Career

A few years ago, “Senior Developer” meant something. Not just a pay grade, not just an internal leveling band, but a signal that you’d seen some things. Broken prod on Christmas Eve. Legacy codebases with more comments than code. Real consequences, real complexity, real context. Now? I’m seeing resumes from people three years out of university with “Senior” in their title. Not senior in years, not senior in depth—just the most experienced person on a three-person dev team at a startup that launched last quarter. ...

There’s a special kind of sigh that comes out when someone says, “We’re rolling out OKRs.” It’s not quite despair. Not quite sarcasm. It’s the sigh of someone who’s seen this play before—probably in Q1 of last year, and Q3 of the year before that. The costumes are different, but the script is the same. Let’s get this out of the way: OKRs—Objectives and Key Results—can be useful. They’re not inherently evil. But like many good ideas, they tend to die in the wild. Not because the framework is flawed, but because the way most companies implement them is. ...

Originally published on August 26, 2022 In my last post, I described the arc most software companies follow—from chaotic startup to process-heavy bureaucracy. If you missed it, check it out here: An Evolution of a Software Company. Spoiler: there’s a pendulum, and it swings hard. Today, we’re talking about what happens next—and how to stop the pendulum from turning your team into a JIRA-powered approval queue. From Chaos to Control By the time the dust settles, you’ve landed in a company that’s seen one too many outages and decided that the cure is process. Lots of it. ...

Originally published on August 15, 2022 Let’s start with a story. It’s one you’ve probably lived through in some form, if you’ve spent more than ten minutes in the software industry. The Origin Story (and Its Inevitable Sequel) A company forms. There’s an idea, a goal, a dream. Usually it involves building the next great thing—a widget, a platform, a barely differentiated SaaS for onboarding PDFs. The founding team is small and experienced. They might be well-compensated, but more often they’re paid in the warm, fuzzy promise of equity. ...

Raise your hand if this sounds familiar: Your team rolls into the retro half-distracted You rehash the same pain points you talked about last sprint Someone adds action items that no one will follow up on Two weeks later, nothing has changed Yeah, me too. A friend of mine put it best: “We stopped doing retros. They just turned into venting sessions that created tasks no one followed up on.” ...