jeffyang

Rising Team | Senior Software Engineer | Remote (US, Pacific Time adjacent) | Full-time

At Rising Team we are transforming how the world's leading organizations develop high-performing managers and teams. Our mission is that everyone in the workplace feels understood, supported, and empowered.

If building with AI tools like Claude Code excites you and you find yourself thinking a lot about what great, high quality AI-powered engineering looks like, please apply! It's certainly something I've been thinking about a lot.

Job post: https://risingteam.com/careers-openings?bzid=2a63ef877906

I mentioned this in a sibling comment, but one idea I have is instead of doing this extra work which is unrecognized, you spend your extra time on gaming the presentation and appearances aspect of it. Which you might not be good at at first but would be practice and probably have compounding gains in your career. And to add an extra interesting challenge is how can you game it with high integrity.

In an attempt to have a positive framing around this, with the disclaimer that I haven't actually fully tried this, one idea might be to spend the extra time on all the politics stuff and marketing yourself and figuring out how to get in good with your manager and get promoted. And that stuff is not easy and you might not be good at it, but spending time on it is good practice and will slow you down in the areas you are good at so there's nothing to hide.

Rising Team | Software Engineer (3+ years of experience) | Remote (USA, Pacific Time Zone) | Full time

Our mission is that everyone in the workplace feels deeply understood, supported, and empowered to reach their goals. Join our team where your dedication to excellence, continuous improvement, and desire to make a meaningful impact will be celebrated and nurtured. Help us build a future where everyone can thrive in their professional journey.

Apply at https://risingteam.com/careers/senior-software-engineer or email me jeff(at)risingteam(dot)com.

Rising Team | Software Engineer (3+ years of experience) | Remote (USA) | Full time

Want to work at a place where you are understood, supported, and empowered to reach your goals?

We envision a world where everyone works at such a place. Our product helps teams bond together over shared experiences, practicing key leadership skills together that help teams work more effectively. We believe in empowering and supporting our employees and are looking for people who want to grow and be their best.

Apply at https://risingteam.com/careers/senior-software-engineer or email me jeff(at)risingteam(dot)com.

I've also been doing chats with engineers and engineering managers who feel stuck or uninspired. It's an area I'm interested in helping if I can as I've had a career with various ups and downs and times when I felt stuck. Feel free to reach out if you'd like to chat.

Waitbutwhy has a great series about this: https://waitbutwhy.com/2019/08/story-of-us.html

Basically absolute freedom means less freedom overall because the strongest take over. Limiting freedom (eg you can't kill others) can mean more freedom overall as more of the population are able to exercise their (limited) freedoms.

Rising Team | Senior and/or Lead Software Engineer | Remote (USA) | Full time

Want to work at a place where you are understood, supported, and empowered to reach your goals?

We envision a world where everyone works at such a place. Our product helps teams bond together over our shared experiences. Team members walk away feeling more connected to each other while practicing key leadership skills that help you work more effectively. We believe in empowering and supporting our employees and are looking for people who want to grow and be their best.

Apply at https://risingteam.com/careers/senior-software-engineer or email me jeff(at)risingteam(dot)com.

I've also been doing chats with engineers and engineering managers who feel stuck or uninspired. It's an area I'm interested in helping if I can as I've had a career with various ups and downs and times when I felt stuck. Feel free to reach out if you'd like to chat.

Agree with doing all 3.

Additional thoughts: 1. Can you ask to chat informally with the person leaving and see if there's a reason they all left? Might be interesting to know. Is this only on the one team or across the company?

2. Do you know if it's the type of culture that would punish you for holding the bag if things go south or one that would reward you? If the former, I would definitely change teams/companies. If the latter, it sounds like a great opportunity. If you aren't sure, maybe chat with other people to find out.

3. As mentioned, this could be a big opportunity. You could for example say that you'd be happy to run the team if they give you 2 engineers (or whatever you think you need). I wouldn't ask for a raise/promotion in the first conversation, but it's definitely something you want to discuss fairly early.

4. Definitely set up time with your higher level manager and see what their thoughts are. I would just be really up front with them, tell them how this definitely a unique situation, find out what their plans are, and let them know what you want to do. The worst thing is if they are hand wavy and give you a vague deadline for resolving things. Try to get to specifics, and even if they don't know, they should be able to give you a plan and a rough timeline for figuring out the resolution.

Also want to mention that I'm hiring, feel free to reach out to me if you're interested (see my profile).

Rising Team | Senior and/or Lead Software Engineer | Remote (USA) | Full time

Want to work at a place where you are understood, supported, and empowered to reach your goals?

We envision a world where everyone works at such a place. If that sounds awesome and if you believe we can successfully help managers do this, it follows that we'd be a great place to work for you.

Our product helps managers with team development by giving them team building sessions in a box that grow deeper connections and improve team effectiveness based on leadership principles such as psychological safety, setting clear expectations, appreciation, and more.

Women and underrepresented groups are strongly encouraged to apply.

See the full role at https://risingteam.com/careers/senior-software-engineer or email me jeff(at)risingteam(dot)com.

We use Python and React, but you don't need those on your resume if you feel comfortable picking up new languages.

Also, as an experiment, I've been doing career chats and they have been quite rewarding so far. Feel free to reach out if you feel stuck or something's not working for you at work.

Yeah, you're right, I did get a bit dramatic there. This was helpful, I understand your comment now, thanks!

I want to note that like you I did say that the majority at FB don't care. I also didn't care when I started and that's why it was such a surprise that people actually did care and that it wasn't shut down by leadership. I think that is compounded by the fact that certain teams are more like that than others and I was at a stage in my life where I was ready to be influenced by that, and so I agree that I have a rosier view than is probably accurate.

Ha really? I mean, no one paid me, but thanks?

Seriously, have you ever worked at a place where people (outside of leadership) care strongly about making sure the company does the right thing rather than just accepting the status quo? That's pretty rare I would say and it was very surprising to me.

I'm not saying that Facebook is good. I'm just saying that people paint it like everyone who works at Facebook made a decision to support an evil empire, which does a disservice to all the people there who are working really hard to do the right thing.

I used to work at Facebook. I understand the vitriol. It's very easy to paint that picture. It's a very one-sided picture though.

Hands down, of all the companies I've worked for, I've never met so many rank and file people who cared about doing the right thing so much. Most jobs are just jobs. People do their jobs and they get money and sometimes they try to do a good job. And there are plenty of people like that at Facebook, the majority of people are like that.

But, nowhere have I seen such a large percentage of people who actually care and who care strongly. It is honestly shocking, coming from jobs where people just do their job and avoid stirring up trouble. These people do stir up trouble. And it's hard work to fight the inertia. Sometimes they fail and become bitter and burnt out. Sometimes they succeed. And when they do they are rewarded.

So that's what I wanted to say. Facebook is a big place but people do care about doing the right thing and doing the right thing is rewarded.

I'm obviously biased, but my company, Rising Team, is a great place to work.

Our product helps managers understand and care about their team members. We envision a world where everyone in the workforce is deeply understood, supported, and empowered to reach their goals. We live this vision and of course we eat our own dogfood.

Personally, I believe in the power of transparency and honesty. If something is off, even just a little bit, we should discuss it. If we're not both winning, something is not working and we need to work to fix it.

I'm nowhere near perfect and I've messed up before as a manager and I will continue to mess up. But in the end even my messups work out, sometimes even better actually, because we communicate with each other and we care about each other.

We're currently hiring a senior software engineer and a PM. You can check it out at https://risingteam.com/careers

Feel free to ask me anything, especially if there's something you're skeptical of.

I used to run support groups to tackle the rampant helplessness I saw around me.

The way it worked is that the person would describe their situation and then everyone else would ask questions.

The format was:

1. understand the facts, and understand if they are actually true

2. explore options, even crazy ones

3. pick an action to take and commit to it

For the questioners, the most important rule was you can't give advice. The person who is asking for help needs own it. They provide all the answers and decide on their own action. That action could be anything from talking to your manager, to setting boundaries, to looking for another job.

It worked amazingly well, many people who started off feeling stuck realized they had the ability to find a better path. Even just making a conscious decision to do nothing and being okay with the consequences of that is empowering and insightful.

I used to be completely helpless, learned from childhood. I finally realized that I'm not a child anymore and I have so many more options as an adult.

Happy to chat with you if you're feeling stuck, feel free to email me (see my profile).

Shameless plug: I stopped this to work on a related area - empowering people through team-building. The first session is free, you could do it in place of your next virtual happy hour! Check it out at https://risingteam.com.

Rising Team | Senior Software Engineer | Remote (USA) | Full time

Ever feel mistreated at work? Did you feel comfortable bringing it up?

Looking for a place where everyone understands, trusts, and empowers each other?

At Rising Team we not only believe this is the way to work, we build a product that does this: help teams become happy and successful, and a great place to work. We envision a world where everyone in the workforce is deeply understood, supported, and empowered to reach their goals.

Women and underrepresented groups are strongly encouraged to apply.

See the full role at https://risingteam.com/careers/senior-software-engineer or email me jeff(at)risingteam(dot)com.

Yes it's okay to say you're happy. And yes, you need to help your team members learn and grow.

If there are no opportunities to learn and grow, you're going to get bored and leave. And most people will not let you know ahead of time, they will just leave. Even if they tell you, by the time they realize they're bored, you've already done them a disservice by not helping them earlier.

For someone who is happy, I think setting targets is overkill. They don't need to aggressively climb the ladder, but you do want to brainstorm with them opportunities to learn things they want to learn. Note this doesn't have to match with what the company "thinks" they should learn but it does have to intersect with actual business needs. Keep it lightweight but always have something they can work towards.

If they don't seem to be working towards it, debug what's stopping them.

1. Don't know how to start? Too hard? Help them get started. Break it down into easier goals/steps.

2. Current work is too much? Lighten their load or change the goal to help them learn how to do the current work better. Be more efficient, prioritize better, etc.

3. They aren't interested? Find a different goal that they actually want to achieve.

4. Temporary setback? Check in later.

The thing with Emacs is that sort-lines is a string you can copy and paste into a buffer, whereas in Visual Studio it's a command that you have to execute.

Disclaimer: I don't know Visual Studio that well. Still, I suspect what I'm writing is true.

I wrote about this in a separate comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28104243

I use both Visual Studio and Emacs. In general Visual Studio does a pretty good job and it is my day to day editor. But there are some things that it's simply not worth bothering with in Visual Studio.

The problem with most editors is that every buffer and every command is different. Code is different than the terminal which is different than your source control. Sorting text is different than copying text is different than formatting text. That means every new thing you want to do, even if it's small, requires you to learn how to do it the way that tool wants you to do it.

In Emacs, every buffer is the same. Which means I can do all sorts of mini workflows without learning anything new. I can navigate the buffer the same way and I can copy text the same way. I can run arbitrary linux commands from my scratch buffer on buffers on multiple machines and massage the output and put it in my code buffers. I can run a macro to repeat that 1000x. Then I can tweak it slightly and run it another 1000x. I don't need to learn anything specific to my editor. I can whip this up in a minute then move on with my day because it's a one off.

Yes, sort lines is available in all editors. What if you wanted to sort all the import statements in every file? In Emacs you can do a quick macro to do that. It would take you a couple of minutes MAX. You wouldn't have to even think. All because sort-lines is text that you can copy and paste. In Visual Studio... I don't even know what I would do... probably find a plugin or write a program. Imagine you found a plugin. Then imagine you didn't want to sort ALL imports, there's one import you always want at the top. Trivial to change in Emacs, not so trivial for a plugin.

It seems like you feel that you being open and friendly has hurt your chances at promotions/raises and then when you try to correct for that it also hurts your chances.

Instead of guessing if acting a certain way will get you a promotion, what you need to do is work with your manager to come up with a concrete plan with concrete steps to get promoted. Figure out exactly what criteria your manager is looking for and make sure you are learning how to do that, and whenever you make progress make sure your manager agrees with your own assessment of your progress. And if they don't agree, learn exactly why. Get it so clear that there is no hand waving or hiding behind excuses.

I am extremely open and friendly and I have had no problems getting promoted. On the other hand, at the beginning of my career I never got promoted despite being the best performer on every team I was on. Then one manager who noticed me started talking to me about what I needed to do to get promoted. Spoiler: It's not just technical skill. All of a sudden, my career took off like a rocket ship. Ever since then I've been the one who started the career conversations with my manager because I realized that I am the one in charge of my career and I don't want to rely on the competence of whomever I work for. I definitely wish I learned this lesson earlier, but I'm also happy that I learned it at all.

That's great that you are setting boundaries!

To add to what you wrote. If someone doesn't respect themselves and their own boundaries, then it's going to be harder for others to respect them. And they are putting the onus of figuring out exactly where those boundaries lie on their manager/peers. Which you could argue is part of a manager's job, but it's a risky strategy to rely on your manager to do that job, especially given that many if not most managers don't consider that part of their job. Also, everyone has different boundaries, and it's not easy to figure out what those are.

Also, setting boundaries forces the people to face reality. If every time there's a problem someone takes care of it, people won't notice that there's a problem.

That being said, setting boundaries is hard and I think everyone struggles with it sometimes. I know I do.

I have things I like and things I don't like about it.

I like it because I see it as a guide that helps people understand how to grow and also a framework for fair compensation.

Without guidance many people, especially early in their career, will not grow as fast as they want to grow. They will need to find other ways to get this guidance, such as a good mentor. Some people learn better with a mentor, some people learn better with a framework.

Without a compensation framework, it's hard to reason about whether people are fairly compensated across the board. So what happens is that people start to develop these anyways. If not done explicitly that means that everyone has to independently do the work of coming up with their own framework and then everyone ends up with different frameworks, resulting in things being less fair. A shared understanding and a shared language can be really helpful.

I don't like it because I feel like it will inevitably change from guidance to a checklist. And then it gets political and competitive. Just like you said, people definitely start focusing on the rating. A lot. I think there could be ways to combat this, but I think it's a difficult problem.

I think no matter what you implement, there's a tradeoff. For example, my current thought is that I want it to be more about guidance and less about compensation. So it's guidance on where to grow (if you aren't sure) and de-emphasize the compensation part. How do you do that? I think you basically need to make the guidance more general and then tailor it to a person. Therefore the guidance will be more hand wavy so you sacrifice some fairness. By de-emphasizing compensation, you'd probably also be making people who thrive on promotions and leveling up less happy.

I would honestly love to hear people's thoughts on this as I'm thinking about defining levels in the next few months.

One funny downside is that if you do enough startups you end up with a few that do really well later on and then you're kicking yourself for not joining. I have to remind myself of all the others that I interviewed at that didn't make it.

I used to do this as well and I still advise others to do this. It's worth reframing it. From: I love my current work and there's no way I would leave... To: What would be so awesome I would have to leave?

With this reframe I was always very up front to the hiring company. "I'm happy where I am but I'm open to interviewing and hearing what you have to offer." It puts you in a pretty powerful negotiating position (assuming you pass the interviews). Then if you like the company remind them that you are happy at your current job and ask for an amount (or hours, PTO, etc) that you would have no hesitation leaving your current job for. No ethical dilemma (in my opinion) and I've definitely accepted some of those offers.

Also it's fun to interview with no pressure to actually land a job. Not a totally fair comparison but my interview success rate at these is way higher than when I was actually looking for a job.

Rising Team | Full Stack and Frontend Software Engineers | Remote (Pacific/Mountain Time Zones) | Full-time

Have you ever had a manager who helped you achieve heights you hadn't imagined? How about a manager who made your life miserable?

I've experienced both. Your manager is critically important to your career and to your overall happiness. Our mission is to elevate managers to maximize the success of their teams and organizations. We envision a world where everyone in the workforce is deeply understood, supported, and empowered to reach their goals.

We live and breathe our own product and are looking for people who want to grow and be heard!

Women and underrepresented groups are strongly encouraged to apply. See full roles and apply at https://risingteam.com/careers or email me at jeff@risingteam.com.

I'm wondering if it would help to align incentives and motivations. I feel like right now it's possible your team members are not motivated to solve these problems. It seems like it might even be fine to be blocked for days or weeks. Not fine to you of course, but there doesn't seem to be a feedback loop right now. Note, I'm making assumptions here based on what you said.

What I like to do is to find the win-win for both me and my team members. If there's no reason for them to do better, why should they? Maybe you can get an understanding of what motivates them. Is it improving as an engineer? Better compensation? Getting promoted? I would imagine all of these are fairly easy to align with a goal of decreasing blocked time from weeks to hours. That's a huge difference in time!

Rising Team | Full Stack and Frontend Software Engineers | Remote (Pacific/Mountain Time Zones) | Full-time

Have you ever had a manager who helped you achieve heights you hadn't imagined? How about a manager who made your life miserable?

I've experienced both. Your manager is critically important to your career and to your overall happiness. Our mission is to elevate managers to maximize the success of their teams and organizations. We envision a world where everyone in the workforce is deeply understood, supported, and empowered to reach their goals.

We live and breathe our own product and are looking for people who want to grow and be heard!

Women and underrepresented groups are strongly encouraged to apply. See full roles and apply at https://risingteam.com/careers or email me at jeff@risingteam.com.

This is a great comment and I'm replying because I want to build on top of it.

Completely agree that the first priority is understanding your why and having a conversation with your manager.

After that, if you feel good about both paths, go ahead and try the managerial path. You've already experienced being an IC, why not experience management and see if you truly like it? As mentioned, it's easy to go back to being an IC and your management experience can only be helpful. You can set a timeline where you re-evaluate your decision so you don't get "stuck" by accident.

Lastly, the skills above like hard conversations are important, but you don't need to have the skills now. Right now you need to accept that you are okay with those being your reality and commit to learning the skills and not be that manager who doesn't tell you the truth and then you find out the hard way later on.

Rising Team | Full Stack and Frontend Software Engineers | SF Bay Area / Remote (PST or adjacent) | Full-time

Have you ever had a manager who helped you achieve heights you hadn't imagined? How about a manager who made your life miserable?

I've experienced both. Your manager is critically important to your career and to your overall happiness. Our mission is to elevate managers to maximize the success of their teams and organizations. We envision a world where everyone in the workforce is deeply understood, supported, and empowered to reach their goals.

We live and breathe our own product and are looking for people who want to grow and be heard!

Women and underrepresented groups are strongly encouraged to apply. See full roles at https://risingteam.com/careers or email me at jeff@risingteam.com.

Yes, it is experience/learning/environment based heuristics. And to me, there's nothing wrong with that. As humans, that's what we are programmed to do. It's completely natural. I would argue that it's pretty much inevitable.

Let's take your example and let's make it realistic and say there are 2 people in suits, one black and one white. Which one is the CEO? Heuristics say it's the white male. What is the difference between experience based heuristics and unconscious racism? It has to be internal to the person who is making the call. Because from any other perspective there is absolutely no difference.

As the parent said, these are honest mistakes. Based on what we learned from our parents, our culture, our peers. Based on our observations. We all have these prejudices. I certainly do. You call it experience based heuristics. I call it racism. Maybe it's not the technical definition of racism, but to me, if the only determining factor is the color of someone's skin, to me that is racism.

So is there a problem? I think we all agree there is. You even mentioned in your comment that this is a problem. Is it your fault? No. So if we agree there is a problem, the question you are asking is... should we do anything about it?

I am an optimist. And I do believe that eventually it will solve itself one way or another. But we can help. We can make it happen faster. This is a spectrum. One end is saying that it will happen anyways so why do anything about it? You could say a similar thing about any effort. Why contribute to cancer research? We will figure it out eventually. The reason is that we want it to happen faster. Because people are actively suffering, people are dying. This is happening to Black Americans right now and for centuries! The other end of the spectrum is equally ridiculous. Should you feel guilty and spend all your time on this cause? No.

I want to make one more point. I used to argue for experience-based heuristics. So. What is the argument in favor of experience-based heuristics? Well, the argument is that it's useful. It's a tool for making quick decisions that help you. It's most useful in situations where your safety is at risk. And yes, it's racist, but I'm not going to deny that it's useful for you to use heuristics to decide to walk quicker when you are walking through certain neighborhoods. I certainly would. But is it useful for you to assume that one person is a CEO? Or even a rapper? I'm pretty sure your safety is not at risk or there is an urgent need for a quick decision. I would argue it's actually starting to become harmful in today's environment to make these assumptions. And that's a great thing. Yes, it does suck for the people who were inadvertently caught between the old paradigm and the new paradigm. And I genuinely empathize with that and feel sorry for those people. And I wish we could all be more empathetic to that and seek to help those people rather than punish them. The new paradigm is better for us. For our society and for the majority of people. We are making progress. And we can accelerate that and make it happen faster.

It sounds bad, and it can be bad, but it's often not. It's all about perspective. Everything above is true. But more often than not it's worth it.

Why? I didn't know until I started responding. But I believe it's worth it. Let me throw some words out there. They may or may not resonate with you.

- Maybe it's because they are full and complete human beings, eventually capable of everything you are capable of and possibly much more.

- You will know everything about them and be responsible for molding them and teaching them and keeping them safe. Taking them from incapable blobs to a person who can think and make decisions and love and hurt.

- You will develop deep relationships and strong feelings for them, more than even for your spouse (which you never thought was possible), and deeper than any other project you'll ever take on.

- This thread is about deep friendships. This is deep. You will laugh with them and cry with them and argue with them. You will create and build things with them. You will discuss and debate things with them. You will challenge each other and make each other better.

- They will trust you like no one has ever trusted you. They will look up to you like no one has ever looked up to you. They will need you like no one has ever needed you. I mean it. No one. Your spouse has lived life before you. Your kids have not. Life without you isn't even conceivable.

- You will be imbued with purpose whether or not you already had purpose.

I state the above as if it were a certainty. It's not. Maybe I'm lucky. Some of the things above are choices you can make.

Some advice:

- Start with zero expectations of time. I took the first years of life with kids very badly because I felt like I lost my life and my time. Eventually I realized that this is my life now. Once I accepted that and stopped looking back and stopped looking forward everything got better. You will start to get more time back and that became a pleasant surprise rather than something I unhappily yearned for. There will be regressions (where you lose time you previously gained back). Expect them and learn how to drop things you were doing until the regression is over.

- Be present. Your kids don't have to have the best anything in order to turn out great. They just need you. When you are with them drop everything else even your thoughts. Be there for them. Play with them.

- Take care of yourself and your needs. Make sure you get enough sleep. Your baby is crying and you are desperate for sleep? Check if they are safe, if they have poop, if they've eaten and if they are warm. Done? Get some earplugs and go to bed. Seriously. Take care of yourself!

- Any time you are feeling at your wits end reset your assumptions and take care of yourself. Start with what's absolutely necessary and work from there. Feeling stretched financially? Kids don't have to be expensive. You need to feed them. You don't really need anything else, not even diapers. A nearby park maybe.