Tag: Earn Trust

Head and the Heart

Head and the Heart

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Just finished Marianna Bellotti’s excellent Kill It with Fire (thanks Kate for the recommendation!) If you do any work with legacy systems, give it a read post haste. You’ll be equal parts informed and inspired.

This quote jumped out at me in particular:

Feedback loops are most effective when the operator feels the impact, rather than just hearing about it.

Amen and amen. Intellect is great, and willpower is helpful, but what fuels anything truly worth doing is emotion. It’s not an accident that a particular emotion tops my company’s list of guiding principles.

Spooky Season

Spooky Season

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I don’t know what’s scarier, that I saw this when trying to use airplane WiFi…

… or that I know the technologies to which it refers.

Honestly, sounds like how a D&D character might meet their untimely demise, does it not?

Future Reference

Future Reference

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Sometimes certain bits of writing resonate in such fundamental ways that you come back to them time and time again. I have a couple of those in my personal brag document, for example. And these two articles, which I share regularly when describing my profession:

Programming Sucks

So You Want To Reform Democracy

I bet I read both of these at least 4 times a year. They do not get old.

Speaking of re-reading, it’s a pretty rare thing for me (for reasons). Off the top of my head, the only books I know for certain I’ve read more than once (and in all cases still only twice) are The Lord of the Rings trilogy, The Hobbit, The Chronicles of Narnia, the Foundation Trilogy, and (somewhat randomly) Thinking in the Future Tense.

Story Time

Story Time

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I’m hiring again, this time for a Director of Engineering. A requirement for application is submitting a cover letter, which apparently has fallen out of favor? Enough so that one candidate DM-ed me on the side to let me know our recruiting tool was misconfigured for having the field non-optional. Nope!

Personally, I enjoy reading cover letters, because they tell me something more than just what a resume can. It’s the same reason I want to hear real stories in interviews. They’re especially useful in revealing the “why” behind an application, which, in the line of work I do, is especially important.

Producing them does require some effort, which is a feature not a bug, but hopefully not too tough because you do document your work, right? And it’s getting even easier with AI, which I have no problem with a person using to get a cover letter started, given a thoughtful prompt that customizes the result to the job, the company to which you’re applying, and unique details about the applicant.

Speaking of “why” and AI, the other day I had a potential candidate ask me why I chose to join my current company. Great question! I put Claude to the test, again giving it my entire blog corpus as reference:

Based on the content of your blog, your reasons for leaving AWS to join RIPL as Chief Technology Officer can be summarized as follows:

1. Mission-driven work: You've expressed a strong interest in using technology to improve people's lives and promote human flourishing. RIPL's mission to work with governments to help them use data, science, and technology to improve policy and lives aligns well with this interest.

2. Intersection of technology and public policy: You mentioned that you've "doubled-down on situating myself at the intersection of tech and politics." RIPL's focus on working with governments to improve policy through technology is a perfect fit for this goal.

3. New challenges: You've indicated a desire for work that isn't a "solved problem." Moving to RIPL likely offers new and unique challenges that weren't present at AWS.

4. Leadership opportunity: The CTO role at RIPL allows you to have a more significant impact on the organization's direction and strategy, which aligns with your growing interest in leadership roles.

5. Building from the ground up: You've expressed enjoyment in creating and building things. A smaller, more focused organization like RIPL might offer more opportunities to build systems and processes from scratch.

6. Applying cloud expertise: Your extensive experience with AWS can be directly applied to help governments leverage cloud technologies for public good.

7. Ethical considerations: You've shown interest in the ethical implications of technology. RIPL's focus on improving government policies likely involves careful consideration of these ethical aspects.

8. Desire for meaningful impact: Your blog suggests a strong desire to make a significant positive impact. The role at RIPL seems to offer a more direct path to seeing the results of your work in terms of improved public policies and services.

While you didn't explicitly list these reasons in a single post, they can be inferred from your various writings about your interests, values, and career trajectory. The move appears to be a natural progression that combines your technical expertise with your interest in public service and desire for impactful work.

Like my request from the other day, that’s pretty accurate! I wonder what other uses I can find for an LLM whose context window is big enough for nearly 9 years of writing…

Jump The Line

Jump The Line

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While it’s not an absolute guarantee, there are a few ways to get my attention when applying for an open role for which I’m responsible.

First, read the job description and the minimum requirements. If you don’t meet them but want to take a chance anyways, don’t shy away from where you fall short. Address any gaps head-on in your cover letter and how you can mitigate.

Speaking of a cover letter, you should absolutely write one. Yes, actual you, not an LLM. I value engineers who can communicate effectively, especially in writing, given the realities of remote work. This isn’t about nitpicking spelling or grammar (though in 2024 there’s little excuse for stumbles here, given the tooling available), nor is it about quantity. It’s about concisely communicating what you value in a job and what excites you about the role enough to apply.

When describing what you value, show don’t tell. I love to see an example of work you’re proud of in a cover letter, because the way you discuss what’s important really matters: are you enamored with technology as an end in itself, or do you value impact on a customer? And what kind of impact do you value?

Finally, be sure to follow the instructions in the application process. Employers may have specific reasons for their requests; deviation does you no favors. For example, RIPL asks for an email to a specific address that goes to a shared inbox. If you send your info directly to an individual it might be missed. And if you DM me in LinkedIn instead, well, I get a lot of DMs, so don’t expect a response.

Dig In

Dig In

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Getting to know your professional colleagues at a personal level is risky. I regularly read advice to avoid it. That’s a reasonable strategy to avoid some of the lows of gainful employment, but it also hamstrings the chance to achieve truly beautiful successes, not to mention it forfeits a potent antidote to loneliness.

So yeah, not only am I going to ignore that advice, I’m doubling down on getting better at being a student of other people. To that end, last week I started reading How to Know a Person, from which I extracted the following list of conversation starters:

  • Which of your five senses is strongest?
  • What are you most self-confident about?
  • What’s working really well in your life?
  • What is the “no” you keep postponing?
  • What have you said “yes” to that you no longer really believe in?
  • What forgiveness are you withholding?
  • Tell me about a time you adapted to change?
  • Have you ever been solitary without feeling lonely?
  • Can you be yourself where you are and still fit in?
  • What crossroads are you at?
  • What would you do if you weren’t afraid?
  • If we meet a year from now, what will we be celebrating?
  • If the next 5 years is a chapter in your life, what is that chapter about?
  • What has become clearer to you as you have aged?
  • What is the best way to grow old?
  • If you died tonight, what would you regret not doing?

Full credit to David Brooks here, I’m just repeating his excellent ideas. Keep learning, friends!

It Is And It Is

It Is And It Is

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Last night ChatGPT had a bug. But not your run-of-the-mill problem like increased latency or complete unavailability. No, it went completely off-the-rails: spouting gibberish, repeating itself ad infinitum, and other nonsensical behavior.

Hilarious though some of the outputs were, it was a powerful reminder that AI technologies are still new and mysterious, and definitely require human oversight. While this incident ended up with random output, I can now imagine a whole class of bugs where language model outputs are wrong in all manner of specifically bad ways. Humorous now, but perhaps less so once we give them agency to act on our behalf.

I anticipate the day coming when I ask my personal Scarlett Johansson to book a family vacation to Fiji and it instead sends an email to my mom lambasting her for wearing white after Labor Day and then sells my living room furniture on eBay.

The future’s going to be something else, of that we can be sure.

Life Hack

Life Hack

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It may not seem like much, but you never know the lives you touch
just by always showing up, even on the days you feel so small.
Turns out it all matters after all.

– Derek Webb

Want an easy way to be perceived as good at your job? Set aggressive goals for being responsive across all your communication media, and especially strive to avoid failing to respond or missing messages altogether.

My own personal targets are the following:

  • Slack / Text: 5 minutes ideally, 1 hour median, never more than 24 hours
  • Email / Voicemail: 4 hours ideally, 24 hours median, never more than 3 days

Even just an “I got it, will have you a better response by X time” goes a long way (assuming of course that you do indeed follow-up). Liberal use of tools like reminders, snoozed messages, and do-not-disturb / notification settings make this achievable without completely giving up on work/life balance.

I call the approach “radical responsiveness”. In my experience, it’s a simple way to earn trust with colleagues and customers alike. It works across levels and roles, though it’s particularly helpful when being attentive is part of the job, like sales positions, and especially critical for people management. Be the boss that always responds quickly and your team will be imminently thankful.

Of course you won’t be able to meet these objectives 100% of the time, but being known as a responsive person 95% of the time usually means others will assume the best of you for the 5% of time you fail.

Distant Well-Wishers

Distant Well-Wishers

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Of all the sources of happy birthday messages (which are truly delightful, by the way), one I least expected was a text from the customer service agent at CoveredCA that I worked with to get health insurance after I was laid off nearly 5 years ago, and haven’t interacted with since.

I get that it’s trivially easy for any organization that knows your date of birth to send out such messages, but…

That’s gotta be some kind of automated message, right? Or a mistake? In any case, thanks for “thinking of me” on my special day!

Praise And Thanksgiving

Praise And Thanksgiving

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Never pass up an opportunity to express gratefulness, especially in the workplace. In my (almost) 45 years of life, I’ve never heard someone say “You say thanks too much, please tone it down.” Do it often, do it out loud, and do it in front of an audience.

That being said, the object of your expressed gratefulness matters. What you praise is what you encourage to happen more often. But the converse is true too, what you don’t praise you will discourage. And if your praise for a person’s work is disproportionately towards things less important to their job, you may be having the side effect of making them feel they aren’t actually doing a good job with the things that do matter.

Of course, that may literally be true. You may be using praise of the inconsequential as a defense mechanism to avoid hard feedback of what is consequential. Or you may not be. But if your praise quotient is out of alignment, the individual you’re praising will have to guess. And that ambiguity can be disheartening.