Artisanal Concatenations of Sentient Emanations

There are a few different takes on the current round of layoffs. There is a lot of concern for the workers and vitriol for the companies involved. I am trying to balance that a little in my brain with an acknowledgment that layoffs in the middle to end of January are better than layoffs in December. I appreciate that whatever forces stretched those out through the holidays exist, whether it is red tape or empathy. Those layoffs were going to happen, and if you need to understand why, there are many people talking about interest rates and inflation. I understand why you are angry and frustrated if you do not understand those reasons.

I spent some time this week talking to people about how to stand out in a crowded marketplace. For every job opening right now, there must be tens or hundreds or, in some cases, probably even thousands of applicants. What can you do to get the interview and, afterward, get the job?

I have talked recently about resumes. Let’s talk about what happens after you get that sweet, sweet interview.

I want to start by saying that eighty to ninety percent of all interviews will be terrible. That might be an understatement. This might be a “two nines” thing. Many companies have inefficient hiring processes and a considerable lack of empathy towards their candidates. They create artificial real-time gauntlets for candidates to run, and sometimes even painful, time-consuming committees where everyone involved is afraid to endorse a candidate ahead of the pack.

It paints a grim picture, doesn’t it?

At this point, it is important to do some reconnaissance on your prospective job. I have spent no small amount of time interviewing at companies in the past, and the first thing you need to know is what kind of boss the hiring manager will be. I have lumped most hiring managers into two buckets. You have the “best fit” hiring manager, who generally has a scarcity mindset, and you have the “best athlete” hiring manager, who is more likely to be an abundant thinker.

Figuring out which type of manager you will have is a real challenge, especially if the hiring manager is somehow last in the queue. It makes a difference in how you approach the interview.

For starters, I write off the interview if I can figure out that I am interviewing for a “best fit” job. I will throw the script out the window and try to understand how the company got into this situation. Trying to get a “best fit” job is a pain in the buttocks. It is all about making sure that you check every box in the hiring manager’s super-secret checklist. If you miss even one tiny little green checkmark in the hiring manager’s list of “must haves,” you will get a rejection letter. It is like waking up inside a bank with a note in your hand saying, “Ask the teller for 100 dollars cash.” Do you have a photo ID? Do you know your bank pin? Do you have your bank card? Can you fill out the paperwork? Did you sign and date it?

Did you miss one of those steps? You don’t get no hundy dollars.

Is it any wonder I just throw my care out the window when faced with this kind of interview? 

Let’s talk about the other kind of interview. The “best athlete” interview is a better gauntlet to run. Unfortunately, it is also less common. The “best athlete” hiring manager wants candidates to get into the job quickly. They want a ” close-ish ” candidate and understand they can train someone to close any skill gaps. They do not want to waste months looking for a candidate that might not even exist.

So how do you excite this particular kind of hiring manager about you?

You want to demonstrate that you have great communication skills. Not just verbal skills but also written skills. You also want to talk about how fast you learn new things. Something I look for is curiosity. If you have an inquisitive nature, you will likely spend time investigating potential problems and issues as a part of your role.

One of the biggest things I also look for is the ability to solve problems. There is a particular flavor of this that I love to see. I like to see people who can solve huge problems with unconventional ideas. If you can persuade the hiring manager that you have this particular “best athlete” skill, it will help you to get this job.

I like to call this kind of individual an “anvil catcher.”

An anvil catcher does exactly what it sounds like. They try to catch really heavy things. You can give your anvil catchers some of your biggest problems, and they will grapple with them until they reach a positive outcome or at least a steady state. Sometimes, it will result in failure. An anvil catcher knows this is okay. After all, you do not automatically catch all your anvils one hundred percent of the time. There is an implicit assumption that you will drop a few spectacularly.

It is good to discuss your positive outcomes as an anvil catcher. Whether or not a hiring manager will respond to stories about failed attempts to catch anvils is debatable. I personally enjoy hearing about these efforts if an important lesson is learned along the way.

I consider myself an anvil catcher. I like to solve hard problems. It also means I focus on the “best athlete” roles if I seek a new role.

As an anvil catcher, qualifying for “best fit” jobs is hard. Some hiring managers fear the extra work they must do to keep you on task. Some hiring managers will feel threatened by your problem-solving skills and will be afraid that you will come after their job. To be candid, if they were thinking about it correctly, they should be attempting to replace themselves. That is one of the best ways to get promoted and solve bigger problems. It takes a lot of courage to make that decision, so I do not get angry or disappointed when I run into this wall. I have had a few comical interviews with people who realized that I could do their job, and they suddenly want you out of the building as fast as possible. I am not saying that I creeped those people on LinkedIn afterward, but if I did, you could bet they were not working for the same company within a year or two. Even worse? They would still be there in the same role eight years later. Either those people got bounced, or they got stuck in an organization where that kind of behavior is the norm.

Now, let’s assume for the moment you are an anvil catcher. It seems cold and horrible for me to say you should blow up the vast majority of potential jobs because you are not a “best fit” for those “best fit” jobs.

Here is some advice to help you avoid some of the landmines in the hiring process. To be clear, I deliberately throw myself on some of these landmines to see if the crater will be visible from space. I do not recommend this approach to everyone, especially if you need a job.

“What kind of role are you looking for?”

This is the question I fail the hardest. Every hiring manager wants to hear, “I want to do this particular job for the next three to five years.” They do not want you to reply, “I enjoy solving problems of any kind, and I like to look at an organization’s biggest problems and see if I can help solve them.” I tend to reply with the latter. I will even preface it with, “You will dislike my answer.” I do not know if that worsens it, but it has never helped me.

“What attracted you to this role/company?”

I also fail this question. Scarce managers are looking for the “passionate” candidate. Whether it means they want someone who desperately loves this job enough to lowball them or think that passion is important for success, they will index heavily on it. I typically tell hiring managers, “I want to work with great people and solve hard problems for millions of consumers.” It might sound a little too mercenarial for some managers’ tastes. I used to think it meant I would be easy to please. However, it meant something different to many hiring managers. I could feel the temperature drop in the room when I said this.

“You have experience with many different things, and we are looking for a specialist.”

This is another one of those painful moments in an interview. I seldom get far enough for this kind of job because if you look at my resume and think I qualify as a specialist, you might want to see your optometrist. Or your psychiatrist. When presented with this statement, I have a flashback to a quote from famed science fiction author Robert A. Heinlein:

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

Reciting this quote from memory is hard, so I do not do that. If you said this to a “best fit” hiring manager, I expect you will be asked to leave the interview immediately.

I suppose I have some specializations, and I love to exercise them to keep my skills and habits current. There is most likely a fear on the part of a hiring manager that you will eventually look at your day job, declare “Not Shiny,” and head off in a new and random direction.

Is this a legitimate fear? It could be. What if “Shiny” was still at the same company? An astute hiring manager would encourage you to pursue your diverse interests if they were valuable to the company. If those interests are not valuable to the company, they should persuade you not to do it or point out that it might mean a change in compensation.

Incidentally, I am not the creator of this term. I have been called an anvil catcher by two previous bosses. I have reached the above conclusions about job interviews through my own experience and many (many) comical and painful interviews —  sometimes both. I am familiar enough with the patterns that I do a little fist-pump and “YUSS!” inside my head when the question comes up, and I brace for impact with the landmine.

I hope this story is helpful to at least one person out there.

I apologize for not including a near-random Amazon item link this week. Maybe I shouldn’t. You would not click on it even if I added it anyway.

Regarding the book competition, two people expressed interest in a free copy of “Slaying the Dragon” book. Neither were out of work. I am capriciously awarding it to my editor, who thanklessly adds and removes commas weekly. He does more than that. He keeps me honest.

See you all next week!

Hello everyone! I am now on week two of avoiding my list of scheduled blog topics. I spent last night wondering whether or not I should write about our good friend Mister Bezos and how much he reminds me of Santa Claus, and I spent this morning playing with “new technology” that is so close to being amazing that I emailed a page of UI nitpicks and issues to the company that makes it. The unboxing and subsequent fiddling with my reMarkable 2 (which I shall Link To You With An Affiliate Code That You Will Not Click On) made it clear that I have something to write about this week.

I had a customer service experience this weekend that reminded me of the following quote:

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” – Arthur C. Clarke

The fan inside my computer’s power supply started making unfortunate noises in early December. The instant I need a new chunk of matter inside my house, my brain immediately envisions two scenarios:

The first scenario is where I get into my car and burn hideous amounts of fossil fuels that will murder the planet. In this scenario, I get into a toxic traffic situation, fighting car by car to get to a retail store. Because this is The Murica, this also means there is a non-zero chance that someone will smash into my bumper, get out of their car, and start shooting bullets in a fit of road rage. Methamphetamines are probably involved.

The second scenario is I open my browser, and Jeff Bezos personally instructs someone to bring it to my house within a single-digit number of hours, possibly even while I am sleeping. In this scenario, I am wearing one hundred percent cotton super comfortable jammies with a fresh cup of coffee in my hands. I hum pleasantly as I walk to the front door, open it to greet the day, collect my merchandise, and bring it blissfully back to the office.

My brain is funny sometimes.

This is, by the technical definition above, magic. Admittedly, the power supply never arrived. Amazon and I did a delicate dance of status updates, eventually bringing them to the point that the original power supply may have been lost. I was given a chance to cancel and reorder a different one, which I took.

Let’s fast forward to Friday. That power supply began making noises it should not make. Maybe the air quality of my home office has the particulate density of the desert world of Arrakis. Regardless, I went to Amazon and observed that I was within 30 days of the original purchase. I could easily click a button to return the device.

What happened next is also in the realm of magic.

The Amazon product return experience is at a “deliciousness of cocaine” level of magic. First, they ask if you want a replacement unit instead of a complete return. Second, they tell you when you will get the unit. Third, you get a week’s grace to return the product.

This is not even where the magic begins. If you have ever purchased a thing that needed to be RMA’ed to the manufacturer, you know that you generally have to pay the shipping cost, print out some labels, and do some kind of ritual involving Packing Tape. It is not fun.

When you buy something from Amazon, you can simply drop off the replaced unit in its packaging at a nearby store and scan a QR code. No packaging. No printing. No shipping fees.

Fucking. Magic.

When I stare at pictures of Santa Claus, I am reasonably convinced it is Jeff Bezos’s eyes staring back at me.

So yesterday my replacement power supply arrived. I replaced the noisy unit, put it into the box, walked into our local Whole Foods store, and finished the whole ordeal within minutes.

I will leave off the impulse purchases and random shopping we did at Whole Foods. I am sure there is some money-math that factors into this service. I am happy to spend twenty dollars at the Whole Foods store on cookies and snacks instead of shipping costs.

I would tell a different story if I purchased a replacement power supply from anywhere else and it went bad. It would be a sad and frustrating story. There would be no cookies and snacks.

Which brings us to my “reMarkable 2”. This product is painfully close to magic. I am looking for a good tool that lets me easily transform information in my brain into electronic format. Some of this information is in text format. Some of this is diagrams and images. I have experimented with dictation and with other devices like the Wacom Tablet. This is the next step in my information transformation journey.

Two hours into fiddle-faddling with my reMarkable, I had a page of notes and a couple of screenshots I sent to the company that makes this… well… remarkable… device. They are close enough to creating magic that they need to be informed of just how close they are.

I also included the concession that some of what I would like is an advanced mode for professionals. I even conceded that I would pay a larger subscription for those kinds of features.

We have reached the end of our journey today. We have talked about the magic of Jeff Bezos. We have talked about the near-magic of reMarkable.

As a bonus, let’s bring it home to our January job hunters.

If you ever created magic at work, you should talk about that in your interviews. You can even sound smarter by quoting Arthur C. Clarke above before you launch into your amazing tale of magic creation. I have created magic a few times in my career. Most recently, I have created an integrated spreadsheet-to-game-data integration that lets a game designer, with a click of a button, take pages and pages of Excel-originated tables and upload them to a website where it is stored into a versioned database. Someone else can open a Unity editor and fire up their game, and that data will magically appear in the game in real-time for testing and development purposes. The last team to use this system had an entry-level designer iterate over 150 times on game content without an engineer getting involved because something in the pipeline was busted.

The handful of times I have told this story to designers and producers, you can see the hunger in their stares. The ability to quickly iterate on a game while you are finding the fun is challenging. When it is this frictionless, that’s right, it is indistinguishable from magic.

Stories like this will help you turn your interview into an offer.

See you all next week!

Hello everyone! I am seeing more and more people taking down their “open to work” banners on LinkedIn. I also see and intermittently share roles advertised by people I have worked with or would want to work with. If you cannot take down your own green LinkedIn banner, I hope you take this as a sign that people are hiring and to stay positive.

I am staring at my row of Post-Its for blog topics and am satisfied with the depths of conversations we will have in the coming months. I also looked at the time of year and found that almost none are related to recruiting or hiring. Have I talked myself out on this subject? That cannot be true.

The SEO people reading this blog post will stare at me like I am a crazy person when I say, “I have written lots on this subject, and it is randomly scattered through my blog.” Go forth and dig. Search on interview. Search on resume. I have previously called out the lack of clickening that happens here when I try linkening. It does not work. You are all not programmed that way. When I get my “least successful Amazon Affiliate of the Year” award, as I earn it for another consecutive year from Amazon, I have all of you to thank. I do not fear the day they remove my affiliate code due to underperformance… I know you are all here for the spice of the follow-up post when I am not worthy to attempt to steal money from the Bezos.

We are all fighting our own battles, aren’t we?

Now that I have said I am trying to help you get enjobbened, I will pop the clutch. I am going to talk about a book I have just read. I am going to give you an Amazon Affiliate Link to it.

“If you are going to buy any one thing I recommend to you this year, let it be this book.” – John Szeder

I will not meander for three paragraphs before I tell you what it is, like some kind of internet recipe website. It is “Slaying the Dragon” by Ben Riggs.

I read this book cover to cover last weekend in one sitting. It talks about TSR, the company behind Dungeons and Dragons, and it was a fascinating read.

You all know that I am a huge roleplaying game nerd. I love the craft so much I have built my own tools for it decades ago. I even ported them to the Modern Web so you could also try them out. Sure, the derfdice launch coincided with the arrival of generative AI, which utterly destroyed its commercial potential, but there was another value for me in building out the site. We can go into that in the future.

I spend a decent amount of time talking to people about building companies and games. Building games is a peculiar bloodsport. I am an intermittent addict to the hobby, and sometimes it becomes more than that. I mention this because this book is now a must-read for anyone I mentor in building games or building content for consumer content in general.

The takeaways from the book are powerful. On reading the final pages, I was… how do the kids say it… shook.

The book masterfully talks about brand value, strategy, and business practices that will make you laugh and cry, often at the same time. There is a mild editorial streak woven into the history. It is hard to detect, but it is there. I happen to agree with the editorial, so I will not complain about it too much. Dare I spoil it for the unsuspecting reader? I consider myself a Spoiler Police enthusiast in good standing; therefore, I must not.

I want to take this moment to bring this full circle now. This is a great book to read if you are looking for a job. People will be looking for interesting things to discuss in your interviews to discover who you are. They will also search for things that make you stand out over other candidates.

Talking about this book would help you get a job. There. I said it.

There are strategy lessons in this book that will demonstrate that you are an eager learner and curious about the fate of businesses. Coming up with your own stories about how you could have applied some of the lessons of this book to your own experience will make for an interesting narrative in an interview.

I am so profoundly impressed with this book that I am willing to buy a copy for someone who needs it.

If you are on the LinkedIn, have the Open To Work banner on your profile, and live in Canada or the United States, send me a message saying, “I wish to read Slaying the Dragon.”

I do not want to add geographic constraints to this. However, I have heard horror stories about shipping to other countries.

From those who reach out, I will randomly pick one person to send a copy of this incredible book. If you are reading this on the other socials, you can send me a message, too. Kindly include your LinkedIn profile with the message to qualify.

This is the kind of thing that you do when you have internet celebrity status. I do not. I am a fan of this book and interested in helping people, even if it is just one person. I am also not going to make you write an essay or anything similar; we will be like most startups and rely a little on the influence of Lady Luck.

If no one qualifies for a free book, I will figure out an alternative person to send this book to and talk about it in the future.

I will put a February 1 deadline on my little competition here. I am equally scared of getting zero people who want this book as I am getting 1000 people to ask me for it.

Either way, I will give you an update next week.

There are many things that I loved about my parents. There are also some things that went into the regrets bucket. They gave me an eating disorder. It was not just me, and it was not really their fault. A whole generation of people grew up with an eating disorder. I have compared notes with many of my other GenXers, and many of them share the same affliction. It is admittedly a first-world problem, and I have resolved to break the circle of violence to make sure that I do not give my kids the same eating disorder.

When I was a kid, whenever we sat down to dinner, we voraciously attacked specific dishes because they were prepared in fixed quantities. There was always plenty of food… We were not starving… My mother had a formula for preparing specific dishes, which generally worked out to “two hamburgers per person,” for example.

My brothers and I happened to love hamburgers. Two hamburgers are enough of a meal from a nutrition standpoint. Sometimes, we would fixate on a different number of burgers, like three.

You might see where this is going.

We were always welcome to take whatever we wanted until it was all gone. It was also a little bit “first-come-first-served.” The problem would sometimes arise when we would take an extra homemade bun or burger paddy and not have room for it all.

Our parents grew up during a difficult time, and there were times when they did not get enough to eat. They did not really have the luxury of being able to eat whenever they wanted, and it was one of those things that would drive them up the wall.

If you sat at the table and could not finish your plate, you were in trouble.

Some people have parents who yell. Some people have parents that were physical when they were upset. My father’s superpower was a cold and level stare followed by a quiet judgment delivered in a voice barely above a whisper while shaking his head sadly.

When you sat there with your plate of uneaten food, he would start with, “What is the matter? Are your eyes bigger than your stomach?”

This was often followed by a wartime anecdote or comparisons to people starving in third-world countries. My mother had her versions of this, except it was heaped up with guilt over how hard she worked to put that food on the table. She had expert command of weaponizing Roman Catholic guilt.

As a result, I spent the next twenty to twenty-five years fastidiously cleaning my plate.

I am glad that I have not inflicted this condition on my children. I do not dress them down for eating only as much as they want. I can pick up a plate half full of food and throw it away. Many times, I inwardly wince and feel the heated glare of my parents staring down at me for allowing food to go to waste. I have broken the circle.

Believe it or not, this story does have something to do with software development.

Let’s talk about software estimation!

If you spend any time building software or teams, you eventually want to get to “done”. As you spend more and more time building software and eventually growing either your products or organizations, it becomes important to know when in the future stuff becomes “done”… So you can start planning for the next bucket of deliverables, and also maybe rearrange the resources for various reasons. This requires you to track your software development somehow.

There are as many ways to track software development as stars in the sky. And almost all of them are wrong.

Quite often, engineers’ eyes are bigger than their stomachs. See how I brought that home?

Even in the time that an engineer has sized their work correctly, sometimes things break in production that require their attention, or a part of the feature in development develops an edge case or wrinkle that suddenly changes the amount of work to be done or the amount of time remaining—for the worse.

Yet everyone in leadership constantly tries to figure out when stuff is done. This is especially true when we want to hit enterprise customer deadlines or important consumer-related dates.

There is no user story that says:

“As a software engineer with bad estimates, I wish Christmas to happen on January 3rd.”

There is no Hallmark Christmas special where engineers return to a small town only to get a different Christmas date so they can complete all of their work; I would probably watch it if there were.

Heck. Even I am bad at doing software estimates. Before I give anyone an estimate, I have to hold myself accountable and declare John Szeder’s Two Week Rule.

Nothing in software development takes two weeks. It either takes three days or one month.

Every single time I have said, “This will take two weeks,” I have been wrong. Sometimes by the number of weeks, sometimes by an entire category shift of time units. Sometimes, I have even been wrong at both.

This is one of the reasons I like two-week sprints. It is so hard to fit a single task into a two-week window that you invariably start breaking tasks down into smaller pieces to fit them more completely into the two-week window.

If you are a planning poker person, and often I am, then your Fibonacci sequences are handy here. Historically, I have pegged some projects to 2 story points of work equal to a single day (of 6 to 7 hours, depending on the organization), and if you break your tasks into Fibonacci numbers, getting to a perfect 20 points is a struggle.

When you get to a big enough team, twenty engineers or more, for example, you can start measuring organization velocity quite nicely with a system like this.

The variance from engineer to engineer on productivity gets smoothed out in the total points allocated sprint-over-sprint, and people think more accurately about how much they can accomplish.

When you start to do planning poker, you generally have really wide variance on your teams for the number of points they sign up for versus the number that gets accomplished.

This, in itself, is okay. What you want to do is to address that in future sprints. It does not matter if your first sprint was largely noise and your team completed 10 of the 60 points they signed up for.

If they get 30 of the 60 possible points next time and continue to whittle away at the gap between “How many points do we think we can do?” and “How many points did we actually do?”, your team will be successful.

You will not have a perfect estimation.

You will be close enough to it that you should not care.

So much like anxiety-ridden John staring at his half-eaten homemade hamburger, you should not care about your appetite. You should not care if your eyes are bigger than your stomach.

Instead, you should consider how much food to put on your plate the next time.

I will leave you some time to digest this clever metaphor.

See you all next week!

Happy New Year! Did I say that already? Oh probably. It has been an odd week with my computer being half-alive due to a power supply fan issue. I gutted the beast last night and replaced the old, janky power supply with a new one. If you are in the market for a new power supply, this Amazon Affiliate link will take you to the closest in shape and size to mine. It was also the fastest to arrive at my house. I did order a different one previously and played a bunch of “This is on it’s way!” games with Amazon until they actually conceded that they may have lost the item in question, and I should probably cancel. That journey was several days and several steps.

We did not come here to talk about my computer power supply issues. We also did not talk last December much about “the job hunt”, which is usually what I do in the run up to the new year. Many people pursue career changes in Q4/Q1, and this year, some of them did not do so by choice. LinkedIn was a mess of people slap-fighting about whether or not to hire people with “#OpenToWork” banners on their profiles. As someone who has had a tragic four-year window of hopping from consulting project to consulting project, I feel like I want to level my best Greta Thunberg stay and say, “How Dare You!”

I will add one more thing. Please be kind to people who have lost their jobs. It is cold out there. Not just because it is January and I live in the northern hemisphere.

What advice can I give you if you are job hunting? I have spoken previously about how I break the script in my interviews and given some tips on resumes. I was going to include links to these blog posts… Aaaand then I got tired. They are in there, and you can type one word into the little search box. Like my Amazon Affiliate Ad-related sales, my wisdom does not come easily to you. You have to search for it. You have to find it. If you were all more click-thirsty and generated me some theft-revenue from mister Bezos, maybe I would put in the extra work to make it clickable. See? This Is All Your Fault.

At the moment, I do not have good career change advice. Usually, it revolves around ensuring you have relevant skills, waiting to collect your final bonus check, and what to do when negotiating offers with publicly held companies. None of this applies to anyone who got into a Zoom meeting to be congratulated for being tricked into the room so IT could lock the rest of their account privileges. It also does not apply to people who just got an email and no Zoom meeting at all. I don’t know which group I most empathize with—Both methods are cruel.

I sat down today to discuss shipping software before realizing it is a new year. Now, I feel like I am on a different topic and will go with it.

How do you make yourself stand out in a sea of resumes?

In the world of remote work, some of your competitors might make as much money in one day as you ask for in one hour. This FOPO (Fear Of Pricing Out) is real. There are many countries where 50 Dollarydoos will cover someone’s cost of living for an entire day.

Return-to-office and Hybrid-is-best bean counter nerds are rubbing their hands together gleefully here. Their inability to adapt to the New Normal means they have an edge as an employer for some subset of the population. “You must re-embrace your shit-ass commute!” They say. “You must re-embrace your love of our free coffee, snacks, and choice of sparkling waters!” they say. And by choice, you mean “what flavor of La Croix will you drink today?” and the answer is always “not lime because that’s the flavor everyone already drank, and now it is gone.”

You see? Return-to-office is a bitter hellscape.

But that is not the topic of conversation today.

Let’s pretend you have gotten some kind of interview for a job.

How do you stand out to someone who lives in Cheapostania?

Here are some ideas.

You have desirable skills. You might have three to seven years of experience in an area that a company needs on day one of your new job. Many companies need to balance the costs of training people in technology against solving problems right now. Sometimes, you cannot afford a candidate who is cheaper in price and who can be trained over six months. The long-term costs might be worse.

You have some hard-to-obtain career successes. Whether it is related to the meme-able question, “Will It Scale?” or some fancy-schmancy tech stack that few people use, you may have some competitive advantages over other candidates. I will praise the residents of Silicon Valley for their mastery over projects at scale. Many people can ship software. I have had to come in and perform blowtorch-and-pliers level of work on some systems that have been stood up by people who have not had thousands or millions of concurrent users. These highly desirable skills may make a difference in getting an offer.

You understand how business works. This is hard to measure and is one thing many people fail to grasp. Being able to function in your role is great. Understanding your customers’ needs and the total costs of ownership of your project is even greater. Being able to think outside of the task list is important, and it makes a difference between surviving year-over-year as a business and breaking out and going to the next level.

You can make hard decisions. This might not matter as much in the first five years of your career as it does later. And if you have just been downsized, this might be one of those things you need to demonstrate in your interviews. If you have been working for a decade and cannot think of two to three instances where you have had to make a hard decision, you will likely struggle to find a role that suits you.

You accept that not all decisions are yours to make. This is another big one, and also a scary one. The Amazon Way talks about this quite a bit. “Leaders are right, a lot” and “Disagree and Commit” are two related principles from their list of fourteen. I have had to disagree and commit many times in my career, and I can speak confidently to the times that it was the right thing to do and the times that it turned out to be unfortunate.

You should sound confident. I saved the best for last. Confidence is really important. Interviewing generally sucks. Interviewers sometimes do not want to be there. Interview processes are painful, awkward, and voluminous. Many companies do not have a good grasp on how to hire effectively. I get excited when being interviewed poorly because it is one of my superpowers. You would be surprised that I will tell interviewers this, and it often comes out as a point in my favor. I will bluntly say, “Your company is terrible at interviewing, which means you are probably bad at hiring. I can fix this for you.” You might expect that this will cause an interview to end. Sometimes, it does, and I am relieved about that. I don’t want to work at a company where I cannot fix big problems.

That is quite a list, isn’t it?

When the interviewer asks, “Why should we hire you over another candidate?” This list should give you a few talking points. It may mean the difference between getting an offer and a generic “good luck in your search” reply.

The market is flooded with talented people due to market conditions and emerging talent pools inundating decision-makers with low-cost options to get work done.

These questions will help you get career traction.

Good luck out there and see you next week!

Happy New Year everyone.

I am not dead or quitting, just uncharacteristically silent. I have a power supply fan in my main PC failing in slow motion, and I am doing the Indiana Jones swap-the-treasure-with-a-bag-of-sand calculations as we speak. I am filled with questions.

Do I change it in the morning?

Do I change it in the evening?

Do I change it less than three days before World of Warcraft Raid time in case my current replacement power supply is missing something, and then I have to do this twice?

So many questions.

Let’s just answer one today:

What are my thoughts on 2023?

I am 50% of the way to my first minimum payout as an Amazon Affiliate Marketer. Yes, I have made five dollars in two and a half years of linking stuff. Keep up the good work, everyone! Your decisions not to click (or buy) anything keep me in contention for Worst Amazon Affiliate Marketer in history.

I have a backlog of two and a half months of blog posts to write. This means that I am still coming up with new things to rant about consistently year after year.

I have embraced Grammarly Premium, but not yet generative AI for my personal writing habits, so much for John always being on the bleeding edge. I have a later post explaining why I am not leveraging this more.

I have started investing in the stonks. Not much, but also not zero. I have had my own “do no harm” theories on money and investing, which have changed this year. This might be too spicy for a blog post. If you are reading this and wondering what I am talking about, then it means you and I should have a 45-minute social meeting to catch up because we have not talked for too long. Please reach out, and let’s get something on the calendar.

I also did not observe much of a change in the “next big thing”… anywhere. 2022 is when we got generative AI; while it has incrementally improved, there is nothing really newey-new-new in 2023.

With all of that said, I am very excited for 2024.

I am embarking on a career journey into “shiny new” territory at work.

I should have one if not two, indie game launches.

I may make a bet for a steak dinner on the timeliness of NFTs, similar to the 2026 steak dinner bet I have for AR/VR, which is still 50/50 even though it is two years away. I think we are going to be four years out on mass market adoption of distributed ledgers in games, and I do not yet have the metrics for said bet.

I apologize for the silence for the past two weeks. The intermittent fan noise of my PC prevented me from putting up the “We will be back soon” sign on the front door. You all deserve better.

I will see you next week!

Watching “The Battle For Remote Work” play out in the media is interesting. There is an ebb and flow of articles proclaiming the merits of returning to the office, alternating with articles that extoll the virtues of remote work. I want to make it very clear that I am wearing the “I Heart Remote Work” shirt.

I was meeting with another engineering leader who has a very nice home office. We started talking about our respective setups. That is the modern-day equivalent of strutting your stuff with all of your peacock feathers on display. I suddenly realized there are many successful remote workers I have known through the years, and they all have something in common. Are you ready for me to shock you? Oh wait, you already clicked the link. I do not need to say that.

My realization is that the most successful remote workers and remote leaders have a very well-defined space for doing their work, and it often has very good physical separation from other parts of their home.

Let’s talk about what that looks like, and fill up a post with wonderful Amazon-Affiliate-linked goodies, shall we?

Thanks to one of my kids leaving for college, I have my home office in a full-sized bedroom. It has two desks. An Uplift standing desk and an L-shaped standard sitting desk (from IKEA, do not judge me). I generally have a machine that I dedicate to full-time work and another for personal use (gaming and side projects). Several years ago, I was a fractional CTO for multiple companies and had a desk with a stack of Mac Minis wired up to a single monitor, keyboard, and mouse separate from these machines. Whenever I was doing technical projects, I would insist on being shipped a build/deployment box. This was a very extreme way to ensure that everyone’s intellectual property was compartmentalized, and I believe everyone understood that importance.

The big takeaway here is that not all remote work is the same. Some people perch a laptop on their kitchen table and sit in a dinner chair. Others have separate rooms with sit/stand workstations and custom furniture. It would be interesting to run some studies on the quality of work and the impact of people’s time and space investment into making themselves effective remotely.

Let’s talk about a few other things that helped me succeed remotely.

Get a good chair. I am a fan of the Secret Labs chairs.  They are very heavy chairs and very firm. Some people prefer lighter Aeron-style chairs; if you do, Google that on your own time.

Use consistent peripherals. When I buy mice, keyboards, and ergonomic items, I tend to buy them ten at a time. I am not going to give you an Amazon Affiliate Link for my keyboard of choice because they are no longer being manufactured, and I am a filthy hoarder who will eventually need to knife-fight someone to get the last of these that were ever made.

I do recommend the Razr DeathAdder mouse. It is like someone at Razr asked, “What if people who work for a living are also gamers?” The answer was this mouse.

I buy the same set of ergonomic peripherals, too. This ought to be its own point. I am a big fan of wrist rests, and I got one for my keyboard from Belkin and a different one for my mouse from IMAK. As an added bonus, the IMAK mouse cushion is something you can pick up and toss around while you are rubber-ducking a problem. Just be prepared for it to break one day and spill little beads all over your office.

Make sure you have a good mousepad too. I have a variety of hand-me-down pads and a beautiful World of Warcraft mousepad that I received as a thoughtful gift. I recommend the SteelSeries brand for the ones I buy for myself.

Finally, ensure you have a quality camera, microphone, and headset. I purchased a Blue Yeti microphone that does the job, but I should have bought “the other kind” of microphone because I had to do a bunch of finagling to get it to work. I also had to get a four-foot boom arm because of my ridiculously oversized curved monitor. For headsets, I am a fan-for-life of Sennheiser.

I prefer all of my peripherals to be wired. I have had enough meeting complications and online gaming problems that have originated from someone else running out of batteries. No thank you. Do not want. Zero stars.

There are two reasons I wanted to share this list. The first reason is that I am still trying to dethrone myself as Amazon’s worst affiliate marketer. The second reason is that I have put significant time and energy into making myself effective as a remote worker. I do not know if there is an upper bound on what you can spend to improve your work environment. I do know that I am very happy with my setup, having invested two thousand dollars over the years, and that does not include items that did not make the cut.

Thank you for reading along! I hope that you are happy with your remote work setup. If you are one of those “I Heart Return To Office” people, the good news is that some of the items I linked above are probably things you can buy for your weird previous-century fetish. If I offended you, I am happy to fax you an apology.

See you all in a week!

Twas the night before Christmas, and we can all see
The world is a mess in twenty twenty three
The Ukraine and Middle East are embroiled in war
We have floods and fires and earthquakes galore
So much is happening, it won’t fit in my head
I had to read up on Wikipedia instead
Blah blah Joe Biden, Blah blah Donald Trump
Washington is a messy and partisan dump
Everyone is ready to complain and to cry
About the best government lobbyist money could buy
In high-tech, we wait for someone to declare
That our computers are now finally all self-aware
I must ask if this is really what we desired
It is probably why Sam Altman was initially fired
He got the job back if you were concerned
Unlike many people who just got “downturn”ed
Companies are trimming, for costs, they are cautious
If you survived the purge, please come back to the office
They are trying to reduce the money they spent
Except, it appears, they want to pay rent
By ratings, in video games, it was a great year
You wouldn’t know it from the layoffs that continually appear
Companies are closing, downsizing, and shrinking
I like to blame thirty percent platform fee thinking
I don’t really know what is really to blame
This was last year: Just more of the same
So double up on your bourbon, your wine, or your beer
And have a merry Christmas and a happy New Year!

Hey everyone. We are approaching the holiday season. That means that traffic will be horrendous, and everything you order online will be late. Do not even think about using food delivery services. Your food delivery wait times will balloon, and you might even experience things like your food delivery person showing up in front of your house, throwing two food orders into the street, and then peeling away. When you ask for your refund, be prepared for the automated system to say, “We are so sorry you did not wish to retrieve your food order from the street and eat it.” Yes, this happened, and no, I will never know the full story about that delivery person.

Now that you have been warned that you should spend the next three weeks under your desk whimpering and mainlining hard alcohol, I have a question: Have you ever been in a standup and heard someone say, “I could potentially be blocked on my task”?

No. Just no. Please no? You are not potentially blocked on your task. You are blocked, or you are not blocked. You do not “think about considering the possibility that we are theoretically contemplating the optionality of being blocked.”

Please.

Just be blocked.

It won’t hurt.

It is okay to be blocked.

This is how we get better.

That is it. That is the whole post. I need to go and shower because I realized I could turn this entire post into a TokTok, and I am now unclean.

Before I go, I will throw down my holiday challenge: If I get ten people sharing this brief and incredibly valuable engineering insight on “The Socials”, I will assemble a top ten list of books for you to buy after cheesing me out of my Amazon Affiliate fee. You would think that you want to take money from Jeff Bezos… Why rob hard-working content creators like yours truly?

I will see you all next week.

I have spent a long time building software. I have also spent a long time managing software teams. Much of my career was spent in very early-stage startups that were usually two to five years ahead of the consumer marketplace, sometimes more. As a result of all of that experience, I have often been asked to become a technical advisor.

Over the course of a decade, the way that I have delivered advice and the way it has been received has changed. I learned that getting emotionally disconnected from the outcome of these projects is important. Sometimes, you are asked to provide feedback and advice so a business leader can make an informed decision. That does not mean they will make the right decision, but it does mean they have at least thought about the outcome for more than five minutes.

I also noticed another interesting phenomenon. I would give some excellent advice in a few cases where another advisor or consultant was also involved in the project. My advice would be ignored, and when the other consultant would give the same advice, they would take it seriously and take action.

I was naturally quite confused at the time.

After two to three years of this, I finally figured out what the issue was. I was not framing my advice correctly.

Much of the time that my advice was being ignored, there was someone else who had worked at a big company who started off their presentation giving a big schpiel about who they were and what impact they had on some big popular project.

“I am Johnny McConsultantFace, and I worked at Facebook on a half-billion-dollar platform where my team raised revenues by two hundred million dollars.” This is an example of how they would start the conversation. When I worked at hi5 Networks as a VP of engineering, I could say, “We had twenty million dollars in declining revenue, and we had to sell the business assets to enable us to do a ground-up reboot.”

So… who would you listen to?

Welcome to the world of framing!

I am grateful that I have had the opportunity to work on more significant projects since then, not the least of which was a two-hundred-million-dollar mobile game that was a leader in its category. When you can preface your presentation with those eye-popping numbers, it gets people to pay attention.

As an early fan of The Meritocracy, I was shocked when I learned how important this is. It is one thing I did very poorly for a long time.

I would go into these presentations armed with graphs, data, and facts, only to sit across from a disinterested executive unfamiliar with the deep technical aspects of the material I presented. Without adding some context as to why that matters, I could have been standing in front of him, pointing at my graphs and repeating the word “loser” over and over.

“Loser loser, loser loser-loser.” I could say and then advance to the next slide, “Loser. Loser? Loser loser! Loser loser loser loser.”

Regardless of the actual words I was saying, this is probably how it all sounded.

Returning to The Meritocracy for a second, I spent years telling people how important it is to work at startups early in your career. I have since reconsidered this advice at least a little. To get the most bang for your buck professionally, you also want to work at a large company on a very large project. I have met many people who have only worked at early-stage startups and many people who have focused exclusively on working for large companies. I think that a blend is the right answer. You get an accelerated pace of learning and familiarity for growth at a startup and some of the credibility of working at scale for a large company.

As you grow into leadership roles, that blend is super important.

I am not generally a person who regrets things. This is one piece of advice I wish that I could give to twenty-five-year-old John. It took me a while to realize how important this is, and I want to ensure everyone can benefit from this belated education.

Thank you for reading along! If you have not finished spending all of your black friday moneys, I have an Amazon Affiliate link for you to click on. Abundance is one of those books that I think everyone should read. It is one of the top five books that helped me transcend professionally and become a better leader. Having said that, I will include links to the other four books in the coming weeks. Maybe “The top five books that John has read” is a better list than “The top five books that John wants to read”?

The call to action here is clear—Your clicks are an important part of the future of content-as-democracy. I shall see you all next week!