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To listen well, get curious
source A common piece of interacting-with-people advice goes: “often when people complain, they don’t want help, they just want you to listen!” For instance, Nonviolent Communication:1 It is often...
View ArticleMy favorite essays of life advice
I start each of my weekly reviews by re-reading one of my favorite essays of life advice—a different one each week. It’s useful for a few different reasons: It helps me get into the right reflective...
View ArticleWhat I've been doing instead of writing
I’ve been too busy with work to write much recently, but in lieu of that, here’s a batch of links to other stuff I’ve been doing elsewhere. The thing I’m most excited about: Wave raises $200m from...
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Searching for outliers
Shortly after I started blogging, because I was a college student and had nothing better to do, I set a goal to write every week. I started in September 2013 and wrote around 150 posts between then and...
View Article10x (engineer, context) pairs
People have big arguments over whether “10x engineers” exist or not. Pro: The differences are not minor—it is rather like Salieri and Mozart. Study after study shows that the very best designers...
View ArticleBe less scared of overconfidence
When I was deciding whether to work for Wave, I got very hung up on the fact that my “total compensation” would be “lower.” The scare quotes are there because Wave and my previous employer, Theorem,...
View ArticleStaring into the abyss as a core life skill
Recently I’ve been thinking about how all my favorite people are great at a skill I’ve labeled in my head as “staring into the abyss.”1 Staring into the abyss means thinking reasonably about things...
View ArticleWhy and how to write things on the Internet
Recently I noticed that most existing “why you should write a blog” articles (e.g.) have at least one of two shortcomings, according to me: They mostly focus on counterarguments to not starting a blog,...
View ArticleLeaving Wave, joining Anthropic
Last Friday was my last day as CTO at Wave, capping an incredible ~8 years filled with more professional and personal growth, joy, and meaning than I could have hoped for. This was the hardest decision...
View ArticleSome mistakes I made as a new manager
This post was adapted from a “management roundtable” I gave at Anthropic. I had an unusually hard time becoming a manager: I went back and forth three times before it stuck, mostly because I made lots...
View ArticleHow I build and run behavioral interviews
This is an adaptation of an internal doc I wrote for Wave. I used to think that behavioral interviews were basically useless, because it was too easy for candidates to bullshit them and too hard for me...
View ArticleTrust as a bottleneck to growing teams quickly
This is an adaptation of an internal doc I wrote for Anthropic. I’ve been noticing recently that often, a big blocker to teams staying effective as they grow is trust. “Alice doesn’t trust Bob” makes...
View ArticleCategories of leadership on technical teams
This is an adaptation of an internal doc I wrote for Anthropic. Recently I’ve been having a lot of conversations about how to structure and staff teams. One framework I’ve referenced repeatedly is to...
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