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readmes

Manager Readme

My attempt at a manager readme.

Who am I?

Some things I like:

Some things I've done:

I wrote some articles about how to evaluate companies when you're interviewing for a job. Check them out if you want to know more about how I think.

I also wrote a blog here that is very sparsely populated. It's old, but it will at least give you an idea of the wide variety of technologies and random things I've done.

What are my principles?

  • Expect from others only what you expect from yourself. If I can't do it, how can I expect it of people I work with/for? I don't expect anyone to be perfect. I expect a lot of mistakes (I certainly make them). I do expect a level of integrity, showing up where you're needed and a level of caring (see above).

  • Honesty and Directness. I have always felt the urge to "do the right thing". I can't really explain why but I tend toward open communication and being as honest as possible.

  • Ownership is important. I have found that the single most important thing you can do in software is to get things done. There are two parts to getting things done:

    1. Driving something to completion without the need for external intervention. Even if it's not necessarily your job, it's worth doing it to get the thing you need done.
    2. Communicating with other people what's going on while you're getting things done.

  • Caring about your job. I think people need to genuinely care about their job to do it well. For myself, if I stop caring about my job I need to find that motivation or find something else to do.

  • Live site is important. There are two reasons I believe in live site support as a first class part of an engineering team:

    1. Availability is a feature. How much does buggy software bother you when you use it? It bothers me a lot. I don't want to be responsbile for something that customers dislike.
    2. Understanding live site is the best way to level up as an engineer. So many crazy things happen in production that do not happen on your local development box. Want to understand threading/locking/performance? You will need to understand live site under load.

What do I expect from myself?

  • Are we shipping a great product?
  • Am I unblocking my direct reports?
  • What is falling through the cracks?
  • I should be humble enough to assume I can always be better. Not hard because I have imposter syndrome. All the time. In everything I do.

What do I expect from my directs?

  • Try to be kind and respectful to others and learn from your mistakes.
  • Communicate what's going on with what you're working on.
  • Code you ship can be trusted in production.
  • You get things done, even if you are blocked or frustrated.