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Jin's Muse on Engineering
  • About Me
  • Leadership
    • About Work
      • Work Like Watching a Movie
      • The day you leave …
      • The inner game of work
      • Routinization - how great institutions become mediocre
      • Have You Lost Your Stories
      • I wish I knew when I was facing layoffs
      • How to get out of this boring job
      • Why Setbacks Can Be Good for Your Career
      • What do we get from returning to office?
      • What if this is the last year you work here
      • Learning, Balancing, Falling - Don’t Stop
      • Who is the boss?
      • Under the Emperor’s New Clothes
      • Are you getting the right opportunities?
      • The elements of a healthy organization
      • Do What You Love vs. Love What You Do
    • About Life
      • Accept the things we cannot change ...
      • Live backwards
      • Life, one breath away, one breath a time
      • Will to Power
      • Learn from stand-up comedian
      • Connect the dots - submit to life’s entropy
    • Leadership Pinciples
      • The thing about Amazon’s leadership principles
      • Vision, Mission, Roadmap - But First, Eat What You Cook
      • Calibration - how we compare
      • But We are on the same side!
      • Leaders need two plans
      • Whose results are you delivering?
      • Coaching through open ended questions
      • This is the new year, and who will you delight?
      • Anti-fragility and Over-thinking
      • So ... what’s your decision
      • No Super Hero in Team
      • Congrats, you are the owner!
    • Communication
      • What, So What, Now What
        • Just tell me what’s next!
      • The Power of Repetition
      • Passing the Story Along
      • Lost in Translation
      • Chopstick War
      • How you speak about the most impactful project
      • Are we really listening
    • Problem Solving
      • How we resolve conflicts
      • Problem Solving: Leader Define Process and Better Leader Define StandardPage
      • If Kant and Nietzsche read Annie Duke's "How to Decide"
  • Engineering
    • Best Practices
      • Accuracy Ain't Always the Truth
      • No excuse for bad engineering
      • Secret of good engineering: constraint, not more time, or resource
      • The Art of Picking the Right Problems
      • Choosing the Right Battle: The Path to Productivity and Satisfaction
      • The Power Balance in Software Development
      • Three Ways of Invent and Simplify
      • Work backwards from demo-able sprint goals
      • That last 1%: from good to great
      • When it is too hard ... don't do it!
      • What Engineering can learn from Sports: Time it!
      • Struggling with Sprint Goals? Try Working Backward
      • Why working on a “legacy service” is a good thing
    • Operational Excellence
      • On dashboard
        • Dashboard Quality Vs. Product Quality
      • How we turn operation problems into big data innovation
      • Don’t automate 100%
        • 99% Automated - deleted an on-call rotation!
      • How we got rid of log diving
      • No perfect runbook - map is not territory
      • Someone have to be oncall, why they can’t be you?
        • Why being oncall is a good thing
        • If Sherlock is On-Call ...
        • Inner Peace During Oncall
      • Monitoring Your Service Health Like Human
    • Software Architecture
      • The Curse of the "Next Generation Project"
      • Absurdity in Decoupling
        • Tension of Decoupling and Cohesion
      • The ideal software form
        • Composition Over Inheritance
      • Security and Safety
      • Architecture Properties for Security Services
      • Learn system design from Git - Multilayered Architecture
        • Learn system design from Git - Immutable content-addressable datastore
        • Learn system design from Git - Event Sourcing
        • Learn system design from Git - Evolutionary Architecture
      • Quality starts with local stack
      • Intention-Revealing Interfaces with Examples
      • Design Principles
    • Distributed Computing
      • The beauty of multi-process applications
      • Cook Concurrent, Parallel, Async, and Non-blocking Together (1)
      • Cook Concurrent, Parallel, Async and Non-blocking Together (2)
      • Cook Concurrent, Parallel, Async and Non-Blocking Together (3) - The Multitasking Myth
      • The Local and Global Optimization Trade-Off in System Design
      • Throttling, Traffic Shaping, Traffic Shedding and Circuit Breakers in System Design
      • Differences Between Service Discovery and Load Balancing
        • Load balancer
      • Power of Two Choices
      • Using High Percentile Latency to Detect Resource Constraints
      • Queuing's Impact on High Percentile Latency
    • Machine Learning
      • Are you underfitting or overfitting?
      • How to lead an underfitting team
      • How to lead an overfitting team
      • Project Management and Neural Networks
      • Cryptography and Machine Learning
    • Programming
      • Can you create a language interpreter?
    • Cryptography
      • Explore KMS with CodeWhisperer (and a Dash of Cryptography) - AES-GCM
      • Exploring KMS with a Dash of Philosophy - HASH
      • Explore KMS' RSA encryption: a tale of two keys
      • Explore KMS - the monkey business of Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC)Page
  • Project Management
    • Setting goals
      • The Words of Goals
      • Why deadline is a good thing
      • Can you ship it?
      • One Thing Worth Remembering Per Quarter
    • The art of project planning
      • Are you still playing poker at scrum planning
      • Plan and Planning - How we start a project
      • A project’s journey - from inception to reflection
      • Component Team, Feature Team and Tiger Team
      • Sprint demo is a stage
      • Milestone and date
      • Onboarding project
      • Have You Sent Your Status Reports
      • When do you know a project smells
      • Hackathon is coming
    • How to prioritize
      • How to prioritize your 700 ticket backlog
      • Kitchen Sink and Tech Debt
  • Product Management
    • Find Problem
      • Dare to be 10x better
      • It is better to do the right problem the wrong way …
      • The Art of Goal setting: reactive goals, proactive goals, and inspirational goals
      • The things we don’t do …
      • No, I don’t want a platform
  • SDE Career Development
    • Promotion
      • The thing about promotion
        • Write your own promo doc
          • How to write your promo doc
        • The Reason Not To Promote
        • The myth of promotion project
      • The thing about leveling: are you SDE I, II or III?
      • What a L5 SDE is expected in Amazon
      • Customer Obsession - Of Your Own Promotion
      • Still waiting for that perfect manager?
      • You and Your Manager
    • Being SDE
      • What does a KMS SDE do?
      • From Knowing to Mastery: SDE Levels and Guild Ranks
      • How do SDE paint a Tiger from a Cat
      • The need to code
        • So ... where is your code
        • Quantity and Quality - How many line of code did you write?
      • Learn the Machine First
      • Is college major important?
      • Become an industry expert
      • How, What and Why in Problem Solving
      • Integrate both Breath and Depth in Life Long Learning
      • Do one thing well
      • CS students should know computer science history
      • Why Micromanagement is good for you
      • The power of imprinting
    • The Different Levels of Diving Deep
    • Becoming a tech lead
      • The traits of top engineers
      • Road to L6 SDE
      • There is no such thing called L6 task
      • Become a SME
      • Owning a Project vs. Owning a Problem Space
      • Leading, coaching and instructing
  • SDM Career Development
    • What does a SDM do
      • The thing about SDM - organization leader
      • The thing about SDM - manager of managers
      • The thing about SDM - line manager
      • The satisfaction of being a manager
      • Coach first, manager second, learner always - how I learn to coach
      • Gardener vs. SDM
      • SDM wearing three hats
      • What is a SDM doing in a design review?
    • How to be a SDM
      • How not to Micro-Manage - Stopping Being A Task Master
      • How SDM Build Momentum And Connect the Dots
      • How a SDM shoots at a moving target
      • The Danger of Over-Abstraction for Managers
        • How AWS SDM Dive Deep (1) - Dashboard
        • How AWS SDM Dive Deep (2) - Datastore
        • How AWS SDM Dive Deep (3) - Infrastructure
        • How AWS SDM Dive Deep (4) - Deployment
        • How AWS SDM Dive Deep (5) - Correction of Error (COE)
        • How AWS SDM Dive Deep (6) - OPS Review
        • How AWS SDM Dive Deep (7) - Bar Raiser
      • You are a manager, but are you a coach?
      • What an SDM can learn from swimming coach
      • Building a Team like a Waterpolo Coach
      • What a SDM can learn from a new programming language?
      • Should a SDM be able to code like a SDE?
      • Manager, Leader and Ruler
      • Performance Evaluation - Scope, Complexity and Impact
      • A Manager’s Vision
      • A Manager's Judgment
      • Build team with a soul
      • Build a learning organization - tech talk
      • Should You Become a Manager?
      • Becoming a SDM
    • Lead Business Application Team
      • Platform Team and Business Application Team
      • Page
    • What should you expect from your manager?
    • Build a Team like a Human Learning System
    • A New Manager's Tribal Survival Guide
    • SDM should Advocate for Intention Revealing Interface
    • A 30 minutes daily standup? You are doing it wrong!
    • Project Status Meeting that Takes an Hour? You are doing it wrong!
    • How to Ask Questions as a New Manager
    • Constructive Feedback: A Managerial Dialogue
    • Distinguishing "Improvement" from "Development" Feedback
  • Interview Tips
    • Level of Your LinkedIn Profile?
    • Make it personal
    • Tell me about yourself in 3 minutes
  • Import
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  1. Leadership
  2. About Work

Are you getting the right opportunities?

This is a good mental model for manager-employee relationship at different stages (buckets).

  1. Your skills match your opportunities - you perform.

  2. Your skills are less than your opportunities - you need coaching to grow the skills.

  3. Your skills are larger than your opportunities - you need another place with bigger opportunities.

It is very much aligned with my previous post on manager-employee relationships:

  1. business partners

  2. athlete-coach

  3. actor (actress)-producer.

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Last updated 1 year ago

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