Brian Lowe’s Post

"Will Larson is the chief technology officer at Carta. Prior to joining Carta, he was the CTO at Calm and held engineering leadership roles at Stripe, Uber, and Digg. He is the author of two foundational engineering career books, An Elegant Puzzle and Staff Engineer, and The Engineering Executive’s Primer, which will be released in February of next year. In our conversation, we discuss: • Systems thinking: what it is and how to apply it • Advice for product managers on fostering productive relationships with engineering managers • Why companies should treat engineers like adults • How to best measure developer productivity • Writing and its impact on his career • How to balance writing with a demanding job • How to develop your company values" https://lnkd.in/ezUCfZMK

$250k guaranteed salary to $0 in the middle of a pandemic. Irene Yu, Skiplevel's founder and CEO left her cushy software engineering job at Amazon in October 2020. In the last newsletter of 2023, learn about about the insights and lessons Irene learned from navigating conversations with product managers. Read the full essay and learn more at https://lnkd.in/dQAQi4Ze!

Have you ever felt completely lost in a new role? When I first started as a software engineer, I was over my head. 😰 I had no idea what I was doing. I'd spend hours googling code snippets... hoping I could somehow glue things together. But it just got harder when things needed to change at an architectural level... because I couldn't find the answers I needed on Google! My boss was definitely not happy with my progress, or lack thereof. Those meetings we had were super frustrating for both of us. 😔 I was dreading every day, scared I was about to get fired. Things really hit rock bottom when I started panicking about losing my job. I knew I had to change something, or I was doomed. So, I swallowed my pride and asked one of the senior engineers for help with some basic functionality. While he helped me, some of the things he said really cut deep, like, "You're drowning because you don't know how to swim. I'm not gonna hold your hand." Ouch! That's when the lightbulb went off for me - I realized I had no idea what I was actually doing! 💡 It felt like I was trying to sail a ship without a rudder. I hadn't laid the groundwork at all. I knew I couldn't keep floundering like that. So, I made a choice to sign up for an intensive training program on the weekends to finally learn the basics. Those four months were grueling. But eventually, it started to click for me. Being able to apply what I learned to my project was such a relief, like a salve on a wound. Things finally started looking up. 😊 What I learned was... that my weakness at the job had actually been my strength in battling the turmoil alone.. and NOT giving up. It gave me the guts to face challenges head-on and overcome them, keeping my goals in sight through the storm. ✌️ P.S. Every pain introduces us to ourselves.   Pain can stop us dead in our tracks like a boulder in the path. 🛑 Or It can cause us: ...to face dragons we would like to avoid ...to uproot weeds we would rather let grow ...to brace against gale-force changes that leave us uncomfortable.

In the work https://lnkd.in/durDSHfe Sankar Ragunathan and I extend the spring-coupling idea for numerical solutions of SDE by Wei Fang and Mike Giles to high-order numerical methods. This improves the variance decay rate and the efficiency of weak approximations of invariant measures.

The journey to a tech career begins with single line of code.

🌟 “🔥 Completed the rigorous Walmart Advanced Software Engineering Simulation via Forage! 🎯 From debugging intricate code to optimizing algorithms, I’ve honed my skills for the tech world. 🚀 Ready to make an impact! 💡 #SoftwareEngineering #WalmartForage #TechJourney #CareerGrowth #CodingSkills” 🌐

3 UBER WINS 👇 Uber for Business faced a surge in new rep headcount, and it was critical to maintain efficiency while keeping the revenue operations team lean.  If the first cohort of new hires didn’t perform as expected, it could disrupt the entire plan for subsequent hires, causing late iterations and potential setbacks… So Nick Lewis and the team at Uber for Business turned to Gong. Read their full story here and see the 3 wins here: https://lnkd.in/gqmMmUAs

Finally graduated and ready start a new career as a software engineer.

Thought leaders who are the very best create books that people can use. Over and over. To help us get out of tough spots. I've been fortunate to be in the inner circle with Stephen Shapiro as he wrote, rewrote, edited, revised and now completed his 32 month journey toward this book, Pivotal. He's done the work to make the book a perfect combination of practical and original. When you read it (yes, buy it today), you'll think, "that's why I've been so stuck before and wow, I see a way out." The punchline is that we need to stop being in love with that ever-famous "pivot" and start falling back in love with digging in deeper to our customer relationships, our core talents, our secret sauce, our superpowers. Don't love em and leave em. Discover what's truly pivotal and double down on it. Bravo, Stephen, for doing the process with a community and for making a book that's incredibly useful (and funny and personal and might I add...PURPLE.) #innovationdoneright #pivotal #ecosystem

Ever feel like you're just being spun around in circles, trying to keep up with the relentless pace of change, innovation, and disruption? It would be nice to feel like you've got some kind of anchor. Some fixed point of stability from which to adapt and iterate. With his newest book, Pivotal: Creating Stability in an Uncertain World, Stephen Shapiro helps us "build a robust foundation that supports future shifts without wasting valuable resources on bright, shiny objects or fleeting fads." If there was ever a time many of us needed this type of strong foundation, it's now. Getting my copy today!