Welcome to my manager README. This is a guide to working effectively with me. My role What do I value most? What will disappoint me? How do I work? How do I expect you to work? Nuances to working with me Motivation for this document This document should help establish a foundation so can work together effectively (if it doesn’t please let me know). Consider this document an introduction to how I work, what I value, and some of my mental models.
Think of a time when you were walking in the hallway or grabbing coffee in the kitchen and chanced upon colleagues discussing a project that impacted you, which you were previously unaware of. Learning about the project is great, but it’s hard to argue that this sort of chance encounter is a good way to learn important information. In this post, I explain how serendipitous communication is an organizational bug and point out an approach that improves how information flows in your organization.
In this post I want to talk about how to hire novel specialists. There have been thousands of pages already written on hiring in-general, and I don’t have anything to add there. However, twice in my career I’ve needed to hire a novel specialist into the organization to bring in new skills. I’m defining novel to mean: someone with highly technical skills that your current organization does not have the capability to evaluate effectively.
Over the past month or two I’ve had several conversations with teammates where they’ve asked for my “reading list”. I read a lot, but there isn’t anything particularly special about the books I read. That being said, books are wonderful and always worth sharing, so here are the things I’ve read that have made a big impact on me. They’re mostly professional, but there are a few mind-expanding books thrown in for good measure.
At work we’ve recently changed how we execute software projects in an effort to dramatically shorten the feedback between work & learnings gleaned from that work. However, as with any sort of transition, there’s a body of work that has recently been wrapping up. Amongst this work were a pair of quarter-long projects that had very different execution stories & completion states. I’ll be using these two projects (in the abstract) to explain Daniel Kahneman Et Al.