I got bored during a sprint retro and decided to build chaos.

Introducing: Unhinged Retros.

It’s a standard retrospective board, until the "Evil Mode" kicks in and changes your UI to this.

Includes anonymous sound effects to derail the meeting. Free & P2P.

Leave a comment to get an early access.

I made a risky bet with my wife 🫣

I recently got 2 big promotions in 4 months.

Her: "Make a video on how you did it"
Me: "No one watches an immigrant with an accent"

👉 100 Likes = Video in 48 hours.
❌ Fail = I’m off cooking duty (1mo).

Honestly... please don't like this 😅

The old common truth - "Praise in public, criticize in private" is only half right.

Public praise often backfires.

It creates jealousy, signals favoritism, and embarrasses introverts who hate the spotlight.

Here is a better way. 🧵

Nvidia has 25,000+ employees.
CEO Jensen Huang has nearly 40 direct reports.
Conventional management theory says this is impossible.
He makes it work by "flattening information" so nothing gets filtered by middle management. Here is his tactic. 🧵

my management resolution for 2026:

listen more. fix less.

as engineers, we are trained to patch bugs immediately.
as managers, sometimes people just want to vent, and my "solution" is actually annoying.

going to practice sitting on my hands.

"Let's set ambitious stretch goals!" - Management
"Let's set goals we can actually hit so we get our bonus." - Everyone else.
the dance continues.

"My door is always open."
This is lazy management.
It sounds supportive, but in reality, it destroys your productivity and trains your team to be helpless.
Close your door. Here is why. 🧵

Satya Nadella turned Microsoft around not by changing the strategy, but by changing one specific behavior in meetings.
He shifted the company from a "know-it-all" culture to a "learn-it-all" culture.
Here is the tactical framework he used to stop internal politics. 🧵

Pay attention to the quiet ones on your team.

The loud ones will tell you when they are unhappy. The quiet ones will just send you a resignation letter one Tuesday morning out of nowhere.

Engineer: "This will take 2 hours."

Me (translating): "This will take 2 days."

2 weeks later

Me: "So about that ticket..."

I'd rather have a "good" engineer with high EQ than a "10x" engineer who refuses to document their code.

The "10x" engineer creates technical debt. The high EQ engineer creates psychological safety.

One scales. The other doesn't.

I stopped asking "how can i help you?" in 1-1s.

It's too broad. people say "nothing, i'm good."

Now I ask: "what is the most annoying thing on your plate right now?"

I usually get an hour-long rant. Much better data.

The specific anxiety of remembering you promised to look at a doc "over the weekend" at 9pm on Sunday….

Seeing a "quick sync" appear on my calendar at 4:30pm on a friday triggers my fight or flight response.

Spoiler: it’s mostly flight.

Hot take: the best senior engineers make the worst managers.

We take our best coders, remove their dopamine source (shipping code), and replace it with their kryptonite (meetings/ambiguity).

Then we wonder why they burn out in 6 months.

Early in my management career, I tried to "shield" my team from everything. Corporate politics, bad news, budget cuts.
I thought I was being a hero.
Actually, I was just treating adults like children. They resented me for the lack of context.
transparency > protection. I learned that the hard way.

I'm an engineering manager but I still freeze up during 1-1s.

I know the theory (a lot of managerial training, etc) but in the moment I sometimes revert to "how’s it going? good? cool."

Does anyone else feel like a "theoretical" good manager but a "practical" bad one?

The emotional labor of keeping your camera on during a meeting where you haven't spoken for 45 minutes is unpaid overtime.

Just let me eat my lunch in the dark in peace.

Fellow EMs: What is the most unhinged candidate interaction you’ve ever had?

I just opened a reply that simply said: 'f*ck you.'

Try to top that in the comments. 👇