"What Am I Even Paid To Do?" — Ego, Identity, and the AI Reckoning
Travis, Brandon, and Nick come back from a two-year absence to interrogate the question one of Travis's engineers asked him about using AI: this feels like cheating — what am I actually paid to do? What happens to an engineer's sense of value when the syntax they spent fifteen years getting good at is suddenly the cheap part? Why have managers, of all people, adapted to AI faster than the senior staff engineers they came from? What does "ego" really mean here — superiority, or just the load-bearing identity that gets shaken when the work changes underneath you? And when we say "fail fast," do we mean it, or do we just mean it on the recruiting page? They get into the identity crisis baked into the manager-IC transition, why the same cognitive move makes you good at both, and the version of "ego" and "failure" worth keeping. Also: Brandon's existential crisis is "permanent and ongoing," thank you for asking.
24 Jan 2024
What If Meetings… Were Good, Actually?
In this episode of the Managing Up Show, Brandon, Travis, and Nick talk about meetings. How did they get a bad reputation? How can they be better? And no, the answer is not to abolish meetings, but rather to put the effort into making them actually good.
15 Feb 2023
Moving Past "Hero Culture"
Nick, Travis, and Brandon talk "hero culture" and how that affects teams. What are the drawbacks of encouraging hero culture? How do you draw the distinction between necessary heroism and chronic hero culture? What's the difference between heroism and professionalism? They also discuss common pitfalls of trying to overcome hero culture, and what it means to set a sustainable example.
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