Bad managers can make a good team bad, a bad team worse, and in either case will make you want to pull your hair out and scream into the void. — This post was originally published at https://www.peterfraedrich.com/5-habits-of-bad-managers/ We’ve all been there, had those jobs, and worked for those people: bad managers. Bad managers can make a good team bad, a bad team worse, and in either case will make you want to pull your hair out and scream into the…

All of the things that I wish I had known when I was becoming a first-time manager. — This post was originally published at https://www.peterfraedrich.com/5-tips-for-new-managers-things-i-wish-i-had-known/ My brother called me out of the blue the other day. “Hey, I got something I want to run by you real quick,” he said, “I’m applying for a manager position and could use your perspective on some stuff.” In all honesty, I…

The ability to drill down into the minute details and still understand how they impact the whole is, in my estimation, one of the greatest skills that an engineer can have regardless of engineering specialty. — This post was originally published at https://www.peterfraedrich.com/deep-skills/ With a single blog post, Netflix showed the world that they have probably the best engineering team on the planet. And I don’t think it’s even close right now. What they showed was an engineering team that is perfectly capable of operating at…

I applied for close to 500 jobs and learned some things along the way. — This post was originally published at https://www.peterfraedrich.com/i-applied-for-483-jobs/ I was laid off from my position in June 2022 and suddenly found myself back in the job hunt with the rest of the 250,000 people who also got laid off around that time. I did a short stint back at a previous…

More like a half-truth. — As someone who has been actively job-seeking for the past few months (thanks layoffs!), and having been involved in hiring and recruting tech talent for long before that, there’s been a trend emerging in the job market that is actively hurting job seekers and benefitting companies in ways that may…

Not always, at least — There seems to be some confusion these days when it comes to the idea of tech debt and what it means for an organization. You can find a dozen articles and whitepapers on any given day that espouse working down tech debt at all costs, and they just so happen…

You can do everything else right, but if your DEI initiative doesn’t also address this one thing…well, you’re doing it wrong. — Spend any time job hunting and you’re likely to see one requirement pop up over and over again, mocking you like the dog from Duck Hunt. Sometimes its pinned to the top of the job description, sometimes it’s buried at the bottom in the small text, but it’s usually there…