Systems and Routines for Consistent Progress
Life is chaotic. Things change. Kids get sick. Parents get old. Friends need help. Companies change priorities without warning. So how do you maintain productivity and effectiveness in the face of all that chaos?
Human Skills 012: Productivity and leverage
Shawn Wang, also known as swyx, is best known for evangelizing the LearnInPublic movement, and for his developer relations and devtools work at companies like Netlify, Temporal, and Airbyte. He is a ridiculously prolific writer and speaker, hosts a number of online tech communities...
Human Skills 011 - Relationships are how to get things done
David Jay has built a career at the intersection of technology and social movements. He studies relationships, how they form, what impact they have on organizations and movements, and how to set up conditions to best foster their growth.
Human Skills 010 - Data Storytelling
Christopher Chin has followed a fascinating if meandering path, starting in music and audio engineering, getting deeply interested in data, moving into data visualization and analysis, and now teaching data professionals how to speak in public and handle presentations.
Human Skills 009 - Multilayered Communication
This was one of those interviews where I felt like I was pulling out every single clip and highlighting it. I could have picked several different themes to summarize here - we talked about scale and how your role as a manager changes as you travel up the hierarchy...
Human Skills 008 - Helping New Managers
How does someone decide to go and study how to be a better manager? For Kyle Jaster, COO of Harvie, it happened because he had gotten into management for what he describes as ego purposes, and then discovered...
ChatGPT: Climbing the Engineering Ladder Requires More Than Just Code Generation
A rebuttal of the assertion that ChatGPT is going to climb from being able to replace junior engineers to being able to replace principal engineers.
Human Skills 007 - Teambuilding and Management
Being a manager can feel incredibly contrived and awkward, especially when you are managing people who are more experienced or older than you are. But at the root of it, you're still human, and so are the people you're managing
Human Skills 006 - Managing Stress and Anxiety
I suppose it's natural that a conversation about managing stress and anxiety turned to feedback. After all, giving critical feedback can be super stressful!
Human Skills 005 - Communication and Empathy are Key to Engineering
How often have you had a long conversation about what to build, come away with new-found clarity, gone off and built it, and then come back and discovered that what you understood wasn't at all what the other person had intended?
Human Skills 004 - How Clarity Helps Negotiation
I wasn't expecting interviewing a data scientist to turn into a master class on negotiation, but that's what happened. Clear, concise, and memorable...
Human Skills 003 - Estimation and other friction points
How do we make working relationships between engineering and business stakeholders really work? Especially when it comes to high-stress common friction points like estimation?
Human Skills 002 - Changing Minds and Organizations
There aren't many people who have written a web framework that changes the way people think about development and gets used by millions of people. And there are even fewer who go on to try to do it again. But Miško Hevery has.
Human Skills 001 - Communication At Scale
How do you create positive relationships when a large part of your job is telling people ‘no’? Or run a whole-company initiative across thousands of people getting them to do boring, frustrating things like updating Access Control Lists...
Introducing the Human Skills Newsletter
Hi there, I’m KBall, and I’m working on a new podcast focused on human skills in the technical industry. For this podcast, I’m digging into all of the non-technical skills that go into success in the tech industry, breaking them down, making them tactical and actionable. Because just because something is non-technical doesn’t mean it has to be fuzzy.
Where to get career guidance in tech
A breakdown of the three most common ways people get career guidance in tech
How to activate your network after getting laid off
Step by step action plan for activating your network to find new opportunities