2026/10/12
For those of you who are searching for a new role. It is definitely a new world, and from what I gather, it is even more true for those of you who are earlier in your careers.
I’m looking for my next role myself, and exploring some different and varied industries along with it. Some I’m very familiar with, like security, networking, CPG (consumer packaged goods), and consumer electronics. With those I’m looking for details and differentiation about the company. But for some other industries that I’m less familiar with, I need to bootstrap my base level understanding, and I’m usually trying to do so quickly to be able to get into deeper than surface level conversations about the opportunities. All the usual things like reading through 10-K’s if they’re publicly traded, seeing what their execs have posted on LinkedIn or spoken about in interviews. But almost every organization invests heavily in putting out a wealth of text about what they do, who they are, and what they want to be next.
2026/10/05
Scrum. It’s funny how much of the tech industry landed on a term for a little-understood part of a game that most people in the United States would struggle to describe.
The metaphor goes back to a 1986 Harvard Business Review article, The New New Product Development Game. The examples are dated, but it still resonates 40 years later. Bringing people together to do something is hard, doing it successfully is harder, and doing it efficiently is what many of us spend our professional hours focused on.
2026/09/18
Fascinating little story in the WSJ this week by Walden Siew. It’s so on the nose that it feels like a just-so story, but I can see how this could easily happen.
This is one of the big issues every organization is facing, whether they know it or not. It rhymes with the early days of cloud computing, when well meaning team members could rack up eye watering bills as part of the broader “shadow IT” problem.
2026/09/14
Autumn is here, and for me that means that we’re done with all that 7s silliness and it’s time for rugby 15s season. This year our club has a new coaching staff and we’ve got a lot of new faces around the men’s team due to new people moving into the area and several moving away. We’re intense as far as most amateur athletics go, but even still it’s only four hours a week in the same place, and due to various life commitments it’s rare for all of our typical starters to be together. So, like most every business I’ve been a part of through my career, we have to build our culture remotely. We still get together outside of practice in various sized groups for everything from volunteering to socializing, and of course during match days we’re all together, but that’s only 12-15 Saturday’s a year. We’ve got a couple Whatsapp groups for sharing highlights from matches, a bit of healthy trash talking about our favorite teams during the International windows, details of day to day operations of the club, and of course some general banter.
2026/09/03
There’s been no lack of pixels pushed talking about the current job market, and I don’t know how much I’ll add to it. But Im enjoying writing again, so… talking with people on all sides, there are some interesting, and weird, things at play. Everyone is acting in their own best interest and doing things that are reasonable, meanwhile it is not working well for anyone.
Locally rational, globally dysfunctional systems are tough to solve.
