dp.cx blog

I've been working on a project for the last year. The goal was to migrate data from one system into another, with my team providing the data layer. We started as two developers and were ahead of schedule.

There's a decision that managers put off more than almost any other: letting go of someone who isn't working out. I've seen it at multiple companies - someone consistently produces bad work, creates extra work for the people around them, and stays employed anyway because nobody wants to make the call.

A friend told me about someone at their company who got caught using ChatGPT to answer client questions during a live meeting - copying the questions in, reading the responses back, right there in front of the client. They'd been in the role long enough that nobody had been checking their work too closely.

I watched a newer team member spend most of their first few months entering data into a tracking system. Not because it was a learning exercise, not because it helped them understand the domain, but because the senior they were supporting didn't want to do it themselves.

My director said something offhand on a call recently that stuck with me: promotions codify what's already been happening. By the time someone gets promoted, they've already been doing the work of that next level, and the title is just catching up.

I have more personal projects than I can realistically work on right now. A shoe rack out of plywood, a decorative fence to hide the air conditioner, low voltage landscape lighting, enclosing the patio under the back deck, smart home automation, software tools I've wanted to build for years.

I was reading a post on Hacker News - a list of rules for being a new manager. Good rules. But some of them really are rules for new managers. I've been watching Gotham Chess's "slow-run" series, and it gets at this.