Organizations
More Engineers = Less Output? The Costs of Growth.
Growing quickly is lauded as a great thing in the news. But is it always a great thing?
Newsletter
Organizations
Wishing for a Better Outcome Isn't a Mechanism. The COE Approach to Continual Improvement and Avoiding Blame.
Focus on what you can control, and move past your narrow focus on outcomes. When mistakes happen, the right question is: Why did your system allow it? How could you have influenced that result?
Personal Dave Posts
How AI Helps (and Doesn’t Help) with My 70k Reader Newsletter
We're in a weird halfway world where AI is both somewhat competent, and unreliable.
Organizations
The Hidden Cost of Process: A Guide for Tech Leaders
Building processes is a mechanism for resolving issues fully. But they're also bottlenecks which slow your organization down. How do you navigate this conundrum?
Mid Career
KPIs Gone Wild: Cautionary Tales of Lost Customer Obsession
How using KPIs and metrics as proxies, goals, or games leads us away from real customer value.
Mid Career
From One-Way to Two-Way Doors: Rethinking How We Make Big Decisions
How to recognize the differences between one-way and two-way doors. A way to think about risk and decision-making.
Career Growth
Your Boss Thinks You Suck. Now What?
When your 'areas to improve' sounds like a shopping list. Or more subtly, an afternoon is ruined when you get a little honest feedback on your performance. And what you should do next.
People Managers
Delegate Delegation — An Upgrade to the Common Delegation Practice of Micro Management
Many managers (and individuals) assume that load balancing their team members is the manager's job. That's a pretty bad idea. And I'll explain why.
Personal Dave Posts
You Must Find a Passion Project - AKA How to Avoid Being a Boring Human
I'm absolutely off topic today. Like if being on topic was a road in downtown Seattle, I'd be hiking up Rattlesnake Ledge today. Which, if you don't know, is far away.
Mid Career
Resolve Risk First - Why Complexity and Ambiguity Not Effort Should Dictate Your Focus
Too often we resolve the hardest work first, instead of the riskiest. A walk through of why that's a mistake.
Early Career
How to Both Embrace and Defeat Imposter Syndrome
Our skills aren't perfect. Moving past our weaknesses is how we discover our ways to add value, and improve along the way.
Mid Career
Inside a High-Severity Outage: A Late Night Sev-2 at Amazon
A detailed narrative of how we communicated about, worked on, and resolved a technical mess we created.