blog.danielna.com

The last ~12 months have been a whirlwind.

I have a lot of career conversations (interviews, reports, chats with people asking for advice) and the single clarifying question I’ve grown to center the discussion around is this: What are you optimizing for?

I left Squarespace at the beginning of July, which brought my tenure to roughly 7 years and 8 months.

The two defining characteristics of the coworkers I enjoy working with most are ownership and urgency.

An unexpected source of management inspiration I’ve mentioned more than several times recently: “have you seen the ending to the movie 8 Mile?”

Over the last several years I’ve had the opportunity to mentor several newer managers, and it’s one of the most rewarding aspects of my role.

Say an engineering team wants to change the behavior of other engineering teams, and for a very good, big-picture reason.

I was interviewed on an engineering management podcast!

One side effect of leading the International engineering effort for so many years is exposure to executives, given the strength of International’s growth and revenue impact.

I was recently inspired by this fantastic point about delivering “balanced” feedback from Randall Stutman.

In the early 2000s there was a trope in the programming community about “a friend with an app idea” 1: “Hey, you’re a programmer right?”

I was recently asked for advice about 1:1s: Sometimes I struggle to fill the time of 1:1s with my direct reports.

Scott Galloway has an interesting take on the two types of effective leaders (starts at 26:14): There are two types of effective leaders or managers.

Tyler Cowen, economist and prolific blogger/podcaster/internet thinker, frequently poses a question to his podcast guests: “What do you do every day that’s the equivalent of a musician practicing their scales?”

It’s a weird time in the tech industry, and if you’ve been in the industry long enough you’ve likely experienced an economic downturn or a company under financial crisis.