More YOLO

We had an interesting training on entrepreneurial behaviors at the company this week. We were asked to rank the following behaviors from “Most often” to “Least often” used. We were given them unordered, but this is how I ordered them for myself: 1. Reflect 2. Desire to have an impact

No More Big Bang Releases

That was awesome all! 🥳 Thanks for all the extra hours, the extra push to make this release happen! Let’s never do that again. I have career-long struggles with many things, and deadlines and big bang releases definitely make an appearance in my top 100. This struggle started probably around

No More: It’s The People

“Half of the people at this company should be fired. They’re not productive, don’t care about anything, and show zero sign of ownership. We should never have hired them.” This was what I heard from my new boss on my very first day. Welcome to the company indeed.

Communication: A Short Story

To sign up, please use this sheet. Apparently, not everybody saw my previous message so let me repeat: to sign up, please use this sheet. Thank you! Cross-posting for visibility @here And @here @all “ChatGPT, write an engaging slack post with the message ‘to sign up, use this sheet’ that

No More Mandatory

“Yo, why did you not attend the event?” “I didn’t see the point, and had more important things to do.” “But it was mandatory!” “So what’s going to happen now?” “Well, I got this little notebook here with a list of names, see? What I’m going to

Focus Mode

“So what do you think, Zef?” Ok, so this is embarrassing. Even though being present in a meeting and paying undivided attention is one of my virtues, I failed this time. I let myself get distracted by (admittedly hilarious) Slack messages from a colleague. While I shouldn’t have, I

Welcome to The Show

I sometimes lie awake at night mentally preparing for a critical meeting. I’m a slow thinker, so when surprising things happen, there’s a risk that I effectively blank out. My coping mechanism is scenario planning. When I say A, how will others respond? If they respond with B,

AI Career Coach

Internal note: Until the announcement of the business pivot during the next all hands meeting, this document is to be considered confidential. Test chat transcript follows, copied verbatim. Frank: Hello there 👋 Let’s get to know each other a little bit. My name is Frank, and I’m a professional

Zef’s Bookshelf of Mindfuckery

Tell me about one of your most strongly held beliefs. I will crush it. Set fire to it. And then laugh at the moon, all evil-like. Sorry, I let myself go there for a second. I’m good now. So. I started a fun little project. Working title: Zef’s

Coconut Radios

During the second world war, soldiers would land on tiny islands of Melanesia in the south-western pacific ocean. They would airdrop cargo, and trade with the indigenous people that had never been exposed to any type of technology before. Then after some years, after the war ended, soldiers and their

The Gaslighting Elephant in the Feedback Room

If feedback is a gift, why does it keep punching us in the face? “Your test coverage didn’t grow as much as we asked, you should care about quality more.” “You should be be better prepared for our meeting.” “You should care enough about this company to pick up

What We Lost

After wrapping up my last meeting of the day, I walk back into the open space. Somewhat disoriented I’m trying to recall at which desk I dropped my bag at the beginning of the day. As I sit down, I glance over on the large external monitor to my