Category: Engineering Leadership

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…

Lessons for leading from home.

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…

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…

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…