The δeltas newsletter March 31st Your Hiring Pipeline Is a Funnel. It Should Be a Net. ↓ I was sixteen years old when I got my first job in tech. I didn't apply anywhere. I didn't have a resume. I uploaded some code I'd written to a BBS. A Bulletin Board System. Kind of like GitHub in the early 90s. It was a bump-mapping effect written in C. A few days later, the home phone rang. Landline. Family line. A guy named Pavel was on the other end. He was expanding a demo-scene team. Two graphic...
8 days ago • 6 min read
The δeltas newsletter March 23rd The Homer Simpson's Guide to Delegation ↓ Watch the video or keep reading below I want to talk about delegation. And I know, delegation is one of those topics where everyone nods along, says "yeah, I know I should delegate more," and then goes back to doing everything themselves. But here's the thing. The problem isn't that you don't delegate. The problem is that when you do delegate, you might be doing it like Homer Simpson. Homer Simpson. Safety inspector at...
15 days ago • 5 min read
The δeltas newsletter March 16th 5 Battles Every Engineering Manager Is Losing Right Now ↓ Prefer to watch? I recorded a video version of this post. A few years back, I was at a startup. Things were going great. We were growing, hiring, the product was taking off. We were planning for an IPO. And then the market turned. Within a few months, the conversations shifted from "how do we scale" to "who do we let go." I was in a really hard spot. I couldn't share everything I knew with my team. I...
22 days ago • 4 min read
The δeltas newsletter March 10th The coding machine is dead. What's next? ↓ This post is based on the video above, adjusted for readability. Read or watch, which ever you prefer. AI is coming for your job. Principal Engineer Edition. Meta has a set of archetypes for IC7 (Senior Staff Engineers) and up. Michael Novati was the poster child of one of them. He recently talked about how AI made his archetype deprecated. That got me thinking. What's the risk for each archetype, and how can senior...
29 days ago • 4 min read
The δeltas newsletter February 17th Three management insights for 2026 ↓ The CTO leaned forward. “We just finished performance reviews,” they said. “One of our managers got curious and pulled token usage data. You know, how much each engineer was using AI.” I expected some hand-wavy correlation. Maybe top performers used it more. Maybe it didn’t matter at all. “Turns out,” they continued, “our best performers used the most tokens. Good performers? More than average.” They paused. “And some of...
about 2 months ago • 6 min read
The δeltas newsletter February 10th How to Network When You'd Rather Be Anywhere Else ↓ I have a confession to make. I talk about networking constantly. In the Manager OS cohort, I teach the "Rule of 2" as a core networking tool. I emphasize it when teaching candidates how to land their next job. I spent an hour on it yesterday in the free session, AI-Powered Job Search: Find & Land Your Next Role. But here's what I don't talk about enough: this stuff is hard for me. I'm an introvert. Right...
about 2 months ago • 5 min read
The δeltas newsletter February 3rd Why Netflix Wants You to Interview at Google ↓ Ted Sarandos, Netflix's CEO, said something that would get most HR departments to panic: "It's not disloyal to take a call from recruiters. Openly interviewing and giving Netflix the salary data benefits all of us." Netflix actively encourages employees to interview externally. Most companies? They call that disloyalty. Last week, Amazon announced another 16,000 layoffs. That's 30,000 jobs gone in three months....
2 months ago • 3 min read
The δeltas newsletter January 27th Your Former Peers Now Report to You. Here's How to Make It Work ↓ You walk into a meeting with your team. Same people you've been working alongside for months or years. Except now, something fundamental has shifted. They report to you. This happened to me twice. Once when I got promoted to director and some of my manager peers moved to report to me. Again at a large nonprofit where people I'd collaborated with for years suddenly became my "direct reports."...
2 months ago • 4 min read