Professional Philosophy

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My experience in Big Tech, Little Tech, and parenting has led me to the following tenets of IT leadership (in alphabetical order):

Avoid echo chambers

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• “Venting” is legitimate, but lots of venting in tech is not results-driven.
• Don’t say anything on Slack you don’t want someone to selectively screenshot and send to the entire company.

Bus factor awareness

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• If you feel like you can’t take a vacation or sick day because “the team needs you”, you’re generating a business risk.

Calendar conflicts mean things

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• Don’t invite people to meetings “optionally, for awareness”; if they are optional, they can get sufficient awareness from an after-meeting summary (or nothing at all).
• If you can’t find a time that works for everyone, you might be inviting too many people.

Get off the pot

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• If you’re spending more time planning a project than you would waste by not doing that planning, stop planning and go make some mistakes.

Professional sabbath

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• Giving an engineer one Friday a month off to focus on recreation and self-actualization pays for itself and then some.

Utilitarian project management

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• Analysis paralysis happens. While you’re busy deciding what to do next, deliver a feature to kill time.
• Something that reduces customer pain is better than nothing; Busy work is worse than nothing.

Resume driven development

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• Engineers are going to implement solutions in search of problems out of ambition and curiosity anyway; it can be more effective to just assign tickets for pet projects that may go nowhere rather than bloating your code base when someone hunting a promotion turns your kubectl manifest into the next Uber.

Zoom call multitasking

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• If you’re able to get away with not paying attention, you probably don’t need to be there. Just decline the invite and keep working.

When everything is a P0, nothing is

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• We all feel personally attacked at this one