Software, Team and Strategy

Most of the literature about interviews is focused on how to give good answers and get an offer letter. I talk to a lot of candidates that forget that interviewing is a bi-directional process.  In the world of technology companies and startups specifically the candidates are interviewing the company just as much as the company is interviewing them.  Over the years I have collected some questions that I believe could help someone understand if the opportunity is right for them.  Here are some areas that I believe every candidate should touch through the interview process: Business Who are the customers?  What happens if they don’t have your product? What are the revenues right now and what are the means of ramping them up? What is the financing now and how much runway do you have left? When delivering your product/service - how much of the process is digital and how much of the process involves people or hard assets?  Are those non-digital parts of your service on your books/p

When your work is to manage an engineering organization there are few people you could get advice from.  If you are a Director, VP or CTO in a tech company there might be zero to a handful of other people with similar job responsibilities. Almost everyone accumulates a number of mentors or friends throughout their career but those connections fade and sometimes geeks feel weird asking other geeks to “get together and catch up.” I have come across Enrich ( https://www.joinenrich.com ) which is a facilitated peer groups and it helped me get some perspective and advice I don’t think I’d get anywhere else.  This group costs money and my company doesn’t pay for it, so I was fairly resistant to signing up for it at first.  My thoughts were that I am already paying a huge premium for living in San Francisco which has the highest concentration of technology leaders in the world.  I should be able to connect with people and foster those relationships without having to pay someone to orga

At the end of August I was in St. Petersburg, Russia.  I was invited to the St. Petersburg Python Meetup group to present how Silicon Valley sees Russian engineers and companies.  It was a fun event with a lot of great questions.  A lot of the focus was on getting hired and how US counterparts relate to software developers in Eastern Europe. Here is a copy of my presentation for those who did or didn't attend. https://www.dropbox.com/s/8c9zd2ue33i3a1b/SPB%20Python%20Presentation.pdf?dl=0  Here is a link to the group event: https://www.meetup.com/spbpython/events/qvcrgryzmbwb/