An unexpected source of management inspiration I’ve mentioned more than several times recently: “have you seen the ending to the movie 8 Mile?”| blog.danielna.com
Over the last several years I’ve had the opportunity to mentor several newer managers, and it’s one of the most rewarding aspects of my role. On a purely tactical basis I think scaling manager capability is the best (only?) mechanism to scale my own capacity, but beyond that I know personally how rudderless the job can feel without help. The internal feeling of underperformance as an IC isn’t great, but underperformance as a manager means you’re letting down a wider scope of people: y...| blog.danielna.com
Last year, after I left Dropbox, I spent some of my break interviewing people in industry about the state of software development. I started a blog series based on those notes. I had always planned to finish publishing it over on the personal blog, and then clean it up and bring it here to the “work” blog. But that plan has lapsed because I got busy, and because I’ve held off on publishing the 4th part in the series looking at labor relations given what a difficult year it’s been for ...| Kellan Elliott-McCrea
A peculiar challenge of management is trying to invest in someone’s career development when they themselves are uncertain about their goals. As a manager, you may have more experience and more access to opportunities within the company, but that represents a small slice of their career possibilities. Our schooling often rewards us for being methodical, linear thinkers, but that approach is less effective outside the intentionally constrained possibility spaces.| lethain.com
How the IC and EM tracks are different, and why I switched back.| blog.danielna.com