2026
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Buy them the tools
Mar 25
Jensen Huang wants engineers spending $250k/yr in tokens. Others say that’s reckless. But the debate over company-sponsored tool budgets isn’t new — and neither is the answer.
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Short Stints, Real Experience: Rethinking Career Tenure
Jan 5
The hiring world still clings to tenure requirements that ignore reality. I’ve been on both sides — rejecting candidates for short stints and creating holes in other engineers’ resumes myself. It’s time to rethink what “experience” actually means.
2025
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Gratitude
Dec 3
Another leader once encouraged managers to express gratitude to their teams through hand-written thank you notes. This has evolved into an annual tradition for me. Sharing gratitude with your team is a way to show leadership, even outside of a management role.
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Burnout Prevention Through Strategic Reassignment
Nov 25
Corporate burnout prevention programs often miss the point entirely. Instead of addressing workload, unrealistic expectations, or systemic issues, they treat burned-out employees as the problem to be managed or removed from the equation entirely.
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Your Return-to-Office Policy is Killing Your AI Strategy
Sept 9
Organizations struggling to trust and manage remote workers will find themselves completely unprepared for the autonomous nature of AI agents. The same control issues that drive return-to-office mandates will cripple AI adoption.
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Finding Balance: Building Scalable Systems While Paying the Bills
Jun 30
Engineering leaders face a constant tension: building the perfect, scalable system versus shipping products that generate revenue. Learn how successful technical leaders navigate this balance, keeping engineering excellence in sight while delivering business value that keeps the lights on.
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Simplify, simplify, simplify
Apr 16
Recently, I’ve been diving into Walter Isaacson’s biography of Elon Musk, which offers insights into his approach to business. Musk’s approach to process improvement isn’t dissimilar from my own. He suggests that if you’re not reintegrating at least 10% of what you cut, you’re not being aggressive enough in your simplification. In my experience managing…
2022
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Radical candor
Mar 15
Performance reviews can be both a celebratory reflection on the last period of time and a chance to set expectations for the period to come.
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Own your mistakes
Feb 4
What’s the largest mistake you’ve made in your career? Did you hold yourself accountable for it? What did you learn through the experience?
2014
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Death by Documentation
Dec 19
Before I finally made it to a more modern company that fully embraced Agile methodologies, I worked for a firm that used the waterfall method exclusively for project planning. It was a nightmare.
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No I in Team
Nov 4
Team efforts rarely come with individual recognition. This is usually a good thing, though it might be difficult to accept.