send them an outreach message via your best guess of the way to contact them.

If you have personal email addresses for them, those can be effective. Barring that, LinkedIn messages have been my next best option, though I've used twitter DMs, facebook messenger, and text messages before all with good effect.

Outreach template

Hi [Name]!
Long time no chat! I hope you are doing well.

I'm currently in a career transition and taking my somewhat reduced workload as a great excuse/opportunity to reconnect with folks. Could I interest you in a short call to reconnect/catch up?

-[Your Name]

These are short, to the point, and not asking for anything. If you get a positive response (I've gotten anywhere from 10% to 70% response rates depending on medium and strength of connection), schedule a short (30 minutes) call. I use calendly to make scheduling easy, but you can also do this manually.

If the connection is local, you can also invite them to coffee or lunch rather than a call.

Don't stress out too much if folks don't respond. Most folks are super busy and bombarded by email - even they intend to respond, it may get slotted behind other urgent things and then forgotten.

If I have a good relationship with an individual, I'll usually send a super quick followup if I haven't heard from them in a week or so. Just a "hey, wanted to follow up really quickly - would love to catch up with you, any chance we could schedule something?" But don't worry about it, even if this doesn't work. It is not a rejection of you as a person, more likely something situational.

Exploratory conversations

These are the conversations you set up with folks. The point of these conversations is not to directly get a job opportunity, but to discover what is out there and become top of mind for folks as they are going through their lives.

Exploratory Conversation template

Hey, how's it going? Long time no talk... what have you been up to?

[Depending on the relationship, anywhere from the first 5 min to 90% of the conversation might be social catchup. That's okay!]

I'd love your advice - I got laid off, I'm looking for a new job doing [XYZ]. I'm particularly interested in [Any sorts of details about the types of company or environment you're looking for]. Do you know anyone currently hiring for this type of role?
    [If yes] Amazing, would you be willing to do an email introduction to them?
    [If no] No worries - is there anyone else you think I should talk to?
      [If so] That's great, would you be willing to make an email introduction?
    Is there anything else I should be thinking about?
Thank you so much for your help, is there anything that I can help *you* with right now?

The introductions outward are a key piece - while it is entirely possible someone you speak with will be working directly somewhere that has a good opportunity, it is far more likely they'll know of someone who is hiring, and a warm introduction (an introduction from someone the person already knows and trusts) is far more powerful than cold outreach.

When you get a "bite" -> Someone who is at a company hiring for a role that is relevant for you, the important thing to do is ask them if they can refer you in.

For most people at most companies, this is not a huge ask - except at some small companies, making a referral does not carry any reputational risk for the person doing the referral. However, what it will do is typically jump your name through the first layer of resume screens, which can be the difference between getting an interview and never hearing back from a company.

Keep Going!

It can take a while to find a good opportunity, especially in a down market, but the key is to keep putting yourself out there, and these conversations will do that.

As an introvert, I find these conversations fun but emotionally taxing, so I give myself both a minimum and maximum pace. I try to schedule at least 3 a week, but no more than 3 a day for while I'm job hunting.

The lower number keeps me accountable and moving forward, while the cap keeps me sane.

Did you find this article useful? This blog is new, so there aren't many other posts, but it has an rss feed! you can subscribe to get more posts, or you could follow KBall on LinkedIn.

Feeling stuck? Want some help to get un-stuck? KBall is available as a coach. Not sure what that would look like? Book a free exploratory session and try it out at no cost.