Management and tech skills

Discussions

• Do you still think coding is in demand?

  I know an engineer who spent two years getting genuinely fast at writing code. Not sloppy fast, but clean, beautiful, well-tested fast. He could turn a ticket into a working pull request in the blink of an eye. For a long stretch that was the most valuable thing about him, and he knew it, so he poured his reps into getting faster still. It was great to see.

• Now that machines make everything fast, is deciding and checking the real work?

  Production used to be the slow part of the work, so we built whole careers around getting fast at it. Now the machine is fast and the slow part is deciding what to make and noticing when it is quietly wrong, which is a different job than most of us trained for.

• Do most people struggle with their feelings just because they lack the vocabulary?

  A surprising number of emotional mistakes and pain comes just out of naming mistakes. Someone says he is angry when he is really ashamed. Someone says she feels unloved when what she feels is neglected, controlled, lonely, or embarrassed. Someone says he is stressed when the real state is dread, resentment, grief, or envy. Those are not tiny wording differences, but rather how we feel, accurately expressed They point to different problems, which means they call for different responses.

• Do most jobs converge into sales once you're senior enough?

  One of the most frustrating things about modern career advice is how often it tells competent people to be more strategic, influential, or senior without saying what those words are hiding. A lot of the time, what they are hiding is sales.

• Does being entertained all the time make ordinary life feel dead?

  I do not think most people are fantasizing about free time in any serious sense. They are fantasizing about free time available for consumption. That is a different thing. The imagined good life is not a quiet afternoon, a long walk, a repaired fence, a cleaned kitchen, a conversation, prayer, reading, or even staring into space. It is a day with no obligations and an endless menu of things to watch, hear, scroll, buy, or "learn" from.

• Is a high salary ever really enough?

  Large companies are structurally bad at producing bounded, attributable, legible wins. Part of the salary is payment for living without them.

• Should you really emulate famous tech CEOs, or did they just get lucky?

  I think a lot of famous tech-management advice only looked wise because of the environment around it. Rising stock prices, captive talent, and equity upside made a lot of bad management survivable. Most organizations do not have those shock absorbers, which is why I think people should stop treating founder mythology as management advice.

• Does splitting 'hard' and 'soft' skills make people worse at both?

  Hard skills are measurable, specific, and teachable abilities or technical knowledge gained through education, training, or experience, which is often directly related to a particular job or industry. Examples include data analysis, programming, graphic design, accounting, dancing, painting… They are usually the core of a profession, particularly the part of it excluding interaction with other people. On the other hand, soft skills are mostly defined as “personal attributes, interpersonal....

• Does your personality matter far less than you think?

  I realize, interacting with students, teenagers and younger co-workers peers that many believe that their personality traits are a leading factor in deciding what do to or how to tackle their own career. Although younger people ask these questions more explicitly, older adults also seem to think along the same lines. I personally find it to be far more irrelevant than most people think. Besides my job, where I observe successful people doing the same role with drastically...

• Do people who eat together fight harder for each other?

  Strong groups do not become strong only because they agree on a mission. They become strong because people stop feeling abstract to one another, they see each other as people and friends. That is one reason shared meals matter more than most official culture programs. You don't need expensive workshops and getaways to build a team culture. You just need to be present. Have lunch with your team, have them eat together. Have coffee together...