I did the job of three people last year and still only got “Meets Expectations” on my performance eval! I see this complaint constantly. And my first instinct is sympathy. It has happened to me, several times, and its super frustrating. But the other day I was thinking, well, what did your manager, your performance […]
It seems like we’ve been seeing a lot of layoffs in the tech sector lately. More than usual. I’ve been thinking about this lately because I saw an analogy online that stuck with me. Someone said something like, “I’m a PhD and one of the world’s best electric vehicle scientists! Why would they lay me […]
Let’s do an introspective exercise. If someone asked you, what do you actually DO at your job, what would you say? If you were to ask someone else the same question, most people would probably say, “I build X”, “I maintain Y”, or “I provide service Z”, something like that. But what’s interesting is, in […]
One interesting thing about being a leader is dealing with different types of conflicts. I’ve talked a lot about when there are various aspects or different goals that directly contradict each other. How do you deal with that healthy tension between different competing priorities? The reality is that we all have our personal goals. But […]
So I like to work out (sort of). I mean, I don’t always enjoy the act of working out but I enjoy the satisfaction of doing it. But I’m not very good at it. I can’t run a marathon, bench 250, do more than three pullups, and I’m one of the last to finish a […]
I was doing a question-and-answer one time at a university’s ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) club. This was a bunch of 18-22-year-old computer science majors. There were a couple of interesting technical questions but the overriding theme was about employment and careers. The main question was basically, “How do I get a job?” My answer […]
I am occasionally asked for career advice by people wanting to get into the industry, for example, high-schoolers deciding on career choices. One situation that frequently comes up in this situation is people who love programming and want to get a job being a programmer. They ask, “How can I get a job as a […]
When do you know its time to move on? There was a ten-year period in my career where I changed jobs 4 or 5 times. I started to notice a pattern: Year 1: Figure out what is actually going on in the company, and how to do your job Year 2: Try to institute a […]
A very common question that I see asked is: Should I make the transition from technical to management? Let’s talk about this. Why are you even asking the question? The answer is probably because you’re looking for a raise, or for career growth, and your company/peers/mentors/society is telling you that making this transition is the […]
Knuggets of Knowledge 