6 Mistakes You Should Avoid In Your Tech Leadership Career

#129 – March 06, 2023

I have been a manager for more than 20 years at technology companies, and I have been lucky enough to make all those mistakes that should not be made as a manager.

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A Culture Virus is a contagious idea that hooks into your culture like a pathogen, passing from person to person, and very often preying on the weak and struggling - the people who are susceptible to convenient excuses.

I managed the engineering team at Digg as we ran out of money, and were eventually acquired. It was an eye opening experience, and I learned a great deal about the reality and the optics of selling a company, particularly one with no money and a shrinking user base. Humbling was just the beginning.

This is the story behind the Facebook for iOS codebase and its evolution over the last 10 years.

I've always had a strong inclination towards action: if something isn't working or about to break, I feel compelled to jump in and lend a hand. However, sometimes that's a leadership blunder which does a greater disservice to the longer view of things.

This article describes a pattern we have observed and applied in multi-team-scope architecture modernization initiatives, the Architecture Modernization Enabling Team. It is a type of architecture enabling team that coordinates and upskills all teams and stakeholders in the modernization initiative.

My father once explained how organizations scale with the analogy of fabric. If you take a piece and stretch it, holes start to appear everywhere. In order to keep that fabric stable, you need to weave new thread into it.

Early in my management days, I found myself in an unforeseen situation. A new and unexpected frontend framework was added to our early-stage startup stack from one week to another.

RFCs, also called Design Documents, let us describe software designs before implementation. But how do you make sure that RFCs get deep review and are seen by the right people? How do you help reviewers catch problems in a system’s design?

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