In today's episode I give some pointers to people who have just recently become engineering managers.  Not really a Management 101, since it's not comprehensive.  But definitely a subset of Management 101.

In this episode I talk a bit about Grab's super app strategy, and where super apps came from, and why you should invest in them. I cut over 20 minutes of blathering about unrelated topics in this episode, so the editing and continuity are a bit choppy. I'll do better next time! I wanted to talk more about Grab's platform and APIs, but rambled on too much and didn't get a chance. I'll follow up with some more Grab-specific concrete details in a future episode. I feel like I really didn't...

Special New Years Episode:  A call to action. Spread awareness of sexual harassment in the workplace, help put an end to it, and also -- to companies with great training materials -- STOP keeping them confidential and proprietary. Nobody talks about this stuff. That's a problem. This was not an easy episode to do. But this needs to be addressed. Help me out by spreading the word.

I'm going to do a series of talks about Grab Inc, a ride-hailing service in Southeast Asia, where I served as Head of Engineering, Ads, Monetization, and Data Insights for 2.5 years.  It was and still is a pretty incredible company. This talk is "breadth-first", were I just talk randomly about my impressions of the whole space, starting with the weather and ending with the business opportunities for 640 million people in Southeast Asia. I will do more focused talks about Grab in future...

The steamy, sordid tale of how drank a bottle of wine, wrote a rant, and wound up on the front page of the Wall Street Journal.

I tell the sad but kinda funny tale of how I basically failed my first Google interview.

Today I talk a bit about how Big Tech companies split into "tribes", usually by geography, and how you can avoid the pitfalls that inevitably tend to occur.

Hey folks, thanks for watching the channel. Today's talk is my 7-or-so-step plan, give or take, for becoming a leader who can motivate your people to do their best and most sustainable work for the company. And I'm talking about motivating the right way, which is NOT to rule by fear. You want people to LOVE their jobs; hence the icon for the thumbnail. I've been told that many people may not realize that subscribing/liking/commenting are all actually really good for the channel, because they...

In this episode I rant at length about the terrible reasons that people have for wanting to go into management/leadership.  I get really worked up by the end. Just to clarify one part of the video, I really love both Korea and Japan. They both have great food, great movies and shows, great people, and are both amazing and awesome countries. They just have terrible, TERRIBLE tech management culture, each in their own messed-up way. And they're not the only ones; they just happen to be two...

This episode is a retrospective, where I answer questions people have been asking me about various themes in the past 19 episodes.  Main questions answered:   * Am I underpaid?   * Can I really get into the tech industry that quickly?   * Why do you talk so much about geopolitics, and how is it relevant?   * Why do you talk so much about how toxic Amazon and other companies were? Those are the big ones.  I think most of the episode is talking about compensation packages, and differences...

I'm finally starting my leadership series. This first talk is for you, if you think you might ever want to go into Management in Big Tech. I cover some of the things that you might not expect or be prepared for, that I've run across in my career, with colorful examples.  Topics I cover include:   * Different management styles, and how everyone feels uncomfortable at some point   * How things can surprise you when you're least expecting them   * Good and bad ways to handle crisis...

I talk about how messed up tech interviewing is, and yet it's sort of the best we've got... or is it?

Several people asked me to talk about Amazon vs. Google and compare them, so I'm doing that in this episode.  I talk a lot about what it's like to work for Google. The dude in the beginning is a little joke, since one of you said I look like a bearded floating head. Which is accurate, since that's the look I'm going for, inspired by the guy at the beginning of Ultima Underworld.

This is the one. The episode where you decide that listening to me was the biggest waste of time in possibly your entire life. I rant like a certifiably crazy person about tinfoil hat conspiracy theories, and throw out strong opinions about subjects I know almost nothing about. You know, like usual.

This episode is two parts.  The first half is me telling the story of how this channel came to be, why I'm doing it in this format, and my future plans.  The second part explains WHY I'm doing the show - it's to help prepare you for some pretty awful stuff that's going to happen soon.  Feel free to skip the first half if you just want to know how you may be affected.

In this episode I take off the boxing gloves and plop on the brass knuckles. I talk about just how horrifically a senior executive can hurt or even kill a company, with lots of examples and real-life stories.

I talk about the tricky problem of having a manager (at any level) who is hurting the company and requires corrective action.  There is a playbook for this, and I walk you through it.  This talk mostly applies to the Big Tech industry specifically, for reasons I outline at the beginning.

Google's promotion process is VERY different from how it works at most companies.  They have spent years refining the process, and it avoids a lot of the dysfunction and problems that happen at other companies. It's worth a look just to see what you can learn from it.

In this episode I talk about my online multiplayer computer game, Wyvern (https://ghosttrack.com).  It has been a 25-year journey, and it wound up being responsible for the pretty awesome career I've had in Big Tech. I talk about the game, the players, and the learnings I've had from it. I hope you enjoy this little detour episode!

Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates are in a race to polish up their image for future generations. Both of them were Bad Guys, but only one of them seems to be on track to atone for it. Warning: I trash talk a lot of billionaires in this episode.

In this episode I talk about how I struggled with learning programming, and eventually made it into the tech industry, where you can very easily make millions of dollars--and that's even more true with each passing year.  I give some tips on how to approach it and think about it, and encourage you to at least TRY it, since it can completely transform your life.

In this episode I talk about a kind of corporate disease that I'm calling "structural dysfunction", where employees are set up to fight with each other, because they have overlapping or even competing job descriptions. This is stupid. Obviously. But companies do it ALL THE TIME, and I give some personal examples and some famous examples.

In this episode I begin the journey (completed in episode 16) of explaining the operation of the biggest company in the world, and how and why they are going to be so dominant for the next 100+ years.

This is my first episode fully dedicated to a particular and VERY common corporate disease called a "centralized DevOps team". I explain how Google does DevOps, how Amazon does it, the "right" way to do it, and finally, how the centralized team is the worst possible way to do it. I get riled up and rant a lot in this episode.

In this episode I conclude my first 3-part series on Amazon's world-class execution.  I talk about how Amazon treats their corporate customers and their developers, and how different it is from Microsoft, Google and other companies competing with Amazon.