How to break your team spirit in three acts Act 1: You just got back from a great team offsite. Everyone is energized! You aligned on values and priorities. Everyone is heading back to work excited about working together to deliver. It feels great! Act 2: It's two months later. The offsite is long forgotten. Your team has reverted back to working the way they worked before the offsite. The same disagreements, the same people irritating each other, the same petty complaints. "What happened?"...
8 days ago • 3 min read
You're hired. Or are you? Every year, I work with Textio to publish original research about the state of performance feedback at work: who's getting it, how good it is, its impact on employee retention, and more. For the first time ever, this year's research focuses on interview feedback, and it dropped today. 🙀 We looked at this from two angles. First, we analyzed over 10,000 written interview assessments across nearly 4,000 candidates. Then, we surveyed 1,100 job seekers about the feedback...
15 days ago • 3 min read
The most magical place on earth I had 90% of a nerd processor draft finished last week, on a piece called How to break your team spirit in three acts. But then I took our 15yo and her best friend to Disneyland for a few days over spring break, and as I sat down to finish the newsletter, my heart honestly wasn't in it anymore. Maybe another time. But right now as I write this, I'm sitting by the pool with a mocktail while my kid and her friend are going on roller coasters in the park, and I'm...
22 days ago • 3 min read
Nine-year itch Since I graduated from college, I have changed careers in a meaningful way every nine years. I was an academic until I craved something more applied. I was a product and engineering leader in BigTech until a reorg caused me to think hard about what I wanted. I was a startup CEO until I stepped down for a break last year. I have generally enjoyed my jobs and I didn't plan any of these moves. In all three cases, I didn't know what I wanted when I made the change. At the end of...
29 days ago • 3 min read
The image generation Two weeks ago, I asked ChatGPT's new image generator to use everything it knows about me to generate an image of me at work. It gets a lot of details right! And ONE ENORMOUS FUNDAMENTAL PART extremely wrong. ChatGPT's image of me at work After I wrote about this on LinkedIn, over 1,500 people sent me their own images. Some people used something other than ChatGPT's new image generator for their images, and others didn't send me the system's explanation of its assumptions....
about 1 month ago • 4 min read
A few weeks ago I showed the problem with AI in one image. Since then, OpenAI has released an amazing new image generator. If you're a ChatGPT power user, ask it to generate an image of you at work. More than 1,200 people have now shared their images with me. Send yours! I'm writing about the patterns in next week's nerd processor. Now back to this week's episode... Signal in the noise By now you've no doubt seen last week's news that top-ranking US officials discussed war plans in a Signal...
about 1 month ago • 3 min read
Eight days a week The other day, my friend Allison made this LinkedIn post: I dashed off this quick reply: I stand by the reply. But a couple of days after I posted it, I started thinking about all the time my own kids spent time at Textio when they were young. Obligatory disclaimers I love work and I work constantly. It is fun to make stuff and solve hard problems! AND ALSO I don't think that dragging your entire team into the office six days a week is a great way to build a company. I love...
about 2 months ago • 3 min read
People break things, like always In the early days of Textio, our office was in a condo that was not zoned for business. Since we were a software company rather than a brick and mortar store, we persuaded the landlord to let us rent it anyway. There were five of us "roommates" on the lease, ten by the time we moved out. There are many aspects of that time period I remember fondly, but the best part was how our team talked every day. Not in scheduled meetings, because we didn't need them, but...
about 2 months ago • 4 min read
200,000 words later Over the last 12 months, I have published more than 50,000 words of nerd processors: data stories, musings about AI, and workplace reflections. But the weekly nerd processor newsletter is only about 25% of the words I have published over the last year. Since March 2024, I estimate that I have published more than 200,000 words in the context of my professional life. This includes weekly nerd processors, email courses, research papers for Textio, blogs for Operator...
2 months ago • 3 min read