Tag: career
- Mar 3, 2024
I worked at Airplane, an internal tooling startup, for nearly two years. Earlier this year, it was announced that the company was being acquired by Airtable and that the product would be shut down. In this blog post, I want to explain what happened from my perspective as a former employee.
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- Dec 30, 2021
A lot of companies, both in tech and other industries, are having trouble
retaining employees at the moment. In this post, I want to describe the various resignation waves
that I've seen in my career thus far and what companies can do to respond to them.
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- Apr 11, 2021
At many companies the "senior engineer" level is fairly straightforward to get into, but hard to
get promoted beyond. The difficulty in advancing past "senior" can cause a lot of frustration and
make people feel stuck in their careers. In this post, I want to share some observations about this "senior engineer plateau", why it causes frustration, and how to navigate out of it.
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- Feb 15, 2021
Software engineers are an interesting bunch. While quirks are fine, and I have a few myself,
there are certain traits that show up on the personality side that can be genuinely counterproductive to my team's work. In this post, I want to explain what these are and how I
try to deal with them.
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- Jan 24, 2021
In my last post, I discussed how companies can make their onboarding processes
better for employees. In this post, I want to turn the tables and talk about the
strategies I use personally to get up-to-speed when I'm starting at a new job.
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- Jan 17, 2021
Starting a new software engineering job is hard, and making this process
successful requires a lot of effort from both the employer and the
employee. In this post, I want to focus on the former, and in particular
how companies can make their onboarding processes better.
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- Jan 1, 2021
Two years ago, I did something that I'd never done in my career before- I left a job
(at Nuro) only a few months after starting it. In this post, I want to explain
what happened and what I learned from the experience.
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- Dec 25, 2020
I spent 5 years of my life getting a PhD, but like many others who've gotten this degree,
I decided to leave academia after graduation. At the time, I explored several career choices
but ultimately decided to take a Product Manager job at Google. In this post, I want to discuss
why I think tech is a great destination for people with technical PhDs.
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- Oct 18, 2020
Equity in one's employer is a large part of the compensation for Software Engineers.
In this post, I want to describe how the different kinds of equity work and why I strongly
prefer one type, restricted stock units (RSUs), over options-based alternatives.
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- Mar 29, 2020
Most tech companies, even those without formal job titles,
assign "levels" to engineers. Despite the importance of levels for determining compensation
and job expectations, many companies prevent non-management employees
from seeing anyone's levels besides their own. In this post,
I explain why this is a harmful practice that should be
discontinued.
(Read more)
- Oct 6, 2019
Over the course of my career, I've had many jobs which implies that I've also left many jobs.
Leaving a job can be awkward and emotionally draining, but, depending on the circumstances,
also liberating and life-improving. In this post, I want to provide some guidance on why, how,
and when to leave a job based on my experiences so far.
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- Sep 7, 2019
I began my career as a product manager (PM)
but then switched tracks and became a software engineer (SWE) three and a half years later.
In this post, I want to describe how I started as a PM, why I made the decision to switch, and
how it worked out.
(Read more)