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Stop being the Oracle for your team!
There is a clear expectation today that leaders should be enablers, which is great as it makes the leadership model more participative. However, it’s all too easy for new leaders to end up assuming the role of the single source of truth for their teams. Let’s try to understand the reasons behind this. Regardless of…
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Your Product Manager is not the enemy
One of my earliest memories when I started working with product teams was the underlying feeling within my team that the Product Manager was actually working against us. In countless meetings, I had to hear complaints that things were not straightforward, and that the product team didn’t understand anything. In hindsight, I see that this…
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Quiet Quitting does not exist
The term “quiet quitting” has been used as an umbrella term for a series of measures that workers have been taking to adjust their workload and scope of work to their current remuneration or position. The thing is, in a capitalist society, quiet quitting doesn’t exist! Story time! My family wasn’t necessarily poor when I…
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Don’t forget to market yourself
When you realize that half of the year has already passed, and if you work for a slightly larger company, it’s time for your mid-year performance review (if your company doesn’t have this process, you should informally request it from your manager). Like many others, you’re staring at a blank document, wondering what to write…
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Leveraging on the Discussion Corner
Today, one of the biggest problems in distributed teams or teams working on a complex domain is the replication of context and concepts among team members. It’s very common for implementation discussions to become lengthy and unnecessary, partly due to the fact that some team members may not have all the necessary context or understand…
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Stop! Don’t become a manager
If you’ve been working in the technology field for some time, you may have witnessed it happening, either in your own team or elsewhere: higher management decides that the team needs a manager, they choose the best engineer from the team, and after a while, that person proves to be a bad manager, either because…
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Career is a ladder not a staircase
Hiring is a costly task that involves the time of everyone involved, so hiring managers and recruiters are looking for people with whom the company can have a long-term relationship. You may have seen this before, whether you were looking at someone’s profile on LinkedIn or receiving a resume to evaluate. The person has exactly…
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You were just another employee
The past few months have been stressful for those who work in technology, whether you work for a Big Tech, Scale-up, or Startup. Whether due to legitimate economic reasons or simply pressure from Venture Capitals, we have been seeing almost monthly mass layoffs. Employees with years of service are writing on social media how shocked and sad they…
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You are the owner of your career
A few years ago, I was interviewing a senior engineer to join my team, and when I asked him the famous cliché question, “Where do you see yourself in the next 5 years?”, he stopped for a full minute before answering, “I don’t know, I never really stopped to think about it…” I think just as he was…
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Seniority takes time!
In the last 5 years, we’ve seen the discussion around seniority within the technology bubble take on a much larger proportion than it should have, and this discussion is largely due to people not understanding what a senior IT professional really does in their area. In the distant past, seniority was attributed to how long…
Thoughts from Phil 