Welcome to alt.management

Management is pretty damn hard. It’s an art-form that humanity aims to master, yet likely never will. Nevertheless, organizations rise and fall with good leadership and management: it’s a nut worth cracking.

It also happens to be pretty damn fascinating and fun.

Alt.management aims to level up technology leaders by delivering fresh, punchy, and alternative perspectives on tech leadership topics. Read our mission statement.

Featured

Introducing alt.management

What have you done to me?! I used to assume people were just stupid, but now I’m starting to take their perspective. Make it stop! I’ve always had trouble coming up with good KPIs for myself. How do I know if I’m doing well, if I’m

#Meta

No More: It’s The People

“Half of the people at this company should be fired. They’re not productive, don’t care about anything, and show zero sign of ownership. We should never have hired them.” This was what I heard from my new boss on my very first day. Welcome to the company indeed.

#No More

The Struggle Makes Real

“I know Kubernetes!” — Neo The Matrix scene where skills and knowledge are uploaded directly into Neo’s brain is iconic. To many, this is the ultimate learning experience: lay back, stab a giant-ass plug into your brain, and let the upload begin. Ahhhh! Sweet. Kung Fu. Shakespeare. CSS. However, the

#Pro #Productivity

LGTM 🚀 Culture: A Short Story

Date: December 31, 2047 Dear Martin, As part of clearing out the final area outside of town for the new Bubble-III data center, an old PC (Personal Computer) was found. It was left behind in a cabin further down in the forest. The PC still had a “hard drive” in

#Short Story #AI

Nobody Wants to Listen to Your Sh*t

“I have a presentation to give. Quick, gimme some low-effort, high-impact tricks!” While for many topics I have books to pull off my shelf, I realized that the last book I read on the topic of presenting was probably Presentation Zen (1st edition), circa 2008. At the time, Death by

#Storytelling

No More Elegance

Here’s the pattern that repeats for me writing code — the pattern that has kept me engaged in this field for well over thirty years: Something starts out small: a few hundred lines of code. It does something useful. As I use it and build it out, it slowly accumulates

#No More #Pro

A Little Bit of History Repeating

A new technology, methodology, movement reveals itself and people go all in, enthusiastically. After some time, it becomes clear things have been pushed too far. Cracks start to show, limitations become obvious. What follows is a partial swing back to older ways, with lesson learned and if we’re lucky:

#Pro

You Ship Your CEO

From Empire of AI, chapter 15: Instead of negotiating between egos, he was conveying to everyone exactly what they wanted to hear as he maneuvered to get exactly what he wanted. And he was telling so many little lies and some big ones in the process that it was becoming

#Pro

People Don't Care What You Do, They Care Why You Do It

“Do you mind if I tweak the slide deck of our All Hands: Reorg Edition slightly?” “Sure, go ahead.” 30 minutes later. “Err... Zef, what did you do?” People don’t care what you do, they care why you do it. 15 years ago, Simon Sinek gave a nice talk

#Trust #Communication

Skin in the Game

“Why is it so hard to make people give a damn? I mean, like, really care?” I have found there are a few key ideas in management that have a tremendous amount of leverage. Once we internalize them, we start to see patterns, and they can explain a lot of

#Motivation #Pro

The Recruiter: Stage I

Recruitment is broken. Candidates can’t get through to the right companies, are ghosted left and right, and have to jump through increasingly ridiculous “AI enhanced” hoops to get a job. Who is not having a terrible experience interviewing right now? Very sad. And what for? Because, I mean, how

#Recruitment #Pro

Freight Boat Theory

“The only sensible organization size is one.” That’s quite a statement. Especially if it comes from your company’s COO. It always stuck with me, because it’s bold. And pretty useless. As somebody who recently went solo on some projects, I can attest that the flexibility and ability

#Pro #Org Design

The Distance Trap: AI Edition

People say that AI is going to be highly disruptive for just about every job. Many such jobs will simply be automated and disappear. Except — well — our own. Why not our own? Because our own jobs require a very particular set of skills. Knowledge. Creativity. Years of experience. There’s

#AI

More Boring Technology

I think it’s time for me to pull the “old man” card. That said, in my defense, this is going to be a repeat of a message I was already spreading thirteen years ago. Which, now that I think about it, you can interpret as simply another proof point

#More #Pro

Give It Time

“It’s not like I’m stalking you or anything...” When a conversation starts like that you just know it is going to be good. “...but I was looking at your calendar and I noticed that you seem to have 1-hour long one-on-one meetings booked with all your direct reports.

#Pro

Thoughts on AI in Engineering

Hypothetical scenario: as an engineering leader you’re asked to look into leveraging AI to accelerate the engineering department. Ok, perhaps not such a hypothetical scenario. In fact, if this is not happening in your company I’d be surprised. It makes sense, there’s a lot of hype and

#AI #Pro

The Five Reallys

The term critical thinking has gotten a bad rap. People think (uncritically) that to be critical means to be a nay-sayer, to be cynical, to stand in the way of progress. While this could be the impression, it’s not the goal. The goal of critical thinking is to “analyzing

More FOMO

I have been looking forward to this for a long time. Partially because this is where the money grab happens. Partially because it’s an amazing mind game opportunity that I plan to milk at every possible (meta) level. You know I love mind games. As the world’s worst

#Meta #Mind Games #Persuasion

The Managerial We

“Interesting challenge! So what are we going to do about it?” There are at least three meanings of the word “we” that I know about: First is the communal we, referring to you and me, or us as a group. In mosts natural contexts, this is the default. Second is

#Communication #Persuasion

Conway’s Law: a Master Class

Late last year I gave an internal talk on my favorite management law: Conway’s Law. It was well received, even called a master class on the subject. Initially the term master class activated imposter syndrome. Who’s the master here? However, when looking a bit deeper into various uses

#Master Class #Org Design