Organizations
By owning software end-to-end, at the expense of occasional annoying operational tasks, engineers are encouraged to build and maintain software the right way.
Career Growth
Understanding what promotions and levels mean at your company is fundamental to career advancement.
Newsletter
Some of my favorite ideas, distilled into a few quotes.
Career Growth
Most employees only learn about how performance management works at their company when it's too late. Here's what happens behind the scenes.
Mid Career
The gap between mid-level and senior engineers usually isn’t technical skill. It’s behavior, judgment, communication, and the ability to make everyone around them better.
Career Growth
The people who create the most value are usually the ones willing to make uncomfortable decisions before the right answer is apparent.
Early Career
Writing new software is fun but a minor part of the software engineering job. Let's talk about the real meat of the job. Legacy code.
Tech industry career and leadership advice from an ex-Amazon GM and Tech Director.
Not in any order, or theme, just 22 thoughts from Dave.
You can sit through training for years. One mistake you care about will teach you more in a day.
From scheduling chaos to final offers, a firsthand account of high-volume hiring at Amazon.
When everyone has a voice, the outcome gets safer, slower, and more boring. This is exactly the opposite of what great companies need.
Diversity isn't about checking the box on hiring people who look different. It's about having true differences of opinions on teams.
The steps to take to grow your skills and career without your manager helping.
A walk down memory lane from 1999, and what that might tell us about today's boom.
Helping gets tasks done. That's nice. Ownership removes problems entirely, and that’s the only way teams and leaders can scale.
Creating an impact doesn't always make you feel accomplished, and feeling accomplished doesn't necessarily mean you're creating an impact. This is about the dopamine trap of getting things done.
The concept of Thinking Big is not about having big ideas. It's about charting a path to accomplish great and challenging things.
Designing processes and software to scale is expensive but necessary. I'll walk through why scaling by definition (basically always) leads to a loss of agility.
Upward feedback is a gift from an employee to a manager. How to politely give the gift of feedback to anyone, but particularly your manager.