Category: Monocategorized

One of my guilty pleasures is to be a part of a raid team in World of Warcraft. I have played the game since The Burning Crusade, which launched in 2007.

When I purchased the game, I recall seeing that there were three boxes beside each other each with a different sticker. The first sticker said “3 million copies sold!”. The second sticker said “4 millions copies sold!”. The third said “5 million copies sold!”. I was greatly amused that they were selling so fast that they could not print the stickers fast enough.

World of Warcraft is a very popular game, and it dominates the MMO genre. I do not really think that is a good Massively Multiplayer Online game (MMO). I recall having a conversation with David Maynard years before where I talked about Massively Singleplayer Online games. I think he can still verify that I used this term before Will Wright tried to make it popular. I believe WoW is a very good MSO, with some multiplayer elements.

We can quibble later about what is and what isn’t an MMO. I have been watching for innovation in the genre without any reward for that effort for many many years.

A few weeks ago I made a note to write an angry rant about a quest in the most recent zone added to WoW; A quest called “Think of the Critters”.

I am somewhat amused to see there is a change in the patch notes from last week:

Quests

• Resolved an issue with Gromits during the “Think of the Critters” quest in Korthia. Hungry Gromits now anxiously await your delicious treats!

You can find some interesting notes on this quest at the following link.

I think that they made a directionally positive change on this quest.

I still think it is one of the worst quests created in the game.

It has me asking myself some very profound questions.

How did this quest get through any kind of QA?

Who created this quest?

And most importantly to me:

Did the person who created this quest ever play this game… ever?

I can generally feel the invisible hand of designers in many of the games I play and online products I use.

There are a few quests in the most recent expansion that left me feeling a little frustrated, and a few systems that are so incredibly obtuse that it made me wonder what they were attempting to do.

This one quest has so many different stages to it and uses so many friction-inducing mechanics that it stands out as the worst of the crop. It has no peer for the amount of steps to take, the complexity of mechanics, and the amount of failure per attempt. It sounds like they addressed the failure rate (the last part of the quest) in an attempt to address player’s issues with it.

The good news is that these quests are randomly generated. That means you will not get this quest every day.

The Korthia daily quests also have random rewards. This has been frustrating because many of these quests drop uninteresting rewards. I have had days where I get 100% of them dropping Anima versus the new currency that matters. That is a silver lining here because if it has bad rewards it means it is one less quest for me to pick up on my pursuit of collecting currency items for the zone. The random rewards here are an anti-pattern that helps me cull pointless activity out of my day in a way that ought to make data analysts at Blizzard afraid that I might self-select into the churn bucket.

So why am I raging about this terrible quest?

I love online games and playing with other people.

WoW has a very strong community and has a lot of great content. You can set aside that the current story tends to focus on how you, as “The Champion”, are generally chosen to save the world (much like everyone else logged in around you). It is the clear king-of-the-hill of the MMO genre.

I have played many betas and early launches for MMOs over the years. It is why I took a job making games. Twenty years ago I sat down and crafted a half a dozen cool systems I would love to see built that would take us from MMO 1.0 into MMO 2.0.

Unfortunately everyone trying to compete in this space has to replicate MMO 1.0, or at least at a minimum try to make MMO 1.1 due to WoW.

So why do I still play WoW?

I still play WoW because I want to see how it ends.

This game is a technical marvel in many ways, and a design marvel in many others. People debate “the end of WoW” quite frequently. The people that have been in the industry the longest or have some of the best insights have generally said “the only thing that will kill WoW is WoW itself”.

This ridiculous critter quest is one of the positive proof points that we may be nearing the end of an era.

I had an interesting conversation based on last week’s article about the meta-worse. Someone asked me to review a very interesting technical demo and see if I could offer them some assistance bringing it to market.

I was quite impressed with the technology and feel like it has some great potential. It is extremely early augmented reality technology. The only thing I could reasonably do is add more conversations about technology to an already technology-rich environment.

One of my biggest problems is that I am generally two to seven years too early professionally. I start making products and platforms way before someone with better investor relationships writes “gib munnies” on a napkin and slides it to his friend over breakfast somewhere near Sand Hill Road. I also do not have the phone number of the person who can give me a Hasbro board game license. These are things I am okay with. I accept that I did not yet sell a company for a hunnert million dollars in order to raise another five million dollars. We can obsess over the biases at work there at a later date.

What I did do is outline where these fine technologists should look in order to get their product better positioned to be successful.

Let’s rewind twenty years or so.

When you had really cool technology prototypes there was a high likelihood you could add some goblins or some spaceships and start marketing your gimmicky gadget to the Hardcore Gamer. Does it have cool spells? Are there amazing laser blasts? Someone will throw a couple hundred dollars at that and talk about it during their tabletop gaming night over pizzas and Jolt cola.

In looking at their technology demo, and thinking about what I would do in their shoes, I thought about my first failed attempt to raise venture capital in the early-to-mid 2000s.

I had some reasonable success in the early 2000s making little mobile games for feature phones. The more games I worked on, and the more phones that were released, the more it was becoming clear to me that there was going to be a transition to a higher-end phone that would be a genre buster. Keep in mind this is 2004 to 2005 or so.

I reasoned that we will probably see this device in a few years and that there was an opportunity to create franchises that players would love if we can get someone to co-fund the development while we were generating revenues off of the existing feature phones. That is right. I was trying to “pivot”. I heard that is what all the cool kids are doing.

The idea was reasonably solid. The iPhone showed up pretty much around the exact time that I thought it would. Unfortunately, I raised zero million dollars because no one believes Al Gore invented the internet. I am okay with that comparison because he has really nice hair.

I told this woeful tale because there were some interesting shifts in the marketplace happening and I was not really processing them fully.

The consumer barriers for owning fancy gaming hardware were falling and the price for phones was on a downward trend. Admittedly it leaped up when Steve Jobs started peddling his touchable surfaces, but if you inflation-adjusted that a little and squinted it at it, somehow people felt that it was a cheap-enough price that everyone should now go out and buy one. The smartphone revolution (evolution? iVolution? whatever) had arrived.

There were a few other things happening at the same time that are noteworthy.

The first is the creation and subsequent demise of the casual games downloadable business. Companies like Popcap and Pogo created awesome little casual games (“Easy To Learn, Difficult To Master!”) that became exceptionally popular. These were pretty easy targets to migrate to cheap feature phones and eventually to smart phones. The casual games downloadable marketplace subsequently ate itself due to the tulip-bulb phenomenon. Everyone released a dozen hidden-object games and stopped making every other genre. It is ironic that they could not see the problem that was created by shipping too many hidden object games.

The second is that these games became very popular on mobile.

I was not the only person to realize that there was awesome stuff happening in the world of mobile. I was also not the only person to come up with a terrible plan to Make Money Fast.

Let’s talk about the first seven years of instant overnight sensation Rovio.

Rovio was a company founded by former Digital Chocolate alumni. The word is finnish for “bonfire”. I will let other historians provide context for why they needed to start a bonfire after leaving Digital Chocolate—it is not my story to tell.

They created the company to create seriously cool stories and deep experiences for the mobile audience. They published deeply interesting, super serious IPs like “Darkest Fear” and attempted to engage core gamers on mobile devices. This is pretty much the same playbook I was attempting to use, but I was several million dollars less successful in raising money for it.

I had chances to meet the leadership from Rovio over the ensuing years as they pivoted repeatedly through fifty-ish games and wandered around in the wilderness until they threw one last thing at the audiences.

Welcome to Angry Birds, and one of the first genre-defining experiences for the smartphone era.

So what does any of this have to do with anything?

Let’s go back to that technology demo I was talking about. Without getting into too many details, it showed off some elements you might expect to find in a really cool RTS game. The problem with their demo was that we are many years away from the last successful RTS game coming to stores near you. You could make the argument that Clash of Clans and its subsequent Nanostars Siege derived variant game are essentially distilled from the core RTS mechanics.

They actually share something in common with Angry Birds and also with recent mass media sensations like Among Us, and to a lesser extent, Fortnite.

If you are paying attention to the trends in gaming and also in gaming investment, you might find that there are some strong correlations that are worth thinking about.

The first is that you are seeing more and more funding available for games that are midcore-to-casual. In the extreme case, you could go the hyper-casual route and essentially just zero out your art budget (As A Hyper-Casual Game Developer I Will Buy All My Assets For Ten Dollars In The Unity Store), but that does not endear you to creating a sustainable defensible business because all of the hyper-casual publishers are ultra-cannibalizing their own market to death.

The advice I gave to these really swell technologists is to go back to the drawing board with their technology demo and to revamp it to take into account the consumer aesthetics that will attract mass-market attention and subsequently investment dollars.

If you look at the aesthetics of Angry Birds, Among Us, and to a lesser extent Fortnite and Clash Royale, you will notice they do not go deep into high poly counts or edgy, real-life, 3d graphics.

In order to succeed in the games marketplace today with new technology, you need to pair it with an aesthetic that delights mass markets, which will also be more likely to attract investor dollars.

I suggested they take a page from these games and reduce their characters to simple blobs and focus on finding a game designer who will craft an experience that accentuates the technology’s benefit. Angry Birds did this quite well with touch screens. Among Us did this quite well with group-voice-inspired play.

These games did not require high poly counts to become successes. In fact they were pretty much just shapeless blobs on the screen, which is why I advised that they should consider removing the edges from their prototype characters since they are already on the cutting edge with technology.

It sounds pretty clever doesn’t it? I sure thought so.

If you are in the business of creating mass-market content, I recommend you take a look at your art direction and desired audience.

You might find that you need to remove some edges too.

This has been a busy week for a plethora of reasons. A veritable plethora. What a great word. Plethora. While I have been busy with my plethoras, I have also seen a plethora of news recently about the metaverse.

And I want it to stop.

There are lots of people on the hype train for the metaverse and I am not one of them. Actually that is not true. I am probably one of the biggest fans of seeing a metaverse. I tried to pitch stuff to AAA executives a decade ago about the value of players buying and selling to each other and the general reaction was “You cannot sell used bread outside of a bakery.” I nodded and smiled but inside I was either weeping or screaming.

There are a lot of people in the process of building a metaverse, or raising money to build a metaverse, or talking in bigly terms about the value of a metaverse. I want to drill down into what the metaverse is, and if you agree maybe you will smash some social buttons for me and share my big thinkiness with your friends and family.

So what is the metaverse?

If you read popular science fiction, the metaverse is a connected set of worlds owned by different people where players can get junk in world A and carry it into world B. Kind of like going to the mall. You can buy a fancy hat in the fancy hat store, and still get to wear it into the fancy ice cream store. Most content today does not do that. You go to the fancy hat store and buy a fancy hat, you do not get to go to the fancy ice cream store and show off your fancy hat. You can just buy the fancy ice cream and talk about your fancy hat. You probably cannot show a picture you have uploaded of your fancy hat, because most businesses understand TOP  in user generated content. Warning: Please do not look that up on your work machine.

My thesis is that the metaverse generally evolves in a way for virtual world creators to make and sell stuff to people directly. This is important because everyone who wants to build the metaverse is touting this as a part of the sales pitch. You Will Make Money Fast.

The problem here is that most companies chasing this dream today are not actually virtual world creators. The vast majority of them are Spotify.

Do not get me wrong, I use Spotify. Its ads are less invasive than YouTube on The Googles. I hope they offer me six months free sometime to agree to sign up. I do not feel like their “one month free” or “three months free” user incentives are enough—I am willing to watch GEICO ads until they are that desperate for my business.

So metaverse companies are raising venture capital. That means they are doing venture-scale planning which requires mass-market success and billions upon billions of dollars. A founder has got to get paid, right? We do not have enough Zuckerbergs out there for the average venture capitalist’s liking. Certainly not in their existing portfolios, which is why they keep writing checks.

A lot of content creators believe that creating the metaverse is a means to get themselves paid. A lot of people building the metaverse right now are probably saying that and talking about the democratization of content. In truth, they need you to believe that in order to get their application to join the 0.1%. They will use your love of Neal Stephenson’s Snowtrash to beat this point home. Yes, I am being mean to an okay book. Yes, I am also linking it with an affiliate code.

The problem with people raising money to build a metaverse is that they are all going to wind up needing stuff to sell and most of their money is earmarked for other things. There will be some companies that make good-enough tools, and good-enough plumbing, but it is going to cost a lot of money. Some of them will make some neat stuff. Some of them will wind up being a second second life.

My belief is that the best metaverse we could possibly get will be one that comes from a bunch of creators who build connectivity and contracts between their own worlds, one at a time. There are great connectivity tools out there. There is sufficient billing and data storage infrastructure.

Heck, there are even common enough 3d engines that people are using to support sharing object formats between them.

The bleak history of platform-as-something-something-future has not led us to a brighter and rosier future for content creators. Generally it means that the old regime of gatekeepers has a new cohort of gatekeepers to add to the pile of fee collectors between Joe Consumer and Jenny Creator.

Almost everything being announced about the metaverse today is being said by people who are just sticking out their hand and bundling services together because they are friendlier with the average venture capitalist than most content creators.

And this is why I think we are not going to get the metaverse. We will get the meta-worse.

The only reason I am not despairing is that I spent a bunch of money in Fortnite.

Fortnite has been slowly building systems and technology season over season. They added cars. They added airplanes. They added boats. I have marvelled at seeing them building an MMO, isolated system by isolated system, on customer’s dimes without anyone saying anything about it.

They have great brand partners and are helping people make money through their game store and their platform.

Heck, the newest person in line is even going so far as to say that if he is going to take his place with his hand out for a share of money, he is at least going to take out one of the incumbents who wants way more money!

I wear my Free Fortnite hat every day at work. It is among my prized possessions. I think it is awesome that they gave out schwag for the lawsuit of the decade. Tim Sweeny is Person of the Year for me, every year at this point, while he is doing things that massively increase the potential value of being a creator. I think that helping reduce friction for content creators is noble. Of course, I also think that billionaires paying to go to space is noble, so you can probably discount my sense of what is cool by your own filters.

I hope we get a metaverse someday. I am skeptical the current crop of companies chasing this are going to be successful. I believe that the metaverse will emerge from the necessity of exerting margin pressure by IP holders, not by the need to get to an IPO to increase the ROI for investors into venture funds based on the flavor of the month of high tech buzzwords.

Thank you for reading along! I hope my opinion on the future of the metaverse is as interesting as it is entertaining. How often do you see a once and future founder shitting on investment strategies for stuff he wants to get paid to build? If I gave you the lols with my salt bae vibe, you should totes adorbs it on your socials. Thanks. Hashtag gratitude.

Last week I took a hiatus and put up a “Something something post” that was a link to a friend’s article about looking for a new opportunity in “Not Oregon”. It was ironic because I gave that friend a few reminders about the importance of their writing habit and then used them as cover for not having made enough time. The blood won’t wash off my Lady Macbeth hands.

Habit forming is hard. I started writing with a purpose. Part of the reason I was not able to post the past few weeks was the arrival of a newborn to my family. Another part of the reason I was not able to post yesterday was that I was busy working on the super-secret-sorry-to-vaguebook personal project. More on that soon.

I am investing some belated time to write a few words on habit forming. I saw a great book sprinkled around the offices of an html5 games company I went to visit. I am going to link it here and you should go buy it because it is a great book. I am also adding an affiliate link because I am curious to see if that works. If I descend into urging you to smash the subscribe button, this is where it all began.

Charles Duhigg’s The Power Of Habit

This is an extraordinary book and one of a few I am going to talk about as “transformative” in my career. I am glad I spotted it. I am glad I purchased it.

I have intentionally created a few habits since reading this book.

I think that if you can understand how to create your own habits, and you are in software development, you will find there is a correlation between figuring out how to apply this book to your livelihood and how big of a check you are getting for those services year over year. I do not yet have a fancy lambo to drive around to say I am an undisputed master of collecting and subsequently dispensing dead presidents, but I do okay.

I am going to get back to meatier subjects related to engineering management, product development, and product launches soon.

I apologize I have not had much to offer in the past dozens of days. I will be back to you soon with much to talk about.

Have a great work week and I appreciate all of you for shamelessly clicking on my experimental affiliate link above. I will let you know if it actually works.

If I don’t you can all complain about how cool I was before I got famous.

I spend a lot of time trying to help people build teams. That involves lots and lots of hiring.

Most people are solving the wrong problem when they are trying to hire someone. Most people are trying to solve a problem they realized they had yesterday, as opposed to hiring someone who will prevent them from having similar problems tomorrow.

The best way to fix this is to seek “best athlete” candidates instead of “best fit” ones.

Admittedly this is pretty “early team” focused. A lot of people looking for deep domain experience in a particular space may have a good reason to do so. You want to keep your Google shareholders happy if you are Google, and hire a VP of Very Good Search to run your core Very Good Search business. Or if you are in the business of Repairing Critical Body Parts, you will want to find a doctor who is very good at Repairing Critical Body Parts.

The truth is that this is really only true for a fraction of the roles out there. Most companies should be focusing on someone who can learn their surroundings quickly, start making changes and measuring results.

To do that, you really have to focus on one thing: Is the person in front of me sufficiently talented to be successful?

Instead, most companies try to hire people who are the closest fit to what they have in a checklist. A great many people fixate on the shape of the qualifications and it creates a whole lot of problems.

For example, “I need a software developer with 5-7 years of experience in McGuffinSpeke” sometimes is not really what you are looking for, especially if McGuffinSpeke has only been out for 3 years as a language (and yes, this happens a lot).

Over many years of hiring, I have adapted my personal practices towards finding talented people—and I have had some pretty amazing results. I have written it into my own personal playbook and I apply it very effectively into organizations where I work.

Here are some things that I have learned.

1) Stop trying to find the perfect candidate

You should be able to better define the “must have” and “would be nice” for what you need from  your future employees. Quite a bit of the time, people can come in and get comfortable with new tools and new technologies, but it is important to understand if they are capable of doing so. So you should…

2) Establish how fast a candidate can learn

This is a big chunk of what I look for. Oddly, the person who has had several jobs that are 18 months to 3 years in duration may look like a red flag and a “skipping stone” for some companies, but that candidate is a fast learner who makes quick decisions. That is incredibly valuable if you can apply it correctly. Especially if you can…

3) Figure out how to attract more candidates to you

This is the biggest and most important of these. You actually do not really find talent. You enable talent to find you. I always tell people that recruiting is more like fishing than grocery shopping. Talented people do not simply throw themselves at checklists for skills that hiring managers have placed on display. When they do, many of them are getting eliminated in the process because they do not sufficiently line up against the checklist for the role. Accordingly, you should…

4) Identify and reduce “false negatives” in your hiring process

This is most of what I do for people who need help with team building. There are so many different false negatives in the hiring cycle that it takes weeks to months to debug that process for many people. False negatives include excessive resume screening, poorly structured interviews, and even interviewers who drive away candidates. Every time you can remove a potential false negative trap, you increase the likelihood of filling your role faster.

So where do we go from here?

For starters, if you have had 10 open hires for six months or longer, you are probably doing something wrong.

You are looking too hard for a candidate that doesn’t exist, you probably have a lot of false negative filters in your hiring process, and you are probably not marketing your roles to the right people. 

Often it is all three.

If you have a budget for 10 new hires, you are probably sitting on a very good market opportunity. You are letting it slip between your fingers every day that you are not taking action. 

You should be willing to make some changes, as I have in the past, to hire people more effectively, more efficiently, and with better results.

I see a lot of discussions about the interviewing process. It is a process filled with failure.

• The failure of white board coding tests (“You and I self-identify as compatible because we both had the same clever solution to this crafty puzzle”).
• The failure to ask the right questions in the interview.
• The failure to get stacks of qualified candidates in front of hiring managers to be effectively screened instead of put through a checklist filtering machine for buzzwords.
• The failure to get enough resumes into the pipeline to have candidates come onsite for interviews.

You should identify where your failures in your candidate pipeline are and come up with some ways to fix them.

Are you struggling with this right now?

It never hurts to get a second opinion on your hiring process.

Feel free to reach out if you need some help!

I hope that this comes as a surprise to none of you but building SaaS (Software as a Service) is complicated. Over the years I have worked on different ways to help people understand this with varying amounts of success. One of the biggest problems I keep running into is the need to plan for maintenance. It is easy to want to believe that you can build a service, stand it up, and move on to the next thing. Unfortunately, it is hard to do that reliably.

Part of the problem in creating SaaS is you are often building something new. I have said before that it is a mistake to believe building an API is like making a car on an assembly line. These things are not widgets. The process is generally more like building a widget factory than actually building a widget. I think that this disconnect drives the majority of problems that businesses run into once they are accidentally successful. There is a cascading failure that comes from accidental success because the people responsible believe it is a repeatable success.

The amount that could be said on this topic could fill libraries. I am trying to find the right nuance of warning and inspiration to impart to someone who is about to enter into this kind of machinery. It absolutely has to be both.

Let’s start with the warnings.

One of the mantras of software development is “build it once, sell it many times”. I am pretty sure I have seen that in book, video, and powerpoint format enough times that I believe it. In the world of SaaS the problem is that you do not just build it once. You need to iterate on it through the release and sales cycle. The vast majority of software systems reveal their True Form after you have stood them up and sprayed audiences on them. Many times, what you built is “six beers equal” to what you wanted to build. You often need to make changes based on usage patterns and learnings from your customers. Sometimes this is change in the UI, sometimes this is change in the API, and sometimes this is change in the administration tools. I have seen all flavors of this.

The problem is that if you are building and deploying SaaS features, you are generally on a feature treadmill, and the resources that worked on the feature that needs modification are now unavailable because they are busy working on “Shiny New” other work. It is always most ideal to get the original developers onto making modifications like this. It is almost always nigh impossible. No one wants to leave precious developer resources idle on the “off-chance” that there is work discovered based on what happens to it once it goes live. I put “off-chance” in quotes because while that is the argument against some kind of “hardening sprints” from well intentioned product managers, it is actually the majority of the time that something is stood up on the internet.

It gets even worse. There is generally such drama and frustration around resourcing the updated tasks to improve a live system that it creates some level of trauma on the part of the development teams involved. Shipping software turns from a moment of joy into a moment of reluctance and dread.

Now let’s finish with the inspiration.

The good news with accidentally successful software is that it is successful. I am seeing more and more companies come to accept this as a good thing and to try to figure out how to make accidental successes into repeatable successes.

This is pretty important. Good product leadership will understand the importance of change management from top to bottom, including how an organization itself can change its change management.

I am seeing more and more people thinking and talking about this, and I am grateful that this describes many of the people I am working with.

If you find that you are not in a similarly awesome situation, you should feel free to reach out. I would love to see if I can help you influence your organization to be more successful or, more likely, to help you find a much more forward thinking bunch of people to work with.

Current world events have thrust rapid radical change on the way we work and you should be ready to optimize for long-term career maximums.

We are going to see some interesting stories about amazing successes in thinking about work—mostly for recruiting purposes.

This may or may not be one of them.

I said I was going to write about previously this because I think it is important. I also think that this is one of those things you really need to learn how to do well and how to talk about it properly. I am very sure that one time, about five years ago, I cost myself a chance at a director job when I was in a room with three potential direct reports talking about how to teach people to fire other people. I may have sounded a little too enthusiastic to people who I may have been about to inherit as a team. Unfortunately, that’s usually how I talk about most things.

To start with, let’s talk about what this is not. This is not a substitute for the checklists your HR manager gives you. This is not a primer on labor law in your state of residence or employment. Finally, this is not something that is trivial or should be done lightly.

When I am interviewing a manager, or giving someone a battlefield promotion, I generally ask the question “Have you ever had to fire anyone before?” It is not surprising that not many people have, and for the people that have, most of them remember the first person they fired. Usually because it is something that happened swiftly and brutally, and often it is a moment that people feel they could have handled better. Some of them have shared horrible stories about it. Sometimes it is at a small enough company that there are improper HR practices in place and lawyers get involved.

If they have not had to fire anyone, then I want to make sure they understand how important it is and why it is important to do it right. I do point out explicitly that they will have a high likelihood of having to do this in their chosen profession, and it is worth getting to the point that it can be done compassionately, cleanly, and professionally. I have had to fire good people before and I have had to fire people who are great personal friends. I have been blessed that they still remain that way and sometimes I have brought them successfully into new roles elsewhere. I have given great professional references for people I have had to fire and also been happy to see when they have career successes. It is worth talking about that with folks and make sure they realize it is not personal.

Now that the stage has been set, hopefully you have a few years between this conversation and the next one when there is a person who is not meeting expectations.

It is a good idea to let your managers do most of the hands-on work themselves but at the same time you should offer to be present or offer to help as much as they want you to. From the meeting where they sit down and explain where the issues are, to the written statement of what needs to improve and the window that they have to make that improvement, this is something that a manager needs to do. Maybe they want you in the room to listen, or maybe they want you to ghost-write the written warning. Be available but not overbearing. This is a human conflict situation which some people do not like, and it is nice to have support.

Do not push a first-time manager to fire someone. You should explain to them why a role adjustment may be good in some cases and may not be good in other cases. They should realize that they have to fire the individual in question and be okay with it. If they disagree, it is worth resolving that between the two of you. The last thing you want to do is just remember that this needs to happen while you are running between meetings and you fire off an email saying “you need to fire that person ASAP”. That is a pretty poor way to push something so delicate to completion.

Now that there is consensus, you should give them some coaching on how to go through “the script”, when to hand it off to HR (if you have HR), and when to bring the meeting to a close. I have sat in on some of the final termination meetings with people (at the request of the manager) and it is better to say as little as possible, but I would advise adding a hand gesture or phrase to indicate that it is time to wrap up the meeting. I have observed that while you want to be compassionate for the employee in question, it is important that this does not turn into a negotiation. If it has gotten to the point where this meeting needs to happen, it should be pretty final, generally they have had warnings and time (up to a month) to make any adjustments needed, or have done something so egregious that it necessitates a rapid removal from the building.

I also advise people not to do this on a friday. I am now at the point where I prefer not to give people strong negative feedback on fridays. It sucks to go into the weekend with a heavy negative emotional load from your job. If there is no need for urgency (material danger, or risk of something happening on live operations), it is always better if you can move this conversation from a Friday to a Monday. You do not know the battles people are fighting, and I have started to land on the side of compassion and decency where possible.

There is probably a lot more to say here but we would be moving into the realm of “work with your HR partners”. This is their specialty and you should work with them on the particulars.

That being said, when you are giving a battlefield promotion to that hard-working, bright-eyed, ambitious, first-time manager, please sit them down and explain that this is among their responsibilities. Tell them some of the lessons you have learned from doing this during your career. Give them some guidance on how to do it cleanly, professionally and, most importantly, with some compassion.

If you have any tips on how to help people come to grips with this most delicate part of management, please share them!

At some point or another you are going to hit a professional wall. Either a wall of ability or a wall of compensation.

Maybe you developed an itch for pricey scotch or want to golf more often. Maybe you want to get a yacht, or have kids, or become a homeowner.

Maybe you are sitting at work with big ideas and you look down at your fingers and wish “gosh if only I had ten times as many of these!” as you do your job. Maybe someone in your firm got a pay raise, a fancier desk, and a new title of “Senior Director of Not Working Here Anymore”.

Maybe none of this happened but you just want to know what it is like to manage people.

This is a tough subject because when I get asked questions, the odd time I go and talk to people about career choices, people ask me “Do you prefer to manage or do you prefer to get your hands dirty?” and honestly, I fail this question so hard. I even start off my response to people by saying “This is a great question, and I fail at it so hard”.

I don’t have a preference between rank and file individual contributor work and managing. That causes eyebrows to be raised. Sometimes people nod quietly. Sometimes they are mentally deconstructing what kind of monster I am. Sometimes they are trying to figure out how to get me out of the building as fast as possible because some latent insecurity told them that is my way of saying “I AM COMING FOR YOUR JOB NEXT.”

I don’t know. This isn’t about me. Maybe it is, in some strange way. But I want to somehow make this about you.

At some point in your career, whether by magic eight ball or by need to get paid or by random circumstance, you are going to get an opportunity to manage people.

Regardless of whether you want to or not I think you should try a management role. You should do it once, and you should do one very important thing that most people do not do. You should make sure there is an escape plan. The worst thing that can happen to a company is you get promoted into a managerial role and then you leave because you did not like it.

When adjusting their compensation to the new role, I tend to have it built in as something they get to keep, and I make sure that we set a clear expectation to everyone that this is a new role and may not be permanent.

You want to make sure that everyone is supportive and that the person trying out this new role understands they can go back if it does not work out.

That is nearly impossible to accomplish by the way but it is totally worth it if you can. You want to have people understand that this is a risk,that there are rewards for taking risks, and that there is mutual trust here.

I have put people into management roles and had them ask to sunset their managerial responsibilities.

I have inherited people in management roles who needed to return to individual contributor work and had to slowly work with them to make the necessary adjustments to get there.

Regretfully, sometimes, I have done so without being so gentle.

Regardless, there is a lot to learn in becoming a manager and you should invest some time in what you need to know and what you need to do.

You need to understand that one of your primary roles is to make sure other people get their work done. You have to avoid being the heroic firefighter manager who jumps in at the eleventh hour because you know you can do it. Nothing will destroy your team and your individual contributors faster than being a better performer. Even if it is true, you are showing that you are not suitable for being a manager if you cannot enable people to do their jobs better.

Another thing you need to understand is how to communicate with people. I have done a number of things where they went super badly because I framed them poorly. Thankfully it is not a large number. Positive communication is vital to keeping people moving forward and being proactive. If you don’t know what a shit sandwich is, now is a good time to learn. Google has your back.

Finally you need to be able to understand that you have to take the beating for other people’s failures and reward them for their successes.

I have seen too many managers whom I refer to as cannibals. They take credit for their team’s work. They devour their teams. It is horrible to be in that situation soI look for managers who are cannibals and try to stay away from them as much as possible.

A good way to test yourself for management potential is to get involved as a youth sports coach. Soccer, basketball, baseball, softball, etc.. There are lots of great sports out there. You will learn more about managing people from a group of 10-year-olds than your average online MBA program and you probably get a free gift card to Starbucks at the end of the season if your team parents don’t completely hate you by the end of the season (hint: You should try to win *ONE* game).

I am pretty far into this article and I have not said half of the stuff I want to yet. Not even a third, actually. I am not going to be able to tell you everything you need to know or everything you need to do in your first-time management job in the space of one online article.

I sure would like to though. I did assemble a playbook of things I do for a first-time manager and I will do my best to share these in future articles and give them each a thorough treatment. From communication, to trusting your team, to how to make team adjustments with compassion.

And when I say adjustments I mean firing people. That is probably what I will talk about next actually. I find it odd that most people do not get some sort of formal training on how to fire people. It is a hard thing to do and it takes work and effort to do it with grace and class. More on that later.

I would love to hear some of your stories about things you did as a first time manager, good or bad!

One of the first things I realized I needed to learn in my career was how to deal with meetings. How to avoid the unimportant ones, how to survive the mandatory ones, and how to not blow up the important ones. Let’s face it, meetings are both really valuable and really horrible. I have had times when I have been sitting in meetings waiting to make a valuable contribution to the enrichment of everyone, and times when I have been furiously doodling in the corner hoping that the fire alarm goes off. Probably the worst meetings I have ever been at have been on projects that have multiple businesses involved and I am aware that there is at least one person at that meeting whose purpose is to destroy the meeting, or even the project, because they have some money or equity sitting in a vendor company that they would love to bring in to replace the company you work for. Let me tell you, spending forty-five to sixty minutes staring at that person is not a great use of time, mentally or emotionally, but I have been there. Sadly, you may be there someday too.

So what the hell are meetings all about? Let’s see if we can break it down without filling a buzzword bingo card.

A meeting is a group of two or more people to either distribute information to increase shared understanding or to establish a plan of action. I think there are subtle nuances in there (achieving consensus on an action plan, daily metrics review, etc) but fundamentally you are attending a meeting to convey your knowledge to one or more other people, create a set of actions by a group of two or more people, or to learn something.

I use this filter for myself frequently. I really don’t like attending meetings because not enough people understand the point of the meeting they are in or don’t understand meetings in general.

So how do you know what you are supposed to do in a meeting? No one I know has a degree in meeting-ology. I don’t even think there was a 101 class in my university that talked about professional meetings. There are almost zero pages in the employee handbook for the first time employee on what to do in a meeting. And everyone has that moment when someone comes into their office/cubicle/shared-work-table-quadrant and says “Hey we are having a meeting and you should come with us” for the very first time.

Truthfully, at that moment you should squeeze your eyes shut, cover your ears, and yell “NOOOOOOOOOOO!” as loud as you can. It is good practice for the road ahead. You probably should not go to this meeting, but you will, and it will help to reinforce one of the first bad habits of professionals—just attending meetings for the sake of attending them. The sooner you cure yourself of this affliction the better off you will be.

When you are invited to a meeting you should try to understand a few things:

1. What is this meeting about?
2. Who is at this meeting?
3. Why am I at this meeting?
4. What is the intended takeaway from the meeting?

If you do not have good answers to these, you should decline the invitation. This serves two purposes: First, it will protect your sanity. Trust me on this. It will. Second, if someone thinks you should be at this meeting, then they will invite you again and then the onus is on them to come up with the answers above.

These are loose guiding principles and there should be some caveats. I hope I don’t get an angry email someday from someone saying “I have a deadline and I missed going to an all-hands meeting where everyone got a leather jacket as some sort of perk for a milestone because YOU said I should avoid all meetings!”

First of all, sorry about the jacket in advance. If that was what you took away from this article, you are doing it wrong. That is okay—many people are. All-hands meetings and staff meetings are very important, and maybe not directly for your day to day tasks, but they serve the organization in disseminating information and increasing employee engagement. Sorry for the buzzwords. Those random social gatherings and quarterly status meetings from the CEO serve a purpose and it may not be readily apparent to you early in your career. If the organization in question uses these tools effectively, they are awesome. They should be used deliberately and judiciously in order to benefit the organization and its people.

As an individual contributor early in my career I was very oblivious to meetings and their purpose. I would sit in a room irritated that I am not coding. I honestly completely missed the point. I transitioned into a role in a sales organization and it wasn’t until I was told by my boss at the time “Hey you need to stop looking so bored in our meetings” that I really began to think about it. We would be out meeting pre-sales companies and I was gathering data on what we should be doing to close the deal. Apparently I looked horribly disinterested and if the prospect meeting we were at was someone who had some degree of insecurity, then the presence of the disdainful techie was counterproductive to getting their business. I think that is the first time I realized that I had to start modifying my behavior in meetings.

Okay so what do we get out of all of this? Meetings are important. Meetings are also horribly broken. No one teaches you how to behave in a meeting and it is hard to figure out what meetings you should be going to. I got involved in student government in university and also participated in youth athletics as a parent coach. Both of these are valuable tools if you can take advantage of them in learning how to behave in a group and what types of structures are good (or bad) for a group of people.

Part of the reason I am writing these articles is to atone for professional sins of the past but also to hopefully help people develop tools for their own future.

I think that being able to participate effectively in a meeting is important. Unfortunately nobody really teaches it as a valuable skill.

I would love to hear your thoughts on the best things and the worst things about meetings!

Joining a new organization as a leader is hard. I have done this repeatedly throughout my career and I take great care in getting settled in and making sure I fully understand things before starting to make changes. One of the reasons I write these articles is so people can get a chance to see things from a different perspective to help them grow professionally. Today I want to talk from a different perspective about joining an organization as a leader. I want to talk about what to do when you have to hire your own boss.

I know that sounds a bit strange at first, but it is not. It is pretty common that teams need to develop new leadership and sometimes the existing people in the team do not have the skillset, the experience, or the mindset to fill a leadership role internally.

Some companies try to give battlefield promotions to fill the gaps which tends to work out in the long term but generally has a pretty bumpy short term period where a new leader makes some unfortunate mistakes. I know this because I have gone through a few battlefield promotions and have made some of those mistakes.

For a variety of reasons, other companies are not comfortable with that approach and choose to look outside to recruit new managers, directors, and executives. Today we are going to talk about what that means if this is happening at your company, and the manager, director, or executive in question is going to be directly above you.

The first time this happened to me was very unpleasant. I found out in a company meeting that the person I was interviewing to be my peer was going to be my manager. I can assure you this is the worst possible way to discover you have a new boss. I was gone within a year, and if this happens to you, I would wager you would find your trust in your employer so sufficiently violated that you would likely want to leave too.

Companies today are hopefully much more transparent than twenty years ago. It stands to reason that if you are hiring a new manager into your organization, you are going to have some of the people who will be reporting to that person participate in the hiring process as interviewers. It is generally a sign of some sort of organizational problem if that is not true. It might be the case that you are being interviewed to solve some of those problems.

For the sake of the rest of this conversation, let’s assume you are participating in the hiring process. So what should you be thinking about?

Why am I getting a new boss from outside the company?

This is a perfectly valid question. If it is your goal to move into engineering management, it is easy to get upset or frustrated to hear you are hiring a new manager from outside the company. You do deserve an explanation about what the reasoning is, and what gaps you may possess that prevented you from being considered for the role.

In times that I have been interviewed by potential direct reports, I have felt their ire at being passed over for an outsider even in the interview process. I totally understand it and accept it.  At that point the challenge for me is to help someone accept that this could be a good thing and could present a learning opportunity to make a transition into a new career smoother and also more efficient.

It is worth noting that if this decision has already been made, you are likely not going to be in a position to reverse it. I have seen some people try to fight by vetoing every candidate that comes in.

That is a bad idea. What will eventually happen is that it will be noticed, and you run the risk of being removed from the interview process.

I would add that if you are getting a new boss and you are removing yourself from the process, either you will wind up with a manager with whom you have had no say in selecting, or you might find yourself in the crosshairs as a problem to be solved by a new manager when it is revealed that you objected so strongly to all of the candidates. Whether or not that is fair, you might find yourself in the spotlight for a while from your new manager while they try to figure out why you objected so strongly and how much time they want to spend in helping you through that process.

What should I be looking for in a new boss?

Now that we have established that just saying “no” over and over is likely a bad idea, you should try to figure out what it is you want from a new boss. There are going to be some easy and obvious questions you can ask which will likely result in basic platitudes and reassurances. When hiring anyone, I always recommend asking best case scenario / worst case scenario questions from candidates. My goal is to learn default behaviors and what I can reasonably expect.

Here are some good questions you can ask a potential future boss:

• Describe how you helped a previous employee get a promotion.
• How long did the best performing engineer work for you?
• Tell me about the best employee you ever had and where are they now?
• What do you do when an employee is struggling in their current role?
• How do you define success as a (manager or director or vice president)?
• What is your greatest leadership accomplishment?

If you can get them to talk about past successes with their teams, or past failures on their teams, it is a good way to learn about how you might be working together. It is important to learn about positives and negatives here. I remember having an uncomfortable conversation with a senior engineer when interviewing for a vice president of engineering role. They had asked me the question “how do I decide when I have to fire someone.” I described my thought process about trying to help people find their best role and how many opportunities make sense for someone who is struggling before putting them on formal notice that there is an issue there. I could tell at the end of that explanation that they were horrified by my answer. If asked, I think I would still answer the question in the same way because it is a serious responsibility to make team adjustments and you should have a plan to do your best for both the individual and the company to try to make things work.

I am pretty certain that individual vetoed my candidacy for a number of reasons, including multiple days of “this person looked at you on LinkedIn” which ended when I got the “we decided on a different direction” email. I am pretty sure each of us felt like we dodged a bullet of some kind.

Why is this person interested in this job?

This is always a tricky one to unpack. People have the strangest motivations for wanting a job. I always like to understand what they are. You should always ask your potential boss why he wants that job. I also recommend asking what they plan to be doing in five years time.

I would be here for hours if I was to list every motivation that people have for wanting a new job or wanting a particular job. Suffice it to say you should ask yourself if you like their answer.

I have taken a good number of jobs via referral because I am lucky to have many smart friends that I have greatly enjoyed working with over many years of my career. I am always happy to help them solve their problems.

If you can establish someone’s career plans and trajectory, that can help you determine whether or not you could have a great working relationship with them. “I need time-in-role as a Director of Engineering” suggests they are focused on getting promoted which has its good and bad parts. “I need experience leading larger teams so I can run a company division some day” is a different way to say the same thing, but it is a better answer. The latter candidate is fixated on team growth, and the prior candidate might be willing to do more upwards management to get a promotion.

How can I help the candidate that I like get hired?

After speaking to a few candidates, you might find yourself in the position of liking what you hear from one candidate over another. Please make that known to the decision makers who are driving the recruiting process! They may ask why, and your feedback might help steer them towards supporting that, especially if multiple people are saying the same thing.

If you find you have a genuine connection with a potential boss during an interview, you should definitely try to paint a clear picture of what life is like at your company, and that you are interested in supporting their candidacy.

I would also recommend reaching out to them to establish a more direct connection after the fact. After all, if your company does not hire this person, some other company probably will. It might be the case that there will be a potential future overlap.

It might even be shortly after they hire someone you don’t like as your boss. In which case it might be worth reaching out to them to see if they are hiring, considering you are probably about to start having a less pleasant time at work.

What can I expect from a new boss?

Now that we have explored a framework for hiring a boss, and all of that is finished, I should let you know that for the first while, you shouldn’t expect much from a new boss. It takes some time to get settled into a leadership role and to understand what is important and what is not important. Every organization has its own wrinkles and curiosities.

While I generally set up a weekly 1:1 with all members of a new team, it would be a good idea to ask your new boss if there is anything you can do to help them. Offer them a weekly AMA to help them get settled in and learn “the little things”. Figure out a list of people they should be getting to know and ask if they want you to facilitate some introductions.

The ultimate thing I do as someone’s boss is to figure out the best way to make them more successful. I have found that the sooner I have gotten successful in a leadership role with the help of my team, the sooner I can get down to the business of helping them become more successful.

Thank you again for reading. Something something social. See you again next week!