TLDR;

I’m available for employment again.

My time with Nordstrom was everything I’d hoped it would be.

Late Stage career growth is a personal journey

Last April I had no idea how large the Nordstrom product and engineering teams were, nor how substantial their scale. I had just come from a late stage startup (post-acquisition), and I think I probably expected a significantly less agile culture with a slower cadence of product development, but hoped at least the scale of it would be my opportunity to learn more.

I couldn’t have been more wrong about what I’d find, or what…

I’ve been thinking a lot about how many people, how many tasks, how much effort, how much cost for public cloud managed services you should be allocating as an engineering leader.

There’s this promise that with each layer of increasing abstraction in modern software development we’ll be freeing up ‘developers’ to do more customer value work. It’s hard to argue with the impulse, and the logic makes a lot of sense. But in practice as I think about the evolution of software applications we’ve seen this promise before. …

Lending the privilege of being employed

I’ve been laid off three times in my career (not counting the 3 times I’ve laid myself off, when it was what was best for the company), I’ve been the author of 3 layoffs in order to save a company so that those who remained would continue to have good jobs.
In total I’ve helped or administered about 8 layoffs.

Nasty business

It is never easy work. It sucks on both sides. Even when you hate your job getting fired is painful, no matter the reason. …

Code Shaming is the worst anti-pattern of all.

As a developer manager (of sorts), I often find myself digging into code I don’t understand in applications when I’m trying to help out, or more likely when I’m dog-fooding our development processes.

So it’s not surprising that in my first months at Avvo as VP of Engineering I would encounter some code that shocked and horrified me. The reaction can be normal for any experienced developer, and trashing legacy code is a time honored past-time in IRC and now in slack channels. Those developers who were around when the code was…

Whatever Works

In my twenty some odd years of working in collaborative projects I’ve encountered dozens of management theories on productivity and effective models for working. I have always tried to pull from the relevant portions of each process into my work when it brings value to the team I’m working in or leading. Initially I called my process for selecting which pieces of whatever management theory (Earned Value , Scrum, Kanban, Matrix Orgs) => “Whatever Works”.

In time I modified it to Whatever Works Well (after having hit the shoals hard when some agile metholodies were ported poorly from one organization’s…

I love to optimize a funnel as much as the next guy. Working at Airhelp as the CIO, I’ve seen our VP of Product do some amazing things to help conversion, and reduce drop-off post user acquisition, some of it is a little clever but in general we stay away from Dark UI because our customers have told us that trust is one of the things they look for most in our service.

I recently realized that we were still paying for Hulu.com when we never watched it, and I decide to cancel it. While I really respect the gumption…