I have a new job!

Sorry for the lack of newsletters for the past ... 3 months. I accepted a new role at the end of March and it's been full on since then. There's also the matter of not wanting to write highly opinionated newsletters when I'm just getting started given that people will (perhaps rightly) assume that they're actually written with my new role in mind. I was also a bit stuck on my last piece, and it's highly relevant to my new role, so that also slowed things down.

There are a couple of things on my mind as I'm settling into this new role. The first is that a few years ago I finally was able to reconcile writing in public with having a job that's highly visible internally. It was easy to write online when I was an individual contributor–my job was mostly writing code, not influencing other people. Once I became a manager it was obvious that people paid attention to my public writing and that it did influence people and their opinions of me (sometimes in ways that I didn't expect or desire). For a long time I just gave up on it.

A few years ago my coach suggested that writing publicly is a useful tool for leaders and that I should intentionally write things in public as part of my approach to communicating with internal audiences. The insight is simple–when you say things in public, people take them seriously. I like writing in public, but I never figured out how to reconcile it in my mind until I realized that I should see it as part of my job rather than as a hobby. My writing just needs to support whatever I'm trying to achieve at work.

You can expect me to keep writing the newsletter, and that if I write about it here it relates in some way to what I'm working on (even if it's just to document my perspective on a topic that's relevant to my work).

I also gave a last lecture at my old job, and it was chock full of topics that are relevant to the newsletter that I hope to write about soon.

I'll be back with a newsletter about the importance of avoiding a NIMBY culture in engineering soon.