management

I spent five and a half years at AWS before moving (back) to Microsoft, where I work today. At Amazon, many meetings began with silent reading. Instead of presenting a document,...

AI-first Engineering is now the operating default in many organizations, including mine. Developers have kept up. Vibe coding became agentic engineering, and the race towards tr...

In today’s shocker, Meta is to “create a new applied AI engineering organization aiming for an ultra-flat structure of up to 50 employees to one manager”.

One of the negative side effects of having any top-down command structure is that every additional layer risks introducing a new level of bureaucracy, which then actively subtra...

The most abused principle in dysfunctional organizations is “Disagree and Commit”. In Don’t Tell Engineers What to Do I said that “telling people what to do, especially if they ...

A famous example where telling Engineers what to do backfired was the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster in 1986. Engineers at Morton Thiokol, the contractor responsible for the ...

There’s much written about becoming a first time Engineering Manager (I recommend Camille’s book), but little about the second time.

There’s much written about becoming an Engineering Manager, but little about going back to being an Individual Contributor. This is not surprising because it often feels like a ...

I recently wrote about dividing CTO and VP of Engineering responsibilities. That post is only useful if you actually have a VP of Engineering. So how does one hire such an anima...

Three years ago I wrote about the difference between a CTO and a VP of Engineering at a startup, but only hired a VP in 2018. In this post I will explain why I decided to do it,...

I now have an executive coach. I wish he just told me what to do, but we pay him a lot of money not to, which means I have to figure it out by myself. So I turned to my personal...

My job title has recently changed from Head of Engineering to CTO, and many people outside of Artsy have been asking me to explain the logic behind this. A more important questi...

Last night I gave a talk on pressing the big scary red reset button at the NY CTO School. The first talk before me was by @malcolmcasey, CTO of Skillshare, another awesome NYC s...

This was in my drafts for years, a story from a past life …

In the last 24 hours my Github Is Your New Resume post gathered 343 comments between my blog, HN and Reddit. There are also 233 RTs. First, I want to thank those with good comme...

Yesterday I gave a talk on choosing technology for a software project. I argued that building software is unlike building rockets, toasters or power plants. This was very well r...

Here’s a disruptive idea for the corporate world: let’s get rid of the traditional “open headcount”.

This is a story of corporate change. It’s a tale about how an unlikely organization embraced open-source. It starts with pain and suffering and may even read like an “I hate my ...

When I lived in Seattle and partied a lot, I ran a party mailing list. I would forward you all the cool parties in Seattle for no fee or any other interest than having you show ...