Hey friends, I’ve been running shippo careers, including its predecessor, my Google-internal Career Reflection Fridays, for more than 3 years, but as you may have noticed, I’ve recently fallen a bit behind. Due to some recent family events, I’m stepping back from the paid newsletter in 2025.
Have a question for Steph? Submit it here or email steph@shippocareers.com with "Ask Steph" in the subject line. If your question is chosen, you’ll get a copy of the response, regardless of whether or not you’re a paid subscriber yet. Questions are posted anonymously,
When you manage more senior engineers, there eventually comes a time for an awkward conversation. Do you… actually want the next promotion? It’s an important topic and one that’s a landmine for misinterpretation. A lot of engineers meet the question with another question: “Why wouldn’t I want
As you move up a ladder, you might experience a weird phenomenon: your “soft” skills start to matter a whole lot more after you spent years proving your technical chops. As more and more of your job becomes coordinating or leading a larger group of people, those technical skills are
When I talk to engineers who feel stuck in their current roles, one of the first orders of business is pulling up their job ladder and really talking about it. You and your manager should regularly look at your job ladder, make sure you both understand it, and maybe evaluate
Have a question for Steph? Submit it here or email steph@shippocareers.com with "Ask Steph" in the subject line. If your question is chosen, you’ll get a copy of the response, regardless of whether or not you’re a paid subscriber yet. Questions are posted anonymously,
The higher you go up in management, the greater your sphere of influence and responsibility. That also comes with a larger blast radius when things go wrong. As they say, the bigger they come, the harder they fall. You’re responsible for more people and that means the sine wave
When I was a tech lead on an SRE team, I was working with one of our partners and I had been in a stalemate with one of their leads over an architecture decision. We’d been disagreeing on what approach to take for his service, and I couldn’t
A while back, my friend Andrew and I were talking about how you shake off the tough days. Maybe you mess up something at work that you should have caught. Maybe someone gives you feedback that you needed to hear but weren’t ready to hear, and you start doubting
Have a question for Steph? Submit it here or email steph@shippocareers.com with "Ask Steph" in the subject line. If your question is chosen, you’ll get a copy of the response, regardless of whether or not you’re a paid subscriber yet. Questions are posted anonymously,
Your best teachers are the ones who sit next to you. The manager learning curve is steeper and your blast radius for messing up is larger. Mistakes are going to cause larger ripple effects, not just in your career, but others’, too. You get a limited number of direct reports
When someone first becomes a Team Lead, there’s a very real trend of them suddenly feeling like they’re failing at their job because they’re not as “productive” as they used to be. It’s usually that their work is different now, and they haven’t learned how