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Recruiting with Tacos & Coffee

I am writing this article five weeks into California’s shelter-in-place. And so it seems like I am writing about a bygone era when it was normal to have a meal or a drink with someone in person — and not just on Zoom. While I don’t possess a crystal ball, my hunch is that the tradition of breaking bread and sharing a drink with someone will return. 

Before Tacos del Sol in Alviso, CA was a restaurant, it was a food truck. And one that was hard to find. I got introduced to it when a colleague at Yahoo asked if I wanted tacos. Of course I was in. Since moving to CA in 2005 I fell in love with the taco scene (it was just not to the same level as the scene in Dallas at that time). Finding the truck was challenging. It parked in a few locations. No one seemed to know the formula, but basically you just drove around the small town in the salt marshes and you would stumble upon it. I mean Alviso isn’t that big. Probably a lot of the charm was it feeling a bit secret.

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Becoming a Manager Is a Poorly Designed Game

Imagine a game that starts as a side-scroller. It could be a game like Super Mario Brothers or Sonic the Hedgehog. Movement is constricted along a 2D plane. The game has a rhythm to it and the levels, while increasing in difficulty, share a lot with the previous levels. The game is fun exactly because it uses just enough of the learnings from the earlier levels in the game, but add just enough challenges to make the game increasingly fun & enjoyable.

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Culture as a Recruiting Tool

It was a beautiful Sunday morning. I had decided to hike the hills on the east side of San Jose just above Alum Rock Park. Bocardo Rock was one of the highest hills in the area and made for a really stunning view of all of Silicon Valley. That morning it looked like a gigantic lake as it was fully shrouded in a dense layer of fog. I was feeling far removed from the hectic pace of my job at Netflix when I heard the ping of a text message. I quickly checked my Blackberry. It was from Reed. Yes, that Reed. My CEO. I wondered what was up for him to be texting me on a Sunday morning.

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Strategies for Technical Tracks

“Can I stay on a purely technical track and still advance my career?” I have heard this question asked of me many times over my career and have asked the same question to myself many times.

As a technical leader you need to have a strategy on how you will grow and retain your best engineering talent. One part of this is clearly defining a path of growth for your engineering talent. Here are a few things to consider when developing technical tracks.

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The Magic Number 72

“We need to get our people to understand that they should stop seeking promotions!” my colleague stated. “They should be excited about their work and not worrying about being promoted.” We had been discussing who we felt were good candidates for promotions in that year’s review cycle. I responded “That is easy for you and me to say. We are executives and have some of the highest ranks in the company. The company created a ‘game system’ complete with these levels. The levels are things like ‘Sr Manager’, ‘Director’, ‘Vice President’. We reward handsomely the players that beat the previous level and move up to a new level. We send out nice congratulatory emails. We give extra perks and equity to those that level-up. And now you are saying they shouldn’t play the game? This seems hypocritical given that you and I made it the top levels of this game, benefited from it and now you don’t want others to play the same game?”

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The Lucifer Effect – Why Teams Do Bad Things

“I am disappointed in all of you”, were the first words the new head of engineering said to the team hastily assembled that Monday morning. “In fact the code you have written is so bad, so amateur, that I could have personally written a better version over the weekend. I should fire all of you.” The room was stunned. It didn’t matter that the accusations were unfounded. This leader had been given his role by the founder/CEO and everyone knew his word was law.

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The Busyness Trap

I moved to a new level of busy after I became the head of engineering for a large organization. My leadership team was no longer first line managers but leaders of their own complex organizations. And with almost 500 engineers under my direction, my schedule quickly filled up. Busy became the new normal. It became harder to manage day to day demands. Problems came in from all directions. I barely had time to digest the first wave before the next would hit. It was frustrating but at the same time exhilarating. Busyness became a bit of a drug. All these meetings and a full schedule carried with it an outsized sense of importance.

As the new year rolled around, I founded a small innovation team. I traded the large organization of 500 for a hand picked team of 10 with a new strategic charter. And with the change, I went from a fully slammed calendar to a completely empty one. 

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My Reluctant Journey to Management

While I write a lot about management, I actually spent the majority of my career focused in non-management roles on writing software and designing products. In fact, I actively resisted moving into management.

For people in the software engineering field, one common topic is should I focus my career on a purely technical track or should I focus on a management track. Let me share a bit of my career journey. It will illustrate that the decision isn’t really a binary one. But can actually look a bit messy.

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Creating a Tower of Babel

Previously I have written about the power of sharing context in order to create high functioning teams. Some of the areas of context I talked about were: product direction, customer needs, business goals as well as organizational structure. Notice each of these dimensions points outward from the team. And this is key. High functioning teams cannot just be inwardly high functioning; they must be high functioning outwardly in how they collaborate with other teams to accomplish the larger mission. And for this type of collaboration to occur, there must be a common language understood by the different teams.

A big barrier between teams effectively sharing context or having a shared understanding is the fact that different teams speak different languages.

Amusingly it is bit like the Tower of Babel story from the book of Genesis (Bresheit) in the Bible/Torah:

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The Power of Context

Reasonably smart people, given enough context, do reasonably smart things.

I remember a particular time at Netflix where we had a site outage. Of course we had more than one of those as most companies do at that scale. In this case the outage was caused by the decision of a single engineer. I don’t actually recall the specific details that led this engineer to make the fateful decision he made. But he made a mistake that appeared innocent enough but ended up impacting millions of customers.

This isn’t though what makes the story interesting. It is the response by leadership that taught me a lesson that I still learn from each and every day.

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