On September 3, 1949, a weather plane was flying over Japan. It detected traces of radioactive isotopes. These elements decay quickly, which means they had been created recently. The conclusion was obvious: the Soviet Union had detonated its first nuclear bomb. Since the last world war, nuclear power was limited to only one country. With this new development, a rivalry […]
Engineers have been reaching a common ceiling in their careers for decades. The pattern goes like this: an individual contributor gets promoted to a senior software engineer, and their career trajectory levels off. Likewise, an IC who transitions to an Engineering Manager often hits a similar wall, wondering if they’ll ever advance to a senior manager or director. In the […]
If you happen to work for a large organization, you’ve probably heard of quarterly check-ins or some similar corporate buzzword to describe what you’ve done and what you could have done better for the quarter. That’s fine, but both we as leaders and our direct reports always get caught off guard. I personally would scroll through Jira, Slack, and Confluence, […]