Over the course of my tech career thus far, I’ve been through two acquisitions. In each case, I was just a normal employee without any special inside knowledge, and found out only a few days before the deals were publicly announced. In retrospect, however, there were some clear signs in the weeks leading up to the announcements that something unusual was going on.| Benjamin Yolken
I worked at Airplane, an internal tooling startup, for nearly two years. Earlier this year, it was announced that the company was being acquired by Airtable and that the product would be shut down. In this blog post, I want to explain what happened from my perspective as a former employee.| Benjamin Yolken
I recently had the opportunity to invest in a venture capital fund. In this post, I want to explain how these funds work and what I’ve learned from the experience so far.| Benjamin Yolken
A lot of companies, both in tech and other industries, are having trouble retaining employees at the moment. In this post, I want to describe the various resignation waves that I’ve seen in my career thus far and what companies can do to respond to them.| Benjamin Yolken
I recently got back from a vacation to the East Coast of the US. For two days during my trip, I biked around New York City and explored various neighborhoods, parks, and bridges. In this post I want to share my routes and also my observations from the perspective of someone who has done most of their biking in San Francisco Bay Area.| Benjamin Yolken
Every company I’ve worked at in the last 9 years, from small startups to multi-thousand-person public corporations, has used Jira for managing software projects internally. In this post, I want to explain what Jira is and why interacting with it at work makes me feel frustrated and unproductive.| Benjamin Yolken
Over the last few years, many tech companies have embraced “core values” with religious fervor. In this post, I want to explain what core values are, why most are meaningless, and what can be done to make them better.| Benjamin Yolken
Looking back over the last decade, I’ve had a lot of great experiences in the offices of my employers and for the most part these spaces have been comfortable. However, there are certain office features that I’ve encountered at company after company that are not optimal and end up unnecessarily lowering productivity and happiness. In this post, I want to call these features out and describe how they can be fixed.| Benjamin Yolken
In my previous post, I described how migrating to Kubernetes involves transitioning an organization’s infrastructure from a legacy service platform (LeSP) to a Kubernetes service platform (KuSP). In this post, I want to go into more details on why this migration is hard and what you can do to reduce the pain associated with this transition.| Benjamin Yolken
Over the last few years, I’ve worked on migrations at several companies- Airbnb, Stripe, and Segment. In this post, I want to talk about why these migrations are done and what they involve from the platform standpoint.| Benjamin Yolken
After nearly 10 years of living in San Francisco, I decided to leave at the end of last year. In this post, I explain what motivated my departure and how the city can improve in the future.| Benjamin Yolken