I'd always been told grocers stock the freshest milk at the back of the refrigerator. Without a second thought, I will lean low, reach far, and extend my arm deep into the back of the fridge and take hold of whatever container of milk rests on that back row. Comparing the date with those in the front, I've never been disappointed. This truth is eternal. On occasion, as I reach deep into the seemingly endless void, my eyes will blur and strain to focus on the darkened shadows of the refrigerated stock room. Mysterious figures move with quiet determination. And on the rarest of these occasions, when my hand feels the vast nothingness that comes with having extended my reach beyond that last row, a shadow will near. A gloved hand will meet my splayed fingers with the handle of a jug of milk colder than the air in which it is surrounded. Pulling it back, I see an expiration date stretching beyond comprehension of what is commonly thought to be an acceptable expiration for milk. My

This morning I was asking myself: If I was getting started in my career, today, knowing all the challenges that exist for those trying to get their foot in the door - what would I do? How would I set myself apart from other candidates? Having my own website, having an amazing looking resume, having an active GitHub and polished LinkedIn - those are great and all, but none of them can compete with having experience. And there's the trouble - to get experience you need experience. And so - if I were getting started today, how would I start building experience? First: Quick builds. Starting from scratch, the last thing I'd want to do is sink myself deep into a huge project that never gets seen. Instead, I'd want to build some credibility quickly - and, if I could afford it, I'd focus less on making money. If I can cover costs - great, but if I couldn't... well, more on this in a second. So what would I build? 0) First, I'd make sure I have my own website. This is

I'd like to introduce a new framework for communicating. Its one that will help you prioritize the right points, and deliver your message in the most efficient way possible.  Engineers, in particular, are bad at writing very narrative-driven chronologies. There's almost a bit of a joke that you can pinpoint where someone is in their career based on how they write their emails. Junior-Seniors are all chronological. Let's call it the "This" method for communicating: "I was doing this ... when this happened, and so it made me think this ...so I looked into it, and found out this . I then took a deeper look, and found this has happened for this many months...Can I ask that you do this ?" It takes as a long time. The important bits end up getting lost in the paragraphs - it's cognitively overwhelming, and it makes the recipient's attention wander. The first time you get a direct report, your communication style shifts. You see the errors in your way

I've always loved doing classroom tech/coding lessons. Getting to my own kid's class makes it extra special because as a dad it gives me an opportunity to embarrass them in front of their friends. I always like to take a tech-less approach, so I can focus on the thinking. I like to give analogs to the typical types of problems Software Engineers deal with. Today's lesson I was the classroom's robot and they had a few different exercises including "writing" procedural commands to have me drink a glass of water. It was fun, but arguably a little too realistic as it brought one child to tears when they got frustrated with a "bug" in the "code." Thankfully, everyone bounced back when they realized the power they had over me - and intentionally programmed me to spill the water on myself. And did it again. And again.

When strangers become friends, and friends become family - that's where you'll find love. We're now coming up on 4 years since I lost my oldest brother. Although he was my brother, I happily shared him with so many others because he was always quick to turn strangers into friends, and friends into family. If you knew him, you knew how quick he was to help: give you a ride, give you advice, help you pack, move you into your new house, pick you up from the airport at 2am. If you didn't know him, you still somehow knew him: he was the one to offer you a ride if he saw that you'd just missed the bus and had to stand in the rain waiting for the next one. He was the one who would help you with a flat. He was the one who helped you when you fell off your bike and injured your wrist so you couldn't get yourself back up. He was the one who stopped everything and sprinted across a parking lot because he saw that your hands were full, and you'd dropped something. Or he

If you struggle to bounce back after getting embarassed at work, here's a story from early in my career that will hopefully make it a bit easier. In 2007, I had been interviewing for a few weeks, and was so excited to finally receive an offer. Wanting to get my dad's advice, I forwarded the offer letter to him. And then, I waited... and waited... Eventually HR forwarded me the email my dad had intended to send to me , but had sent to them instead. 🙃 I still laugh at the juxtoposition of my dad's prose and his use of Comic Sans.

"Am I being ghosted?" You may be, and the reason may be entirely due to your resume. As wrong as that sounds, the sad reality is a lot of really smart people have really bad resumes. Common mistakes are: Saying too much (your resume is not your autobiography!) Saying too little (a list of responsibilities does not show your value!) Poor formatting (you're awesome, make it obvious!) If you feel like your resume is solid but you're still getting ghosted then join Taylor Desseyn and I as we review resumes in a livestream this Friday !  If you're willing to have your resume reviewed live, DM it to either of us with the hashtag #CallMaybeNo

Too many people list generic statements about their role and responsibilities on their resumes Your responsibilities don't tell a hiring manager a whole lot... they can only guess you were successful at it. But take the guesswork out of it! instead of generic statements, make it about YOU. Make it about your IMPACT.

Salad is boring. Even when it's good, salad is never as exciting as pizza, or lasagna, or a sandwich.  I love pizza, lasagna, sandwiches, bagels, and don't get me started on chocolate chip cookies. But...right now I'm eating a salad. Eating salad is not about the adventure. Or rather - eating saladas is about anticipating and preparing for adventures to come. A bowl of lettuce is, I'm told, much better at preparing you for adventure than a bowl of cookies could. (Yes, bowl of cookies. Don't judge.)  If you've been following me, you know I've related resumes to pizza . I've related bagels to motivation , pancakes with growth , and pasta sauce with team building .  Now, as I stare down at this bowl of salad, slowly getting tired of so much chewing (seriously, how do rabbits do this?) I can't help but wonder: how do salads relate back to our careers? What are the things we do to keep our careers "healthy"? What are the things we do to lose car

In Product Management, it's important to focus on the outcome , not the output . An output could be all the work a team has done in service of a product, but it may have no immediate value for the customer. Output isn't bad, but if you don't focus on the outcome, you can end up with the wrong one. Outcomes are focused on the customer's problem. Having just come off a string of reviewing more than 60 resumes, I came to the realization that this concept applies just as much to resumes as is does to products. What is a resume, if not a Product, after all - with your primary customer being a hiring manager? With that, I say: When you're building your resume don't focus on Output - focus on Outcome. Once you have that, quantify it.

If you missed us last month, me and my good pal Taylor Desseyn are reviewing your resumes live and on-air! How's this different than just DM'ing your resume for review? First off - you get 2 opinions for the price of 1! (And don't tell Taylor this...but his feedback is pretty good. I even learned a thing or two from him last time.) Second: Taylor and I intentionally don't look at resumes in advance - instead we approach it just like a hiring manager does when they have a stack of resumes. Managers quickly sort into buckets: definitely call, maybe call, and don't-call so they can prioritize their top candidates. It's something I've discussed before - and while it's not necessarily the best system, it helps scale when you have 200 resumes and very little time. That's why we're rebranding this event from 'Resume Triage' to simply calling this event: Call, Maybe, No. We'll open up a resume, give our immediate Call/Maybe/No reaction, and

After putting it out there that I was offering to review as many #resumes as I could, my final count for last week was 52 resumes. But that's not anywhere near the difficulty felt by those applying to 100s of places every week. Job hunting is frustrating. It's anxiety inducing. It can make you doubt your self worth. We've all been through it, yet we're quick to forget how challenging the experience is. So, this is your Monday reminder: If you see someone #opentowork don't just be empathetic. Be helpful. Be, for them, the resource you wish you'd had. Be #opentohelping .

Since a few have asked how it's been going with the resume reviews, here's a quick update: 32 (so far) across 3 different continents... A little overwhelming at times, but still manageable. I made sure to find a good pace because I obviously wanted the feedback to be useful and actionable. Finger's crossed, in a few weeks I'll see 32 "Just hired!" posts! 🤞 💛

I want to do something bold. Last week, an average week, I reviewed 9 different resumes for people (and not as a paid service or anything like that...) I feel like I can do a lot better than that - but I just need help getting the word out. I want to get so inundated with resumes that I regret this post. That's the level of  bold  that I'm going for. I'm not looking to turn this into a business, I won't be harvesting your data... I just want to help. And if you're the type who is likely to not consult with an unknown or is proud about your resume and doesn't feel it needs changes... well... let's be  bold  together. Connect with me on LinkedIn and send your resume!

This is a story about Tables. Not database tables or HTML tables - but the kind of table that you sit at on a crisp autumn morning on a Sunday and enjoy the aromas of your freshly brewed coffee. Years ago, my wife and I bought a dining table we absolutely loved. The style, the unique design and character - we were really excited to find a table that we thought would become our family table. Then, our young family sat for dinner at the table. Each whack of a metal spoon that our 1-year-old daughter would make against the fine grain of the table caused us to wince. Every spill caused us to quickly jump up to and hurriedly wipe up any mess for fears of stains. Our little girl, who loved to draw and paint, and play with clay - well... she couldn't at that table. Suddenly, we felt a lot more constrained by this table. The table, beautiful as it was, didn't match the life we were living. Fortunately, the house we'd moved into at the time had a formal dining and a kitc

 In case you missed it, here's the hour-long resume workshop that I ran with my friend Taylor. We had a lot of resume submissions - and the approach was the same for each: First sorting the resume into a "Definitely Call", "May Call" and "Wouldn't Call" bucket before diving deeper into our constructive feedback. We had so many submissions that we couldn't get through them all - so we're talking about making Resume Triage a monthly thing. Stay tuned! 

  I was talking to a good friend of mine about career paths, and where their focus generally falls as they grow in their career - as I did, I thought about my own experiences and the companies with which I've interviewed. In particular, there have been some that I avoided purely because their expectations didn't align with my own for the role I was pursuing. That lead me to make the above graph - it's not necessarily to capture where all our time is spent, but more about the types of problems that align to our career goals. This isn't prescriptive scientific fact - but an approach to explaining the differences in responsibilities as one grows in their career. The time spent in each role may be accelerated, it may not be linear - and depending on the size of the organization they are with, the exact percentage breakdowns may shift up or down. As the first few years of our career is really about learning coding as a skilled trade. We're refining our skills and becom

Having reviewed thousands of resumes at this point, I have been seeing a lot of the same mistakes over and over. What crushes me is when I find out how much some people have paid to get ... not-so-good ... advice. That's why next Friday (the 23rd), I am going to livestream with my good pal Taylor Desseyn and we're going to review resumes live and on-air. It'll be a fun (and free)  workshop where we cover what works & what doesn't. If you're brave enough to have yours reviewed, you can share us a link - if you want to do it anonymously you're free to change your info and experience before sharing. For context: I have more than 10 years experience in hiring tech jobs, and I've helped a bunch of others land jobs. Taylor's got about the same number of years as a recruiter - so he has a great sense of what many companies are looking for. Hope to see you soon! Join the event

He stepped into my office and closed the door. This was a bad sign. Any time one of your direct reports quietly comes it and closes a door, you know it's bad news. "What's up?" I say. "You're going to be mad at me." He replies. Yep. Bad news - but at least, this statement reduces my anxiety: I can infer some context; It's not personal, it's not health related, it's not a family-event. He's probably moving on... "Are you about to resign?" I ask, to cut the tension. "I...didn't expect you to ask so bluntly..." "You've lined up a new role though, right?" I reply, with the tone of a concerned parent. "Yes..." "Cool, tell me about it..." He proceeds to tell me the role, what it offers. "That sounds great, I can see how that would be a big move for you. Just so I make sure - you're committed to this decision, right? I mean, based on what you described, I'm assuming you'r

 Lego bricks are more than just bricks... This took a lot of lego pieces...

I've been coaching my daughter's soccer team for more 3 and a half years now - 7 seasons in total. We're just hours away from her first first game for the fall season and I've been struck with an epiphany: coaching is very much like coding. For the last month we've been hard at work making sure we cover the basic requirements, and wrap things up with test scenarios. As we grew more confident that we'd covered the happy paths, we focused on edge cases and broadened our test suite. We've made a lot of assumptions about the depths of what we should cover - but, given the set schedule and hard deadline, we did the best we could in the time we had. And now, we're ready to deploy into production. Or...maybe we aren't ready and we'll find out. But ultimately, as any good coder knows: if things fail, they should fail gracefully. When things go wrong, we'll be learn from it, build on the experience, and continue to iterate. We've set ourselves up

A really good friend of mine once told me I'd be one of the funniest people he knows if I could just keep myself from making the many un-funny jokes I make. As is, the bad jokes made me about half as funny as I could be. The tricky thing is - because I'd argue all those jokes are funny - it's hard to know which jokes will "land" and which will cause groans. And I say all this because I think it equally applies to the posts - as great as I may think they all are, some of them never land. The trickiest part is when the popularity of a particular post is inversely proportional to the effort I put in. Despite the old addage about quality over quantity, I've found that whether it's jokes, posts, or some other hobby - creativity fuels creativity. It's easier to keep the momentum of the proverbial snowball when it's already rolling - and so I'm scared to ever stop. I guess that applies to just about anything too - dieting, exercising, reading, coding,

I see a lot of posts about having a #sidehustle - investing your time, energy and effort into a passion that unlocks your future. While I'm not against them, for now these two are my side hustle (and my main hustle.) When you become a parent they tell you the days are long, but the years are short. I can think of any better investment for these short few years. It's tough to balance the impact your professional can have on your family, with the impact your presence has. In my own case, I try to involve my kids in my projects. They see me struggle, they see me persevere, but they also see me have fun - but for the most part I am in their orbit.

If you're struggling to come up with a quality LinkedIn post, I have the thing for you! If you're familiar with MadLibs, I've built one for LinkedIn, that I'm calling "LinkedLibs". LinkedLibs will generate engaging posts that resonate with your followers! Here's a quick sample: Want to gain more followers? Here's how I did it: Profile picture? 🤳 Make sure it has toys! Without toys, you're just another hasty penguin! 😥😢😖 In your heading, be sure to include statements about your collection of vintage robots! This tells people you're a beautiful person 🧑‍💼 who is happy to cry. 😃 Your banner should include a photo of you at a wedding or you in a hot-air balloon.  People take hot-air balloon pictures very quickly - in fact, did you know hot-air balloon pictures have been shown by anthropologists to make people feel satisfaction? As for a wedding - well - nothing says "humble", like a picture of you at a wedding. Finally, everyone lo

When I used to code all the time, I'd go to bed and have code-mares. The same problem I was wrestling with would play in a stressful loop in my mind - but on some rare occasions I'd actually find the solution in my sleep. I'd wake up and, impatiently, couldn't get back to the keyboard fast enough. I was filled with excitement that a solved problem gives you. Recently I've been doing some mild carpentry at the house (building a mudroom bench and laundry cabinet). Carpentry, I've found, produces the same kind of feelings that coding can. I love it but I find myself frustrated when the right solution feels slightly out of reach. Suffice it to say, I had my first carpentry-mare. The dream made me realize I'd missed an important detail - and so, waking up, it was the first thing I had to do. That's when I realized a very important lesson about the difference between coding and carpentry: despite their similarities, coding is much much quieter.