Career & Recruiting
The 5 stages of CTO & the CTO Career Chasm
Unsurprisingly, there are different types of CTOs for the various stages of a startup. What makes a CTO strong in one stage might turn into a weakness two stages later, and vice versa. I’ve been a CTO for the last [...]
17 reasons why becoming an engineering manager is not what you thought it will be
I often find myself giving career advice to software engineers who want to become a manager. I also mentor and coach many managers who’ve made the transition, some more successfully than others. These activities happen inside and outside of my [...]
Interviewing: Ask them to show, not tell!
Picture this. You are taking a Calculus test in High School. Instead of a written assessment, it’s a different type of evaluation. It’s an oral test. Huh? And, instead of asking to solve Calculus problems, the test is about how [...]
The 10-step skill ladder for you to achieve awesomeness
What does it mean to be the best software engineer possible? What does it mean to be the best designer? Or the best dentist, CEO, carpenter, recruiter, product manager? A decade ago I heard Jeff Atwood, the founder of Stack [...]
The unintended consequences of trying to do it all
On my first job as a manager at Microsoft, the software developers on my team were spending too much time documenting code. They were writing architectural documents, design docs (design docs for devs are not about graphic design but code [...]
The three-thirds executive
Over the last decade, as a startup executive, I’ve made countless mistakes. As a computer scientist, my brain tries to abstract the problem to a class of problems. Fixing the symptoms, although it might be the right thing to do [...]
Struggling to hire the perfect VP of X at your Startup
Entrepreneurs dream of a better product, better world, or a better business than something that existed before. In this ideological view, when the CEO sets out to recruit a new VP of Marketing, a new CTO, or a new Head [...]
Hiring the best tech talent: Purpose, Product, and Compensation
We live in a very peculiar time in history in which the demand for tech skills are so high that companies are going above and beyond to convince talent to join their mission. These are primarily software engineers, but also [...]
