I’ve played product manager more often this year than I have in years. It’s been a fun role to get back into. It’s also been a long time since I played product manager at a larger company. The last two times were tiny startups, and well, it’s a very different experience. With tiny startup product […]
Category: work
Avoiding cynicism
I mentioned this last week, but while I’ve been fixing formatting issues on my old blog posts, I’ve made the mistake of reading some of them. Getting a glimpse of me 20 years ago has been interesting – he was so angry, usually about work, and talked about it a lot. That guy was on […]
Strategic apathy
I have a bad habit at work of saying “I don’t care” without qualifying it. It comes off as sarcastic or dismissive, when that’s not how I mean it – which means I need to find a new way to express it. Most of the time, it pops out of my mouth when my manager […]
People are always the problem
I’m now a very senior engineer. I don’t even know what the right title is (once I got “CTO” titles kind of stopped mattering), but at Gusto I’m an L6 and there are seven levels at the company. One of the great things about working at a larger company is how many people I get […]
Be kind, but have boundaries
After yesterday’s post, Amy asked another question that I’m ill-equipped to answer, but I’m going to try anyway: Ok, tough question: a thing I struggle with, (maybe as a woman or maybe just my family of origin), is me behaving in a kind manner often means being seen as inherently weak or (shudder) useable to […]
The intersections of kindness, humor and privilege
On Mastodon this morning, as I sat watching football (aka soccer) and drinking coffee, I asked what I should write about. Amy came through for me: You’ve always seemed to put a lot of thought into kindness and humor (you++). I’d be very interested to read your thoughts on that – not just as a […]
Playing
We have a monthly thing at work where someone picks a conference talk, we watch it together and then discuss. This month, we talked about Playing with Engineering by AnnMarie Thomas from this years Strange Loop. It was really good, and it’s definitely worth your time. While watching it, I realized that it’s a great […]
The 3 Options
I guess this is part four of my one part series (parts one, two & three) on layoffs and reorgs. For the record, I was right about the reorg following right behind the layoff. In part three, I talked about the loss of control that layoffs cause. Reorgs just pile on to that, and then, […]
The Illusion of Control
I’ve been talking to a lot of people since the layoffs last Wednesday, helping them (and myself) come to terms with the colleagues that are no longer here, all of the survivor’s guilt, uncertainty and fear that comes along with it. I’ve talked about some of those things in the previous two posts (this one […]
One Last Layoff Lament
In my last layoff-related post, I tried to talk through some of the emotions you’ll feel, and why no question you’ll ask will get an answer that will satisfy you. Well, I’ve still been thinking about them, and how we navigate them. A layoff confronts us with suffering we can’t turn away from, can’t reason […]