On Doubt

There is an emotional toll that comes with being constantly unsure and frequently wrong. How you handle that can define whether you are a good influence on your coworkers.

My team is too senior. How am I supposed to be promoted?

I love talking to people about their careers and I’ve been hearing a couple variations from different levels of folks saying “How am I supposed to be able to get promoted when there are so many folks at my level?” Perhaps there aren’t enough spots working on the hot new project. Perhaps there are not enough projects to lead. Perhaps it’s that there are not enough juniors to mentor. There’s not “enough” of it, and the team feels like a competition.

6 things I learned interviewing for Staff positions

I recently completed an either 9 month or 2 month search for a new job, looking for Staff-level engineering positions for the first time in my career. I live-snarked much of the process on Twitter and heard that was helpful to some folks who are also thinking about starting their first Staff-level search. Some reasons this blog post may not be interesting or ring true to you:

How I operated as a Staff engineer at Heroku

I was incredibly lucky to spend 5 amazing years at Heroku. By the end of my time, I was operating in a Staff capacity, although I’m honestly completely unclear which titles at Salesforce actually map to Staff.