The Human Systems around our Technical Systems
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Jason Gallaugher is a long time engineer and engineering leader who now works as a consultant and coach helping technology organizations become high leverage.
Human Skills 031: Taking Control of Yourself and Your Career
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Michelle Brenner, Senior Software Engineer at Netflix, has a fascinating and different background from many software developers. For one things, she started out in art school, and then while working in a support engineer role in VFX self taught python and gradually moved into development.
Human Skills 030: Organizational Change
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with Elaine May
Human Skills 029: Fully Asynchronous Teams
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Amy Phillips has an incredibly varied background in management, having led QA teams, developers, and SREs. And we talked some about those experiences, the challenges of different ways you might take over a team, and what how to think about balancing a team as you hire. But those weren't the meat of this interview.
Human Skills 028 - Conflict and Swagger
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After a career at the intersection of UX design and front end development, Kate Cox became a manager in early 2020, one of the most tumultuous times in recent history. Since then she has been through a roller-coaster of management, everything from managing an existing team to building new teams to now leading a whole department.
Human Skills 027 - Thriving in the Tech Industry
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Jossie Haines has been a technical leader in some of the biggest name brands in tech, working in Management, Director, and VP roles at companies like Zynga, Tile, and Apple. Which makes it all the more interesting to me that in her role now as an executive coach, she has leaned heavily into joy, playfulness, and a lot of other topics that might be considered "woo woo".
Human Skills 026: The Importance of Caring
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Garima Sahai "grew up" with Google, spending almost 20 years with the organization through a series of engineering roles, followed by management, and finally director of engineering. Throughout her time there she not only led technically, but became increasingly involved in initiatives around human...
Good resources for new managers
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Hey folks,
Human Skills 025: Improving Processes as an Engineer
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Loren Verheyden is a long time engineer who started getting involved in process improvements, and eventually became a manager after realizing that most of her learning focus was on people and processes.
Human Skills 024: Operationalizing Values
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Amy Chantasirivisal is someone I've been chatting back and forth with online for a couple of years now. She is one of those engineering leaders who tackles the human problems head on, building high trust, high impact teams, such as the one she's now building at Hint Health.with Amy ChantasirivisalAmy Chantasirivisal is someone I've been chatting back and forth with online for a couple of years now. She is one of those engineering leaders who tackles the human problems head on, building high trust, high impact teams, such as the one she's now building at Hint Health.
Human Skills 023: Teams as Complex Systems
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Paulo André has worked as an engineer, manager, director, and VP of Engineering before becoming a leadership coach. He has experience working with small teams, and building scalable organizations. And he is an incredibly clear communicator and thinker.
Human Skills 022: Vulnerability and Leadership
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Jamie Strachan worked his way up through various software roles until he reached Architect, at which point he realized that increasingly his work was made up of people problems instead of software ones, and decided to try management.
Human Skills 021 - Stakeholder Management
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Mo Villagran has a unique background. Starting in statistical genetics, she moved into actuarial science, and from there into data analytics. Through that time, she had to deal with a wide variety of different stakeholders, from law enforcement officers to healthcare providers, and over time she developed a 7-step system for stakeholder management that she has turned into a book.
Human Skills 020 - Decisionmaking
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Joel Chippindale has served as Chief Technical officer at a number of different startups and scaleups. He has been through the process of scaling, seen the many dysfunctions that happen in these chaotic early stages. And now he runs an independent business as a CTO coach.
Human Skills 019 - Making Choices Explicit
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with Eric Nehrlich
Human Skills 018 - Creating Clarity From Ambiguity
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I first had the pleasure of working with Kristján Pétursson in 2008, when he was already a wickedly productive software engineer. Since then he moved his way up the ladder, becoming a manager, then director, then temporarily head of engineering at Apartment List. He quickly learned that he did not like that...
Human Skills 017 - Learning to See Power
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Elijah Meeks has a fascinating background for a tech startup cofounder. He started with a graduate degree in the humanities, moved into software development within academia, got heavily into data visualization and worked at both Netflix and Apple, and now is the cofounder and Chief Innovation Officer of Noteable.
Human Skills 016 - Magical Teams
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Jason Reid started his career in the defense industry, handling servers and software for Lockheed Martin. He moved into data engineering in the early 2010s, and then on up into leadership, becoming a director of data science and engineering at Netflix, and now the cofounder of Tabular, a data automation platform.
Human Skills 015 - Throwing the Gauntlet
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Sarah Drasner is one of my tech heroes. She has keynoted for React conferences been a core contributor for Vue, and now runs Web Infrastructure at Google, which includes open source projects like Angular and Sass. She has written hundreds of articles for CSS Tricks and other publications, taught workshops for Frontend Masters, and written about SVG Animations for O'Reilly...
Human Skills 014 - Thriving with Diversity
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Kristen Spencer took a nontraditional path to tech. She taught herself to code during maternity leave, then got involved with bootcamps, teaching, and eventually got fully into the tech industry. From there, her bent towards teaching and human skills quickly led her into management, and today...
Systems and Routines for Consistent Progress
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?
ChatGPT: Climbing the Engineering Ladder Requires More Than Just Code Generation
A rebuttal of the assertion that ChatGPT is going to climb from being able to replace junior engineers to being able to replace principal engineers.
Where to get career guidance in tech
A breakdown of the three most common ways people get career guidance in tech
How to activate your network after getting laid off
Step by step action plan for activating your network to find new opportunities