More Stories

“I got up and then I found a berry. And then I ate it. And then I went hunting with Andre. And then Andre was killed by a Mammoth. And then I was sad. And then I found another berry. And then I ate it. And then I felt better.

Kicked Out

Krav Maga is a self-defense sport originally developed by the Israeli military. It takes a “no-frills” approach to self defense. Whereas in Eastern martial arts like Kung-Fu or Aikido, one may learn elaborate, beautiful, dance-like responses to an attack, in Krav Maga you simply learn to kick ‘em in the

The OC

While people differ in many ways, there’s at least one constraint that unites us all: time. Whether you were born an third-world country or The OC, whether you are tall or short, senior or junior — your number of hours in a day, days in a week, weeks in a

TinkerWare

A few years ago, I started to dabble with Scratch with my oldest son. Scratch is a visual programming environment that has a nice and low barrier to entry. You visit a web site and start dragging and dropping blocks around, hit a Run button to instantly see your changes

More Direct Feedback

“Dude, you have blood spatters on your shirt...” That’s what I should have said as I entered the surgeon’s office last Friday for some minor surgery. I didn’t. Now, we all realize that surgery involves cutting. There is going to be blood involved. However, greeting your next

More Thank You

As my oldest son (10) walks downstairs, he sighs deeply and audibly. “That was quite something!” He is doing his usual dramatic my life is so tough thing again. “Tell us, what is this challenging achievement of yours?” “I put my laundry in my closet. All of it.” “You mean

Scaling Trust, Episode II

“So this company Zef mentioned, the one where his new boss told him on his first day that half the people should be fired, that’s us, right?” I was catching up with a former colleague this week. One of his team members had read my post, and assumed it

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

Essentials

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

World Peace

The Empathy Games

Let’s play a little game. I’ll call these games The Empathy Games. It’s like The Hunger Games, except it’s pretty much unrelated. I think. Rather than everybody but one dying in the end (or two, I suppose — I watched the first movie but didn’t care

The Inverse Self-Fulfilling Prophecy Maneuver

I don’t really care about winning; I’m not at all competitive. This also means that you cannot really motivate me by setting specific goals (with the one exception of doing Jack Shit, obviously). I’m a “journey man” — I mostly care about the journey, not the destination. However,

Man on the Moon

In 1962, president John F. Kennedy visited NASA for the first time. As he toured around, he met a janitor carrying a broom in the hallway. “What are you doing here, son?” the president asked. The janitor stood still, broom in hand, and dreamily glanced up towards the sky. “I’

Decisions, Decisions

“Thanks for coming to me with this. Here’s what we’re going to do.” I stop and feel my pockets. Nothing. “Ok, in this day and age, who still carries a wallet? Anybody got any coins on them?” Everybody starts feeling their pants and skirts. Frank finds some loose

The Feature Tax

Naively you may have thought: “I’m sure that Zef got a lot of pushback on his openness about his ambition to do Jack Shit, so probably this week he’ll walk some of that back.” Hah! No. I’m going to double down on it. I’m going to