The Years We Can't Hire Back
When I was studying in college, many people switched to computer science from other departments. Nowadays, people ask me if they should get a CS degree. They are surprised by my...
Articles tagged with Incentives
Incentives writing on behavior, organizational politics, ownership structure, and the quiet forces that shape outcomes at work.
The Cost of Looking Competent
Sophia has been with the company for over a decade. In that time, she grew in her role and established herself as one of the goto people, eventually earning her staff title. In...
The Double-Counted Future
In 1997, Jeff Bezos sent a letter to shareholders about Day 1\. Despite the rapid growth he was seeing, he wanted to keep the startup mentality. He wanted to give ownership alon...
What Does Retirement Look Like?
I find myself thinking about retirement a lot recently, especially when talking to family members. I also don’t think about retirement at the age of 60+. I have been following d...
Breaking Up With WordPress After Two Decades
Around Black Friday last November, I moved my website from SiteGround to Bluehost. This was not some ambitious infrastructure decision. SiteGround wanted roughly five times more...
Incentives Drive Everything
In early modern France, the monarchy kept running into the same problem. Wars were expensive, revenue was not steady, and every obvious solution came with a political price. New...
Scaling Culture Without Dilution
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...
Why Politics Appear
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 f...
Why Over-Engineering Happens
If you’ve worked in software long enough, you’ve probably seen it: a CRUD app serving a handful of users, deployed on a Kubernetes cluster with half the CNCF landscape stitched...
Prisoner's Dilemma
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...
Building Remote Teams
You've probably heard stories of big tech companies in US and hiring double that number in India, blaming AI for the shift. Everyone's first thought is likely cheap labor. While...
Handling Competitive Dynamics
A healthy level of competition can fuel innovation and push people to do their best work. It turns problematic when it starts overshadowing the team. I don’t think competition i...
Why Metrics Don’t Equal Quality
In 1902, Hanoi was drowning in rats. The government was getting nervous about plague. Hence, the city put a bounty per rat tail. Suddenly, the system had a way to measure, somet...