01 · STAND-UP “The most important thing in communication is hearing what isn’t said.” — Peter Drucker Most candidates answer “tell me about yourself” by narrating their resume. The interviewer already has the resume. What they’re actually listening for is whether you understand your own work well enough to explain it to a stranger in ninety seconds. Here’s the framework I developed over ten years working with Engineering Managers. 02 · SPRINT I’ve sat across from a lot of engineers in the...
6 months ago • 3 min read
01 · STAND-UP "Your network is the people who want to see you win." — Sahil Lavingia Most people hear "network" and think LinkedIn requests. Sahil meant something different. He meant the people already watching — who notice a typo in your GitHub repo, who forward your message to someone who books you on a panel. You don't build that in a day. You tend it over years. Start now. 02 · SPRINT The typo that closed a contract A friend messaged me out of nowhere last week. She’d been looking through...
6 months ago • 3 min read
01 · STAND-UP "Feedback is the breakfast of champions." — Ken Blanchard Most teams serve cold coffee and call it a meal. The debrief happens. Someone types two sentences into the ATS. The candidate gets a rejection email written by a lawyer in 2019. "Unfortunately, we moved forward with someone with {insert variable reason}..." And everyone wonders why the next search starts with the same problems. 02 · SPRINT I've been working with a handful of startups for the last 3 months. All of it has...
6 months ago • 4 min read
01 · STAND-UP “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” — African proverb I’ve been thinking about this one differently lately. It’s not just about speed or distance. It’s about information. Recruiters go fast — alone, with proprietary playbooks, behind closed doors. Engineers and EMs run the same broken job search loop a thousand times over. Nobody goes far. Nobody shares the map. That changes when the map is public; this Friday. 02 · SPRINT Ten years in. I’ve...
6 months ago • 3 min read
01 · STAND-UP “You never get a second chance to make a first impression.” — Will Rogers Most resumes are designed to be read. The best ones are designed to be scanned. There’s a difference. 02 · SPRINT I have a confession. I have over 15 resume formats saved on my computer. Different file formats. Different fonts. Different lengths. One of them — I’m not making this up — has headers set to hex code #800000. Maroon. I spent years on the candidate side of the table obsessing over aesthetics,...
7 months ago • 2 min read
01 · STAND-UP “Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.” — Abraham Lincoln (Kind of...) Most hiring managers spend zero hours on the axe. They open a role, start sourcing, and wonder why the first ninety days feel like a slow-motion stumble. The sharpening isn’t the job description. It’s the question nobody asks before the search opens: what does success actually look like — and on whose timeline? 02 · SPRINT I live in a tech-forward apartment...
7 months ago • 3 min read
01 · STAND-UP “Before you build, you must understand the problem.” Linus Torvalds, creator of Linux Every engineer I’ve ever worked with knows this instinctively. You don’t write code before you understand the system. You don’t ship before you define what done looks like. But when it’s time to hire, most engineering teams skip the design doc entirely. And then wonder why the search falls apart. 02 · SPRINT Engineers don’t ship without a design doc. Why do we hire without one? Every...
7 months ago • 1 min read
01 · STAND-UP “The system is not broken. It was built this way.” common observation from anyone who has been inside one long enough Most engineers on the job search eventually ask the same question: What am I doing wrong? They optimize their resume. Rewrite their summary. Practice their behavioral answers. Apply again. Wait again. And the system — silent, inconsistent, weirdly personal — gives them nothing back. Ten years in this profession and the problem still remains: the process isn’t...
7 months ago • 3 min read