Tag Archives: management

I hate going on vacation

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I get four weeks of vacation a year. It’s not a lot, especially now that I have a family that I want to spend lots of time with. But you make do with what you have, right?

My problem isn’t so much the lack of time I have to use, it’s the time I have to spend up-front before I can leave the office. That’s what I’m going through right now, so I can spend 2.5 weeks in the UK (and another week in San Francisco on a conference, pretty much as soon as I get back).

There is never a “good time” to be away from Critical Mass — something is always happening. And I fear that this might be a worse time than usual to be gone.

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My Expectations of a Technology Team

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I’m a tough person. I don’t settle for mediocrity in my own work, or in the work of those who work with me. There are the minimum height bars, and then there are the ones I set. Knee-capping height, some even high enough to deliver serious abdominal or even cranial damage if you’re not careful. Normally, I subject only myself to these standards, and beat myself up when I don’t achieve them. But as I’m also a manager, they do creep into others’ reviews.

In 2005, I think many people thought I was an outright ass for marking people as hard as I did. I gave “average” marks to otherwise outstanding people who made one or two mistakes. I considered them serious mistakes. Not ones that would get people fired, but ones that I really felt needed direct attention. There were repercussions to myself though, and I was brought to task for those marks. Not for the marks themselves, but for the way it was communicated. How are people to know what they’re being evaluated against?

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Promotion to Manager … uh oh!

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It seems that good things do happen to those who wait. Surprisingly enough, that also applies to me.

You may recall some weeks ago, [[The Hell of my job|I lamented Critical Mass' ability to see the need to promote from within]]. It wasn’t so much about me as it was about using the resources we had, and not stalling forever on putting people into open positions.

I kept raising the red flag. I was, well, a kind of whistle-blower, but only in reminding management that we were rapidly heading for a serious problem if we didn’t fill the position that I knew needed to be filled. I bugged Allard, and I bugged Cory. I wanted to make sure that we would have some sort of movement on the issue.

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Middle Management

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I found out today that I’ve become middle management. I’ve become my own arch-nemesis.

Critical Mass has (almost) finished its massive organizational effort. It’s not really a reorganization, per se, but it is a process that we’ve needed to go through for a very long time.

This year, Critical Mass turns eight years old. It’s been almost six years since the launch of our first website. I’m employee #175, and new people are in the #400 range. We’ve got a lot of people that need organziation to get through their daily lives. So with the introduction of Thelton, our new COO (well, “new” as of September), we dove into the melee of putting an actual structure into Critical Mass.

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