On the subject of imposter syndrome, I want to bring extra attention to this classic piece from Chris Xu, who writes about how unthinking application of the concept can often amount to treating self-awareness as a pathology. This is not to say that imposter syndrome isn’t real, but that the reverse—the belief that you are capable of doing anything, regardless of your experience—is not a salve. What we’re aiming for is an environment in which everyone’s experience and expertise is respected, while also being able to safely acknowledge that we all have things to learn. Or, to borrow from Xu’s brilliant nomenclature, in rooting out imposter syndrome, we’re not aiming to build a culture of blowhards in its place.
Recent entries from the blog.
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Returning to this short piece from Agustina Vidal from a number of years ago, about emotional justice at work. Vidal defines emotional justice as “policies that protect the emotional well-being of our staff by centering anti-oppressive and trauma-informed practices in our workplace.” Among those practices are “evaluations that uplift,” an idea that sadly remains underused. A great many review procedures start from an unexamined position of critique; what if we shifted that mindset to orient those practices in care and support instead?
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Some years ago, a well-respected peer and leader on the team I served shared that she was leaving. This news came at a particularly uncertain and challenging time, and was met by a lot of long faces and heartbreak emojis. I was bummed. Lots of folks on the team were bummed. I wrote a short note to share with the team—the kind of thing I was wont to write often—part acknowledgement that things were difficult and it was right to grieve, part reminder that I and other leaders were available, part pick-me-up (to the extent the latter was even possible). I don’t recall exactly what I said, but I know I included something to the effect of, “Your work is bigger than this one time and place.” It’s a message I have often had to remind myself of, at previous moments of rupture—when a company came to an end, when a beloved colleague moved on, when a round of layoffs seemed to shatter whatever illusions of stability and safety I had held. It helped to remember that just because someone was leaving the proverbial building didn’t mean our work was coming to an end. As Gregg Bernstein writes, you can leave someone’s Slack channels, but you don’t have to leave their life.
Capitalism is capricious, and job security ephemeral. But your relationships with your people need not be either.
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“What’s burning out health care workers is less the grueling conditions we practice under, and more our dwindling faith in the systems for which we work.” So writes Eric Reinhart, a physician at Northwestern University, in this piece about burnout among doctors. The big picture here—that demoralization about contributing to a broken system is a bigger issue than overwork—is one that I think applies broadly to a lot of other industries, tech among them. It’s true that too much work and too little stability is a big part of the epidemic of burnout we’re in; but people’s faith (or lack thereof) in the systems in which they work is at least an equal contributor. And just as challenging a problem to solve.
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This evergreen post from Camille Fournier has great advice for new managers trying to avoid some very familiar pitfalls. While written in the context of engineering management, the counsel she offers is equally applicable to other disciplines and amounts to a warning to stay out of the weeds. As Fournier notes, “remember that your job is now about generating leverage by developing your team, which means delegating the technical work to them while helping them identify other skills they will need to successfully grow as an engineer.”
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More proof of a trend that I’ve been harping on for a while: while we’ve seen lots of layoffs in some areas of the tech industry (ads, platforms, commerce), there’s still tons of growth in another area—climate tech. It’s one of the hottest areas of investing right now, and a lot of that investment is being further buoyed up by government funds. This article notes that in some cases the salaries aren’t as high as competing companies, but that’s often the case when comparing early stage to mature companies, and isn’t likely to be a long term trend. There are a few good resources in here for job searchers, but I’d love to see climate tech companies doing more outreach to help tech workers understand how to navigate a move into the field.
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Rose Eveleth captures what I hear from a lot of my friends and clients, about a moment when she hit a level of burnout that required her to stop working for a while: “So when I couldn’t work—and I really mean physically could not, trust me, I tried—I panicked. What am I if not a person who works four jobs at once? Who am I if not the hardest working person you know? What then?????” The bad news is that when this question shows up, it hurts, and there are no shortcuts to answering it. The good news: once you answer it, you’ll realize you’ve been waiting to answer it for a long, long time.
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This piece from Emily Stewart lays out the trend of interviewing becoming a lengthy slog through multiple rounds of interviews and take-home assignments and tests. And look, I get it: hiring someone who doesn’t turn out to be right for the job is a costly and frustrating mistake, for both the manager and the worker. And we’re right to suspect that the traditional mode of interviewing is insufficient to create the perfect assurance that we’re making the right decision. But then, any process is insufficient for allaying all doubts—homework and panel interviews and tests might get us closer to really knowing how someone will perform once on the job, but nothing will get us all the way. My rubric has always been: ask yourself if someone with both a full-time job and caretaking responsibilities could reasonably complete your process without losing sleep. And if you’re the candidate, take note of how a prospective employer respects your time during the interview process; it’s a good tell for how they’ll respect it on the other side.
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This article on the history of burnout notes its origin in New York City’s East Village in the 1970s. A psychologist named Herbert Freudenberger coined the term, borrowing from language that his patients used to describe the effects of drug use, while also calling out to the wave of landlord-driven arson that rocked the neighborhood in those years. In a neat bit of sleight of hand, his definition of burnout managed to exclude the people he expropriated the term from. And yet, as Bench Ansfield notes, “it’s actually quite telling that Freudenberger saw himself and his burned-out coworkers as akin to burned-out buildings. Though he didn’t acknowledge it in his own exploration of the term, those torched buildings had generated value by being destroyed.”
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Emma Hayes has tips for baking with brain fog, among them getting prepped, keeping track of time, and playing to your strengths. I don’t think it’s a stretch to say this is all good advice for doing anything with brain fog—whether you need that counsel for yourself or are looking to support someone on your team. I’m particularly fond of the advice to stick to one bowl—that is, to choose projects that reduce the margins for error when you know your likelihood to commit an error is high.
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I work with people from all different kinds of organizations—different sizes, different industries, different countries and cultures and processes—but everyone I’ve ever worked with talks about how their organization is, in myriad ways, busted. I come back often to this piece from Lane Becker about how all human systems are enormous trash fires—that every time people come together to make something, things start to blaze, in one way or another. The question to ask yourself, as Becker does, is “Am I surrounded by a team of firefighters or a team of arsonists?”
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Jeff Eaton rants about how AI is not going to replace design systems, but I think the more interesting part of this is the recognition that systems are a kind of language—that is, they don’t exist to eliminate the need to communicate but to facilitate that communication. As Eaton writes, “The solution is to engage with the concept of a design system, to grapple with its language-like nature, and to create one that can evolve through use to meet emerging needs. One that can vary contextually but retain consistency across many communities. One that is only successful when it enables groups of creative humans to communicate effectively.”
“These last few years have been hard for trying. The act of surviving in a global pandemic, in the chaos of climate change, in waves hands in all directions, taps a lot out of you.” Here’s Dan Sinker with some wisdom about trying. What I like about this: the recognition that most of us, most of the time, are just trying—with no guarantee of success or even a plan for getting anywhere, just making it up as we go. And also the acknowledgement that even trying has its fallow periods—but given time to rest, a fallow field will eventually reseed itself.
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This exceptionally rigorous and insightful article from Maurice Mitchell outlines the challenges faced by social justice institutions, alongside a set of clear, actionable, and thoughtful approaches to addressing them. Somewhat unsurprisingly, nearly everything in here is just as applicable to those of us working to build equitable and resilient mission-driven workplaces, whether nonprofit or otherwise. The trends Mitchell outlines—from maximalism to cherry picking to glass houses and unanchored care—would be familiar to most workers and managers I know. In addition to absorbing all of the strategic advice he offers here, I’m struck by how much of his framing involves not avoiding conflict but navigating it with grace, transparency, and patience.
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I love this post from Elspeth Michaels about a year-long daily creative habit. Michaels and her friend note that the small (twenty minutes) daily commitment helped them to make incremental progress while also making more ambitious projects feel accessible. I don’t personally care for tracking streaks—I think they can make taking care of your body (or someone else’s) feel like a failure, and that’s never my goal—but having a regular habit you can return to over and again is a magical way of staying rooted in work that you like while also finding new (and fun) ways to keep learning.
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From adrienne maree brown, a short incantation that holds some balanced new year energy. Her phrasing of a “right sized extension of energy”—neither overextending nor witholding—is something I come back to often. But the strongest resonance for me here is about practice, and how regular commitments to practice are a kind of fortifying and learning and healing all at once: “we become what we practice. what are you practicing?”