This has been a terrible, staggering year in so many ways. It's also been a disproportionately interesting and meaningful year for me professionally, and I wanted to share some of what I learned in 2017 about engineering and infrastructure management.
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There is a surprisingly broad category of work where a single dedicated person saves person-years of rushed efforts later: ensuring systems are scaling (and not regressing), cost accounting, build tooling, code hosting, etc. Prefer two people, one is still the loneliest number.
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A core management skill is bridging between your management’s and your team’s expectations in a way that is authentic to both’s values. If you never say no to your team, you’re not actually managing them. If you never change your management’s mind, you’re not being a manager.
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A less obvious advantage of having a broad set of skills is that you can succeed in a wider variety of situations. When your manager changes, you switch companies, priorities change, etc.
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I hope we can do more to emphasize that line management is a distinct job than managing managers. The skills are different, and line management is an extremely rich, deep field that we should celebrate more.
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Stereotype threat, the idea that simple being aware of stereotypes about you meaningfully reduces your related performance, was a new and eye-opening learning for me (see Whistling Vivaldi by Claude Steele).
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I--and almost every manager I worked with--was certain that cold sourcing did not work and was a waste of time. We wrote up a process, followed it, and damningly it consistently worked for all of us. Humbling example of strong conviction in a reasonable but entirely false belief.
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Replying to @Lethain
I think it would be interesting to dig into this more. Why were we all so wrong?? Are we doing it differently? Are our candidates different? I’m pretty excited about the success we’ve had here.
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We think cold sourcing is useless because we've said no a whole lot to cold sourcing attempts. As far as success, I think this is one for
@patio11 though.1 reply 0 retweets 2 likes -
Right this is exactly true. So I wonder why we said no so often but we’re finding folks saying yes. Is it because Stripe is awesome? Is it because our candidates are earlier career? Do just more folks respond to cold calls than we think?
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(Lurking on in because I was mentioned.) I think that Stripe being Stripe increases our response rates but the core insight for ourselves and the industry is that well-established sales techniques tend to work, much like well-established engineering techniques.
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SHOCKING
I would tend to agree that fundamentally that’s what’s at play, and that it’s probably always worked pretty well, which explains why we get all those damn cold emails.0 replies 0 retweets 1 likeThanks. Twitter will use this to make your timeline better. UndoUndo
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