Whenever there’s a feeling of “someone should do something here,” there’s a reasonable chance that the someone is you.

When two or more teams need to work closely together, their projects can fall into chaos if they don’t have the same clear view of where they’re trying to get to. The lack of alignment can lead to power struggles and wasted effort as both sides try to “win” the technical direction.

To pass through the fortress gates, you might need to bring a token of sponsorship from someone the gatekeeper respects, or know the password to lower the drawbridge. (Common passwords include proving that you’ve mitigated all of the risks of your proposed change, completing lengthy checklists or capacity estimates, or replying to huge numbers of d

A technique I learned from my friend Cian Synnott is to write out my understanding of my job and share it with my manager. It can feel a little intimidating to answer the question “What do you do here?” What if other people think what you do is useless, or think you don’t do it well? But writing it out removes the ambiguity, and you’ll find out ear

Staff engineers often take on ambiguous, messy, difficult problems and do just enough work on them to make them manageable by someone else. Once the problem is tractable, it becomes a growth opportunity for less experienced engineers (sometimes with support from the staff engineer).

Whenever I interview a job candidate, their first question is often, “What’s the culture like?” I used to struggle to answer; where do you even start? Tomes have been written on organizational culture. Now, though, I think most of the time people are really asking these questions: How much autonomy will I have? Will I feel included? Will it be safe

You need to measure success from your users’ point of view.

Good decisions need context. Experienced engineers know that the answer to most technology choices is “it depends.” Knowing the pros and cons of a particular technology isn’t enough—you need to know the local details too. What are you trying to do? How much time, money, and patience do you have? What’s your risk tolerance? What does the business ne

If your organization has published a statement of values or principles, that can help you see what the leaders care most about. But these values are aspirational: the real values of the company are reflected in what actually happens every day.