How Do Individual Contributors Get Stuck? A Primer

“Always design a thing by considering it in its next larger context — a chair in a room, a room in a house, a house in an environment, an environment in a city plan” — Eliel SaarinenFrequently we will be given problems to solve by other people. Early in our career, these problems will usually be well-scoped and specific, eg:Add this new data to...

Adding product management to more traditional software infrastructure organizations, sometimes with a shift towards platform engineering, is all the rage today. As someone who has done both these things, it doesn’t surprise me to see so many people struggling to make it work. Both of these shifts require going from a siloed, process, tech-focused...

Software engineers are attracted to formulas, algorithms, and structures. As people whose job it is to take ideas and turn them into predictable executable code, it is unsurprising that we’re drawn to ways of thinking that categorize and systematize things. This attraction continues as engineers become engineering managers and leaders. I should...

Most companies have carefully created separate senior career tracks that provide details of the differences between being a manager and being an individual contributor (IC). And yet, many people still believe that you can’t get ahead without becoming a manager, and many companies who want more senior individual contributors struggle to promote...

For varying levels of seniority, from senior, to staff, and beyond.How to run a meeting, and no, being the person who talks the most in the meeting is not the same thing as running itHow to write a design doc, take feedback, and drive it to resolution, in a reasonable period of timeHow to mentor an early-career teammate, a mid-career engineer, a...