This is a set of posts that I’d like to highlight, generally longer and more in-depth thoughts that hopefully make for interesting reading.
in|retrospect Articles.
Argh, this year. I’m hardly original in bidding good riddance to a frustrating and challenging year, though the weight of ongoing pandemic is, in a macabre way, a continual reminder for me to be grateful for continued health and economic …
After Donald Trump was elected in 2016 and through the duration of his first term as the US President, there have been, by my estimation, at least two new types of literature that have gotten popular, usually in the form …
No fine print. It was a few months after I started my new job at Affirm, when I noticed this literally plastered on the hallway walls leading to the company kitchens. Out of our set of company’s values, this principle …
The lengthy, yet just beginning wildfire season in California this year is already exhausting. Starting with the random dry lightning strikes sparking a trio of the largest wildfires our state has experienced on record, it has been one crisis after …
The COVID-induced crisis is supposedly an accelerant of trends. If so, it seems inevitable that remote and distributed work will be rolled out and truly tested on a broad scale; many companies of the technology persuasion have been announcing their …
Recently, I’ve been helping our company make a handful of business-critical hires for the team, one of which is an open managerial role in our New York office. I’ve long believed that hiring is a core management responsibility, and I’ve …
We’re all very tired. 2020 has so far been a living rendition of the supposed Chinese curse, “may you live in interesting times”. Given all the major events that have occurred thus far, it’s actually hard to remember all that’s …
The drumbeat of unprecedented events come at a daily clip. Disney resorts, for the first time, shut down indefinitely. The stock market, with some of the biggest index drops ever and a place in macroeconomic history books. The highest number …
As of the first draft of this post, it’s been 6 days since my company transitioned most of its workforce into work-from-home arrangements, which was coincidentally the same day that the NBA suspended its entire season as one of its …
It started with a tweet: Agreed, particularly in looking for an external hire, it’s to compliment a missing piece within the current team and more often than not it’s the management piece. — Allen Cheung (@allenmhc) January 23, 2020 If …
2019 marks the end of the second decade in the 21st century. I’m going to resist the temptation to do the thing where you look back at the past 10 years and try to sum up 3652.5 individual days into …
I’ve been thinking a lot recently about organizational structure and design. Eventually, I’m reminded and inevitably return to Conway’s Law: Any organization that designs a system (defined broadly) will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization’s …