Years ago, when I first joined Tripadvisor, we had a tool that moved data to Amazon Redshift. One of the engineers went on holiday, the tool had a few bugs, and people were blocked. It needed immediate attention. I jumped in. I stayed until almost 1 a.m. some nights. Sometimes I had to manually hold things together, debug issues on […]
Teams spend months hiring a strong candidate. Sourcing, interviews, debriefs, approvals, compensation, notice period. Everyone treats the hire like a serious investment. Then the new joiner goes through induction, gets set up, and by the end of their first week feels like they have wandered into an archaeology project. Which service owns this path? Which document is still accurate? Why […]
It was during my college years that I saw the Big Lebowski for the first time. Within days, my friends and I were calling each other “dude”. Living in Turkey, despite English-speaking classes, the word “dude” entered our lives because of this movie. Even now, wherever someone asks: what’s the big deal with the Big Lebowski? A part of me […]
In 1911, Frederick Winslow Taylor published The Principles of Scientific Management and helped cement one of management’s oldest instincts. In simple terms, break work into measurable units, optimize for efficiency, and add labor when output falls behind. More than a century later, we still make the same category error. We confuse software planning with arithmetic. Multiply headcount by weeks. Voilà, […]
When I was young, I worked in carpentry during the summers. Summer was busy. New buildings had to go up. Stables needed repairs. Barns needed extensions. Sheds had to be built out in the fields. Demand was high. Our bottleneck was capacity. We had one saw, and one person could run it at a time. Yes, we could extend the […]