Strive To Be Earth's Best Employer – Page 2

Eye Of The Beholder

By Jud | June 3, 2023 | Comments 0 Comment

In My 20 Year Career Is Technical Debt, the author outlines how most everything he’s worked on is eventually deprecated and replaced. It’s a hazard of technical work, where new approaches, frameworks, and solutions are being invented regularly. We’re not building cathedrals that will still be standing five-hundred years from now. At least not in the sense that the stuff of our creation, the ones and zeros, are still going be on a storage medium and flowing through a CPU long into the future (with some rare exceptions).

But that’s not the point. What you build doesn’t matter, it’s all going to end up technical debt (if you’re lucky) or deleted (if you’re not). What matters is the outcomes enabled by what you’ve created, and the relationships you’ve developed along the way. If your code plays a part in improving people’s lives for some period of time, then it’s done its job. And if those around you are better for having collaborated on it, you’ve done yours.

That’s all we can ask for. And it’s enough.

Remix

By Jud | May 13, 2023 | Comments 0 Comment

I’m three weeks into the new job now, and while in many ways it’s exactly what I expected, there have been a few surprise challenges. However, what we’re facing isn’t new to me. Though the details are always different (history doesn’t repeat itself, despite the adage), and I’ll never feel totally up to the task, my nearly 25 years of professional technical work were excellent preparation.

It isn’t just the years of experience, though. I’ve intentionally pursued a variety of situations, and through a combination of hard work, the graciousness of colleagues and bosses, and some luck, I’ve been in the positions I’ve needed to develop professionally and grow my career. I’m thankful for that.

Walking the line between unchallenging safety and ineffective overreach is not easy, but I advise erring on the side of the latter. It’s true there’s no compression algorithm for experience, one has some control over the speed and variety at which experiences are… experienced. And that’s an encouraging thought.

I have no doubt I’m right where I need to be. Looking forward to Monday and the chance to move the needle.

Just No

By Jud | May 9, 2023 | Comments 0 Comment

Can we all agree that “drinking from a fire hose” is a terrible metaphor for the feeling of starting a new job? It’s overused, cliched, and kinda gross.

What I find most funny is that it’s usually stated as a humble brag about the amount of information you can ingest in short order, or to indicate that your new company is some kind of special unicorn doing work so incredibly complex that it overwhelms all who dare join it.

Reality is that the feeling of being overwhelmed in a new role is totally normal, even if the work is banal or the company is pedestrian. Sure, it takes time, but don’t make it sound harder than it is.

No Easy Answers

By Jud | February 13, 2023 | Comments 0 Comment

I’ve been managing technical people for a while now, but when it comes to asking good questions and listening well, I’m always learning. One thing I’ve discovered is that questions needn’t be complex to be effective. Here’s three I use regularly:

How do you feel about that?

Giving someone space to express their emotions is usually a good place to start when beginning a conversation. This is doubly true in the workplace, where there’s a misperception that feelings have no place. But we’re all human, and our effectiveness is predicated on aligning our emotions to the task at hand.

What could you do about that?

Once a person feels safe describing how they feel about a situation, it’s time to explore options for how to move forward. The word could here is critical, it’s a word about possibilities. Usually with just a little nudge, people will be able to come up with a variety of potential solutions on their own.

What do you want to do about that?

Too often people are asked to consider all sorts of factors when weighing options, but never their own desires. And especially not just surface desires, but what they truly want based on their own complex (and often competing and contradictory) web of values. It’s a powerful question; simple to ask, but hard to answer truthfully. Though once it is, I’ve found one often has all the data at hand to make a high quality decision.

You Are Not Alone

By Jud | November 14, 2022 | Comments 0 Comment

Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end.

It’s been a strange season for tech work, with the boom of the last few years (decades even?) feeling like it’s coming to a screeching halt. A lot of people suddenly finding themselves out of a job, wondering what’s next.

While I’m relieved not to have been affected this time, I’ve been laid off before, and I remember the feeling of helplessness. Of wondering if I should have known better or cut and run before things got bad. And most of all (though it took me some time to name it): loneliness. All the relationships I’d built up at the workplace, while not my best friends, were a large part of my social life, and to have them ripped away with no warning took quite a toll.

For those in that boat right now, know that it’s not your fault. Really, it’s not your fault. Take it from someone who’s been there (on both sides of the table): it’s not your fault. Take time to acknowledge your feelings. And while I can’t promise you that something better is just over the horizon, there might be! And that is an encouraging thought.

That Lovin’ Feeling

By Jud | August 28, 2022 | Comments 0 Comment

I’ve done a fair share of production debugging in my career. There’s a heroic Dopamine rush that comes with it, that feeling of diving deep on a problem in a critical situation, finding the solution, and then implementing it to the delight of your customers and teammates (well, either delight or they graciously allow you to live another day).

A similar feeling is experienced any time you build something with your own two hands and see it come to life; that joy is why this blog is named what it is, because I love to build. But as a manager of a technical team, I don’t get the chance to directly build solutions as often as I might like, and when I do, it often represents a failure of some kind. To be successful as a leader, one needs to learn to let the joy of building go, at least the hands-on kind.

Instead, what a manager must cultivate is the joy of watching others succeed, especially those to whom they are charged to mentor as direct reports. Being thrilled when a person shares a difficult problem they solved; rejoicing when a struggling individual responds to your coaching with positive growth. Giving others the spotlight and serving their needs while hidden from view. Learn to get a Dopamine hit from such experiences, and you’ll do well.

And here’s the real kicker: when you achieve it, you’ll have scaled your ability to enjoy your job beyond what was possible before, because you now have a whole team of people whose successes are a source of happiness, versus just your own. Ultimately you’re still building, but now it’s through others.