As organizations grow across geographies, one thing becomes disproportionately important. Culture. We, engineers, often dismiss culture as soft and cushy. This is until you see the hard costs of ignoring it. Culture isn’t just how we feel about work; it is the distributed operating system for how decisions are made when leadership isn’t in the room. There is company culture, […]
Ancient Athens did not solve uncertainty with better communication. They solved it by removing people. Once a year, citizens gathered to vote on exile. Not for crimes. Not for failures. For influence. Some people became too visible, too connected. They were deemed likely to become dangerous later, so they had to go. The mechanism was called ostracism. In essence, it […]
Alright, this is gonna be a long one. And not just a one-time thing. I’ll keep updating it as I write more about leadership. I’ll try to link everything I’ve written before. This one’s the one, just like in the Matrix. All the things I wish I had when I first stepped into managing. There are so many damn questions […]
You can fake a lot of things in business. Authority. Expertise. Competence. But you can’t fake certain traits, like respect. Think about the managers you’ve had in the past. The good ones. The bad ones. People do respect good managers. Why? You remember how it felt to work with them. I bet it felt safe, challenged, trusted and a few […]
Estimating software projects is basically the tech equivalent of arguing about Irish weather. Everyone has an opinion, nobody really knows anything, and the forecast changes all the time. One minute you’re looking up and see that nice blue sky, and fifteen minutes later you’re sprinting through sideways rain wondering why you ever trusted an umbrella in this country. If you […]