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Posts tagged “writing”

2 June 2024

Balancing your inputs

As someone who is currently reading Slow Productivity and also watching Shōgun, I concur with this point from Austin Kleon:

During a recent phone call, my friend Matt Thomas told me he likes to take a high/low approach to balancing his input, which started when he was in grad school reading dense theoretical texts by day and chasing them with movies like Fast Five at night. I’ve currently got a good combo going: I’m reading Middlemarch and binge-watching Bridgerton. (As the poet Donald Hall wrote in Essays After Eighty, everybody who works with their brains all day needs to lighten up a bit at night: “Before Yeats went to sleep every night he read an American Western. When Eliot was done with poetry and editing, he read a mystery book.”)

19 May 2024

A few tips for job seekers

Updated February 27, 2025

I am in the process of hiring for a couple of roles at Cloudflare, so I’ve been talking to a lot of candidates over the past few weeks. I noticed a few trends along the way, so I thought I’d share a quick list of tips for anyone who is currently in the job market. This is obviously just one hiring manager’s opinion, but hopefully there’s something helpful for folks here!

  • Fill out your LinkedIn profile. So many people have empty LinkedIn profiles that just show their roles with no other details. Even if there is detail in your resumé, the LinkedIn profile is often the first thing I look at. It’s an opportunity to get to know you a little bit more than the formality of a resumé usually requires. Make sure the details about your responsibilities—and some outcomes and achievements—are listed within each position.
  • Write a summary paragraph at the top of your resume. Possibly the most impactful resumé post I’ve read in recent years is Austin Belcak’s How To Write A Resume Summary That Works In 2024 . He explains in detail the importance of these 3–4 bullet points (he calls it a “highlight reel”) at the top of your resume—before you even get to the details of your previous roles.
  • Write 1 sentence about each company in your history. This is true for all companies you’ve worked at, but especially smaller startups. It takes quite a while to Google every company someone has worked for, so it’s super useful to include a brief summary of what the company does. For instance, I would describe Jeli.io as “Incident management platform for incident response teams and their stakeholders.”
  • Send a note to the hiring manager if you know who it is. This works, if you do it right (see the next tip…). I have over 2,000 applications across roles right now, so there is no way to look at every single resumé. If people reach out with a message about their interest it’s a good signal that it’s someone who is excited about the role, which is one of the big things I’m looking for.
  • Do not, under any circumstances, use ChatGPT to write your outreach or cover letter for you. This should go without saying by now, but so many letters and notes are clearly written by ChatGPT. If you read as many of these as some of us do it’s really easy to spot. It’s about the cadence and the words—so much “utilizing” and “enhancing”!—and the particular style of grammar. We want to get to know you. Use your own words.
  • Learn about the company and the hiring manager before your first chat. I want to work with people who are excited about the job. I want to know if this is one of a thousand applications, or something they are truly interested in. I know it’s not possible to spend hours on research for every single call. But a little bit goes a long way.
  • Answer questions succinctly, and then stop. I know interviewing is stressful, and sometimes it’s hard to come up with answers on the spot. But the strongest candidates are able to distill their thoughts into a few short sentences, clarify some things if they need to, and then let the answer rest. Don’t keep saying words just to fill the space. Rather ask a question back, or wait for the interviewer to finish their notes and ask the next question.

I also feel like it’s important to point out that I truly believe the hiring manager / candidate relationship should not be an adversarial one. Hiring managers want someone who will be great for the role just as much as candidates want a role they love. No one wants a mismatch that’s not going to work out. So we have to help each other out. As hiring manager I have to be transparent about the role, the team, and the process. And candidates can help by providing enough relevant information to help us figure out who would be good to explore that fit with.

19 May 2024

Generative AI Is Totally Shameless. I Want to Be It.

Yes, I’m a relentless fanboy of whatever Paul Ford writes, but this is a truly wonderful post about what makes AI so addictive and impossible to look away from. He frames AI as a technology that truly has no shame because “it possesses an absolute willingness to spout foolishness, balanced only by its carefree attitude toward plagiarism.” And so:

By aggregating the world’s knowledge, chomping it into bits with GPUs, and emitting it as multi-gigabyte software that somehow knows what to say next, we’ve made the funniest parody of humanity ever. These models have all of our qualities, bad and good. Helpful, smart, know-it-alls with tendencies to prejudice, spewing statistics and bragging like salesmen at the bar. They mirror the arrogant, repetitive ramblings of our betters, the horrific confidence that keeps driving us over the same cliffs. That arrogance will be sculpted down and smoothed over, but it will have been the most accurate representation of who we truly are to exist so far, a real mirror of our folly, and I will miss it when it goes.

27 April 2024

How to move into Product Management at your company

I am currently in the process of hiring a product manager for my team at Cloudflare. One of the neat things about Cloudflare is that internal candidates are encouraged to reach out to hiring managers to chat with them about the role. That means that I’ve had several really great conversations with colleagues over the past couple of weeks, many of them with folks who are in other parts of the org like BI, customer support, finance, engineering, etc. The question they have is, “how do I move into product management?”

It’s a great question, and after I’ve given the same answer a few times, I decided to just go ahead and write it down in our internal wiki as well. Below is a lightly edited version of the advice I shared, in case that’s helpful to anyone else who is trying to move into the PM role at their company:

  • If you’re brand new to the job I have a couple of book recommendations to get a general sense of what good product management looks like. I recommend starting with Inspired by Marty Cagan, and Escaping the Build Trap by Melissa Perri. You’ll hear these two books mentioned a lot in our field, and they are classics for good reasons. After that, read everything you can get your hands on (but stay away from LinkedIn Influencers, that’s mostly ChatGPT content these days). For more book/newsletter recommendations, I have a running list here.
  • Then—and this is the most important advice I have—do the job before you have the title. Every role can be expanded into some area of product management. Think deeply about the product(s) you support, what customers need, how it contributes to the business, what could be better, what you think the long-term strategy should be. Start exercising the PM muscle so that when the right role comes along internally, you’re ready for it.
  • Publish your thinking. Every company has an internal wiki, many with personal spaces. Use it. If you have an idea for a product, or an analysis that’s interesting, or some thoughts on future strategy, write it down, publish it, and share it with the PM who works on that product. This is the best way to practice for the job—clear, succinct communication is a crucial skill, so this exercises that muscle as well.

If you learn the craft, practice the craft, and show publicly that you can do the craft, you’ll be well on your way to moving into product management at your company. When a good job rolls around you’ll be able to point towards the work you’ve done to give hiring managers a sense of your product skills.

And lastly, this is a great job. You will love it!

21 April 2024

System Diagrams are Performance Caches for Cognitive Load

I recently mentioned how I like to draw it until it works when I’m ramping up on a new system. Clint Byrum says it so much better in his post System Diagrams are Performance Caches for Cognitive Load. First, this bit resonated with me because it’s exactly the situation I currently find myself in:

Having joined just a few months ago, I was overwhelmed about 5 minutes into the meeting. The individual words and concepts all made sense. JSON parsing slow. Network transit treacherous. Changing things at the source hard. I got all of those components of the discussion, but through the whole thing I was just barely able to follow the overall system conversation and ask very basic questions to understand what was going on. I came away with a bunch of exploratory personal action items, and a very clear hole in my mental model of the system that needs to be filled.

Clint goes on to use a systems analogy for the individual people that make up a team—people and knowledge as components of caching, computation, and storage. This leads to a perfect explanation for why system diagrams are so important:

A single system diagram is where those primed nodes can push the most relevant bits of their information out of their local brain-caches, and into a high-performance distributed cache from which everyone can read. This will preserve precious cognitive load for those critical low-latency tasks. Of course, all of these caches may be stale. The local in-memory ones are particularly hard to test, but at least the system diagram is observable. Everyone can look at it, and if there are nodes with updates, they can update the cache.

So, prime those caches. Draw it until it works!

18 April 2024

How to send progress updates

I don’t agree with everything on this list of how to send progress updates, but these two points are especially important and worth remembering:

Acknowledge changes explicitly. If you said a the last time and b this time, and b conflicts with a, you need to explain the inconsistency. People perceive acknowledged inconsistencies as cost of doing business, but unacknowledged inconsistencies as broken promises.

I name this section “challenges and requests” in my updates, but the underlying principle is the same:

Add a dedicated section for worries and failures. Be honest, have good plans, and don’t panic. People are drawn to conscientiousness and vulnerability but repelled from haplessness and histrionics.

14 April 2024

Author Martha Wells discusses the origins and meaning of Murderbot

If you’re a fan of the Murderbot series (and if you haven’t read it, get on it!) you will absolutely love this recent keynote speech by author Martha Wells at the annual Jack Williamson Lecture at Eastern New Mexico University. She describes how Murderbot came to be, what it’s really about, and where the story sits within sci-fi and our world in general:

There are a lot of people who viewed All Systems Red as a cute robot story. Which was very weird to me, since I thought I was writing a story about slavery and personhood and bodily autonomy. But humans have always been really good at ignoring things we don’t want to pay attention to. Which is also a theme in the Murderbot series.

I won’t ruin the ending by quoting the final paragraph, I’ll just say that this is my favorite thing I’ve read in a long time, and you should savor every word.

7 April 2024

Make better documents

This has been shared around quite a bit over the past couple of weeks, but Anil Dash has written another[1] modern classic in Make better documents. Excellent advice all around, including:

Similar to the importance of sequencing and order, you almost always want to start by clearly and simply stating your conclusion, or declaring your request or question. Very often, people feel a lot of anxiety about the need to preface their big dramatic point with lots of build-up. But you almost never want to be building dramatic tension in a professional context; this isn’t a thriller where you’re trying to surprise them with twists and turns.

And:

Similarly, you’ll want to constrain your requests to your audience to be something they can react to constructively. “Do we want to invest at the higher cost of Option A to move faster, or go with the lower cost of Option B to be more cautious?” That’s an answerable question! And it’s perfectly fine if it leads to a conversation where a third option is explored — but you never would have gotten there with a prompt that says, “What do we want to do next?”

  1. Never forget: If your website’s full of assholes, it’s your fault  ↩
30 March 2024

Can You Tweet Your Way to Impact?

Cal Newport writes about some recent research on the impact of social media followers/traffic in Can You Tweet Your Way to Impact? The tl;dr is that audience != impact:

In this narrow look at social media and science a more general lesson about this technology emerges. Maintaining an aggressive presence in these online spaces can increase the number of people who temporarily encounter you or your work. But these encounters are often ephemeral, rarely leading to more serious engagement. It’s exciting to receive increased attention in the present, but it may have little effect on your impact in the future.

I would say that this is true for me as well. Tweeting never got me much, even in the “olden days”. But I’ve made lots of real connections (and even got hired) because of this slow, steady blog.

Speaking of Cal, I just started on his latest book Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout and I’m really liking it so far. From the intro:

I want to instead propose an entirely new way for you, your small business, or your large employer to think about what it means to get things done. I want to rescue knowledge work from its increasingly untenable freneticism and rebuild it into something more sustainable and humane, enabling you to create things you’re proud of without requiring you to grind yourself down along the way.

25 March 2024

The meek inherit the earth

Austin Kleon has a really interesting post on the word “meek” in the Beatitudes. In short, “meek” doesn’t mean “weak”:

Meekness as a habit of calm attentiveness, stillness, freedom from the fretting worry of keeping control, a stillness that allows others to feel welcome around you, can appear as something very different from the shrinking back that the word so easily suggests. If anger is very much to do with the “pushing out and pushing away” element in our psyche, “meekness” in the sense of a welcoming stillness is the opposite of this.

That definition reminds me of my earlier post On kindness and decisiveness. I should’ve thrown a “meek” in there!