Drafts, but finished the-right-language.

2024-01-principles.md

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+## Learn from interviewing.
+
+I have had some fantastic interviews lately. 
+[Valimail application]
+
+>What are the 3 most important qualities in an engineering manager?
+
+Humility: None of us knows everything. We have different life experiences, different professional viewpoints. This is why we work in teams: we amplify each other's strengths, and shore up our more tenuous parts.
+
+Curiosity: Take that humility and go ask questions to learn things. Learn how to ask questions in ways that establish and sustain trusting relationships.
+
+Inclusivity: Be curious: meet people where they are, personally, professionally, culturally. Ask open questions. Understand the systemic biases people experience, be respectful of them, and understand how you can improve your own understanding and engagement. (Also, it’s not their job to educate you. Go do the reading.)
+
+>Describe a time when you advocated for a change that was important to your team. What was it? Why was it so important, and how did you approach it? Was it successful- why or why not?
+
+At one small company, our hiring process had interviewers recording their notes in Greenhouse, but then nobody heard anything until the hiring manager made a decision. This skipped a step that I’ve found to be absolutely crucial, which is to get the interviewers together with the recruiter and hiring manager to go through each interviewer’s feedback.
+
+This is not the full list of things you get out of that step, but some:
+
+- Interviewers can hear how they all conducted the interview, and there’s a lot of teaching and learning to be done.
+- You get verbal details that interviewers didn’t include in the writeup.
+- Patterns can emerge from hearing all the feedback in context of all the other feedback: interviewers often discount yellow flags as being an anomaly of their own mood or what have you, but then someone says "lack of humility" and others chime in with "oh, I noticed that too" and suddenly you’ve gone from Hire to a very very important No-Hire.
+
+I explained all this to the VP, who eventually let me try it, and it did everything I told them it would, so it stuck. =)

2024-01-the-new-manager.md

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++1 to always having them. set the time aside for them and make sure they know it. most of my 1-1s are 10-15 minutes, but boy howdy sometimes it takes the 30 minutes or more.
+
+for new reports, be aware that they don't know what kind of manager you are, and maybe they don't even know you as a person at all, so I allow time for getting to know each other as two humans together, and as trust builds, honor and acknowledge the level of trust that actually exists, and if I need to presume upon it, I'll tell them. (edited) 
+
+I manage via trust relationships, because otherwise everything gets really really hard: you want to do a re-org, or make a process change, or pivot the team to something new for whatever reason, if they don't trust you to do your damnedest to take care of them individually and as a team, it will be a trainwreck.
+
+I keep a google doc with 1-1 notes, that also keeps their personal details up at the top: spouse, kids & their ages, pets. there's no way I'd remember it otherwise, and it sends a huge signal that I'm interested in them as a person (which I am, because that's what they are).
+
+okay clearly I should write a doc

2024-02-use-the-right-language.md

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+You can only communicate with people in a language they understand.
+
+In the 80s and 90s, Massachusetts was still trying to establish racial integration in schools—tricky, of course, because as always, centuries of redlining and segregation wove those things into the very fabric of the city. Neighborhoods were divided mostly by race, cross-cut with socioeconomic biases that sometimes deviated from racial divisions. This was 30 years after *Brown v. Board of Education*, and it was and is a tough nut to crack.
+
+Our city went down a common path:
+
+1. Group students into different classes, by level of academic advancement ("tracking").
+2. Decide that in addition to racial integration, some of the problem is that schools in marginalized neighborhoods don't have advanced classes.
+3. Turn them into "magnet schools" by placing the Talented & Gifted (TAG) programs there.
+4. The TAG kids are almost all white, and the marginalized neighborhoods are almost all non-white, so you bus the TAG kids to the magnet school, and Bob's your uncle: racial integration!
+
+Wow, spelling it out makes it look even worse.
+
+At any rate, I was a nerdy, troubled, abrasive, undiagnosed-ADHD kid who was forbidden from getting into fights, even for self-defense. (I was not protected in any other way, so this was the worst time of a life that has had some pretty bad times. If you don't protect your kid, and don't allow them to protect themselves, you might as well just tell them "You're not worth protecting" out loud.) My father, fond of pairing "violence is never the answer" with violence, scared me more than bullies.
+
+This all sets the scene for my 7th-8th grade experience, at a decaying school that was 74% Hispanic (overwhelmingly Puerto Rican), 12% Black, and 11% white. I don't recall there being much mobility into the advanced classes, so the populations mostly mixed for things like gym, life skills (or whatever it was called: I had Cooking, Sewing, and two iterations of Drafting).
+
+The changing areas for gym were in the basement—basically catacombs with showers and benches. There was a lot of waiting around for a teacher to come down and tell us we could leave.
+
+One of my tormentors was George Cruz. On one fateful day, we were waiting in the gym catacombs, and he was hucking a little plastic figurine at me. It hurt! And then he would come over to demand it back. Refusing would provoke a fight, so I just did the World's Most Resentful Gandhi act and gave it back to him. Lather, rinse, repeat. 
+
+Until I was done. He came over to get the figurine back.
+
+> "Give it."
+> "No. You're just going to throw it at me again."
+
+He reached into my personal space to grab it.
+
+I stood up quickly and punched him very hard in the stomach. When he doubled over, I pounded his spine twice. He stepped back and caught his breath.
+
+I said "Here" and gave him the figurine back. For the rest of our time together, we were, if not BFFs, on quite peaceable and even friendly terms.
+
+I don't think George was a "bad kid," whatever that means. I don't know why he was bullying classmates, whether it was boredom, sublimated experience from elsewhere at school, transmitting onward the abuse he got from others, or what. What I *do* know with 100% certainty is this:
+
+1. Talking to him at best did nothing, and seemed to make things worse.
+2. The moment I punched him, he started to see me as a peer.
+
+![Hulk punches Thor in a friendly way](hulk-and-thor-punchx.gif "Hulk punches Thor in a friendly way")
+
+For the two of us, right then, violence was the answer because *that was the language he could hear*. He couldn't, or wouldn't, be flexible enough to listen to other approaches. I had to express my boundaries physically.
+
+I learned a lot of things from that hellish two years—sometimes in retrospect, but I learned this one in my bones, right then. You really need to try all the other answers first, but sometimes you have to go out of your comfort zone into forms of communication that you may find baffling or repellent. I haven't been in any fights since leaving that school; it turns out I'm really good at avoiding or escaping them.
+
+I owe George a debt of gratitude, of sorts.