Sunday Review: We Don’t Know Where We Are

Here is a digest of the best links I found each week for anyone who might be interested. The Pandemic: the reality we live in It’s almost a daily wondering: where are we now? However, it’s such a complicated topic. The more I read, the more questions I get. To this moment, many start to wonder what…

Sunday Review: Turning Point for Real Change

Here is a digest of the best links I found each week for anyone who might be interested. Pandemic and Protests: the reality we live in If you are like me having a hard time making sense of all happening, here is one very insightful piece, Systemic racism and coronavirus are killing people of color. Protesting…

Will Remote Work Continue After the Pandemic

The economy is gradually re-opening across the country. However, the virus is not going away any time soon. Tech companies will need a mixed strategy in the short term that carefully weighs which teams need to return to the office and which should stay remote. This period of extra caution might last a really long…

Sunday Review: One Great Thing The Pandemic Brings

Here is a digest of the best links I found each week for anyone who might be interested. Coronavirus Pandemic: the reality we live in The First Modern Pandemic is an amazing piece from Bill Gates on covid’19, coined as the “Pandemic I”, that pits the entire humanity against the virus. It summarizes things we…

Fostering Innovation: Using Hackathons to Drive Product Stability

I have run into several urgent situations this year, including major infra instability issues caused by fast product iteration, large cost reduction target with a short time window, and a major product sprint to deliver. Things started getting worse after some major product launches led us to accumulate a lot of technical debt in a…

Deliver bad news during hard time

Managing is hard. Managing during a downturn is much harder. During hard times, leaders often need to deliver bad news to the team while still being able to rally people around a vision. You may fail to deliver on previous promises, have to cancel ongoing projects, and sometimes even let people go. The year 2018…

Promotion doesn’t mean career growth

It is promotion season again. I just spent the past month reviewing hundreds of promo packages from the engineering department, in addition to conducting more than 50 one-on-one conversations with my team on career growth. I have realized that many people care more about the prospect of a promotion than the growth itself. It is…

Frugality: The essential element for a successful startup

In Silicon Valley, startups are being created for world-changing problems every day. Once they raise funds, companies will try to hire top talents in town with unique perks and attractive packages. Magic often happens when smart people work together. The success continues by raising bigger funds, hiring more people, and offering better perks. From the…