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Views = mine. Engineering Manager at Spotify 🤓👩🏽💻 ✊🏾 Whisk(e)y woman 👩🏽🏫🥃 UVA Alum🔸 Scuba Diver 🤿 IG: womanwithwhiskey
Washington, DC
Joined June 2017
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Random internet manager here 👋🏽 I have so many thoughts here and if you don’t know me, I’m known for building psychologically safe and efficient teams. Some of my favorite compliments I’ve received about my management are: 1- “your team would run through brick walls for you”. 2- “your team doesn’t play about you, even when you’re not around” 3- many of my engineers saying they’d following me “anywhere”
I know it’s not common but I LOVE trying to be the best manager I can be to each person on my team. However, I understand that mode of thinking isn’t for everyone.
But no matter what your mindset is on management, I truly believe a few ways of working will help you build an effective and stable team that’s built to last.
First, the quoted post is right. Some managers intentionally don’t grow engineers to keep the team “stable”. But if an engineer feels they don’t have room to grow and/or are unhappy, they’re not going to do their best work. Potentially creating a drag on the team until they finally find their exit. If you have motivated people, do your best to align them with what makes them tick and let them soar. Quality people will always be able to leave, help them see the value in staying. And when it does come time for them to leave, don’t take it personal. It’s a job 💜
Second, if onboarding people is a grueling task, dig into why. Yes, people take time to get organizational context, but are there other onboarding changes you could make to make things more smooth? Outdated documentation? Breaking down knowledge siloes? Engineers who don’t want to help their team? Whatever it is, lessen the impact of the onboarding drag.
Third, great employees are hard to find. If you find a few, do you really want to lose them because you’re scared they’ll leave? IMHO, I prefer to give these phenomenal employees a work environment that’s hard to find elsewhere. Giving a crap puts you ahead of majority of managers.
Fourth, I want to acknowledge that the industry is in a tight spot right now. If you lose someone, you may not get the backfill. Which can feel scary when the workload isn’t decreasing. But even with the potential of losing the headcount, I still stand by the fact that limiting your people’s growth isn’t the fix here. If anything, managers should lean into coaching and aligning their people with high impact work in case the team’s value ever comes into question.
Lastly, remember that your best people can always leave. If they’re good enough, there’s likely always another company that wants them. Refusing to nurture their career will only expedite their exit. My approach is to make sure they enjoy their time under my management so I can slowly but surely build my “forever team” of people I’d hire anywhere I work.
Most managers already know how to run great 1:1s. They choose not to because their org punishes them for it.
Every experienced manager has heard the advice. Let your reports own the agenda. Focus on their growth. Coach instead of direct. They learned it in their first leadership training. They’ve read the books. They’ve nodded along in the workshops.
They still run status update 1:1s. And the reason is structural.
A manager who develops their reports well creates people who get promoted out, get poached, or start asking for the manager’s job. A manager who runs low-energy status updates keeps the team stable, dependent, and unlikely to leave. HR tracks attrition as a negative on the manager’s scorecard. Nobody tracks “I developed three people so well they all got promoted in 18 months” as a win.
The incentive math is brutal. Develop your people → they leave → you backfill → you spend 6 months ramping a new hire → your team’s output craters during the transition → your performance review suffers. Run status updates → team stays put → output is predictable → you look like a stable operator.
This is why advice like this resonates massively and changes almost nobody’s behavior. The managers reading and bookmarking it will open their next 1:1 on Monday and ask “so what’s your status on the Q2 deliverables?” Because their org rewards exactly that.
The managers who actually run great 1:1s tend to work at companies where developing people out of your team is celebrated. Those orgs are rare. And until that changes, most 1:1s stay exactly where they are: status updates with a calendar invite.
I’m at my nephew’s flag football game and the field next to their game has a team of all girls and they are DOMINATING.
I love to see it.
“The result is never in question for me. Just what path do you take to get there.”
- Abel, A Most Violent Year
Negotiating to buy a home can be such an interesting and laborious process. Loan process aside, the emotions sellers have tied to a home and/or how much they “feel” their house is worth can make things 10x harder than it needs to be.
My uber driver is going below the speed limit while cruising in the left lane on the highway.
It’s taking everything out of me to keep my trap shut on this 25 minute ride.
My husband noticed I was angry and pensive as he kissed me goodbye so he asked me what’s wrong.
I told him I was actively considering asking the mortgage lenders if they’d also like to see a picture of my butthole to make sure no one has been siphoning me money in there either.
Needless to say, that was not the response he was expecting 😂
Taylor Poindexter retweeted
We may be hiring some people at DirectMeds if you want to hang out sometimes at work.
Shoot me a DM.
EDIT: Remote, US Only. Mountain Time hours.
Taylor Poindexter retweeted
Wealth building, to me, has never been about chasing shiny things. It is about financial control, not waiting on someone else to decide your fate.
The old gatekeepers are falling. The only one left is information, and that gate opens from the inside.
Walk through it at TonyaEvans.com
Heartbreaking and infuriating wusa9.com/article/life/local…
I watched a show about squatters and it is absolutely mind blowing that someone could break into your home, stay, and they immediately have rights.
People are also pair programming less in the workforce. In a society where we were already leaning into less in person interactions, I hate the idea of us leaning even further into it.
The post mentions office hours being empty and studying groups disappearing from the college experience which makes me wonder how effective future generations will be when it comes to talking to and collaborating with other humans if we can’t change this trajectory.
MIT published a brutally honest report on what AI is doing to students.
A committee of professors and students spent five months studying how AI changed learning on campus, and the findings read like a warning to every university on the planet.
Study groups are disappearing. Office hours are emptying out. Problem sets and take-home exams no longer prove anything, because AI can produce credible solutions to almost any written assignment in the undergraduate curriculum. Students who lean on chatbots lose mastery and confidence, and some slip into what the report calls cognitive surrender, reaching for AI at the first hint of struggle.
The numbers are rough. 46 percent of surveyed MIT undergrads use LLMs daily. 90 percent worry about their own overreliance. Undergrads who feel AI makes them replaceable now outnumber those who feel it makes them capable.
The committee's answer surprised me. They refused to fight AI with surveillance. The report calls AI detectors unreliable, says lockdown browsers feel like spying, and warns that policing students builds a classroom atmosphere of mutual distrust.
Instead, MIT wants to rebuild education around the things AI can't replace. That means oral exams, semester portfolios, in-person project work, and a required social component in every subject. The report even floats the idea of rethinking grades entirely, since without a GPA to optimize, much of the incentive to cheat with AI evaporates.
The committee warns professors against replacing undergrad research assistants with AI agents just because they're cheaper, because a university exists to grow people, not output.
The most famous tech school on earth admitted the machines broke its way of teaching. Its answer is more humans, not more software.
Just saw a high schooler walking with his lady, holding hands. Then I noticed that he was carrying his own backpack while carrying his lady’s purse in his opposite hand.
The kids are alright.
Taylor Poindexter retweeted
since becoming president again, Trump has promised:
-$5000 stimulus checks via "DOGE dividend"
-$2000 stimulus checks via "tariff dividend"
-$1000+ checks via "savings" from expiring ACA subsidies
-$5000 "dividend" if Rs win midterms
no checks have been issued
Trump: "If the Republicans win the House of Representatives and the United States Senate...I will issue a dividend to every adult citizen in the United States of America for $5,000."
20 years from now, I likely won't remember the exact details around how a person wronged me. But you know who will? MY MOM 🤣
It cracks me up how she consistently remembers these details better than me.