typingham

Happy summer! It’s nearly mid August and yet with the hot and cold weather we’ve been having here in Seattle, a few trees are starting to turn. Fall is probably my favorite season in the northwest, so a couple of auburn leaves here and there are certainly a way to raise my spirits.

Friday marked my last day in my department at Amazon. After 2.5 years and a few really hard peak seasons, I’ll be moving from a marketing role to product management in the Marketplace organization. Product management, for many graduates of MBA programs, is a very ideal trade, particularly for those who have spent thousands of dollars to move into tech and work in an organization to launch the next big thing. I haven’t personally been drawn to it as a discipline before, but in the role I’m taking on, it’s the medium needed to get the work done. So it’s time to become a student again. It’ll be a new environment to learn, continue flexing my professional humility skills, and attempt to push another Amazon business forward.

The move itself is also bittersweet – I had the opportunity to build a large team that is very much taking the reins going forward on a business I care deeply about. It was the first real time that I was able to find my footing as a manager and be able to have tangible examples of empowering others to develop their own careers. It’s been very difficult at times but also very rewarding looking back.

Outside of my work, summer for us has felt pretty standard. We have had the chance to attend a number of great concerts and dinners. On the music side we’ve seen Katy Perry, The Appleseed Cast, Jimmy Eat World, Third Eye Blind, Kishi Bashi, The Strumbellas, and a few others. Each of these musicians or bands have been constants in my life over the last 10+ years, so it’s been a pleasure to get to see them live. If you are looking for new music to try, Kishi Bashi’s Omoiyari and The Strumbella’s Rattlesnake are both great listens. Rattlesnake has a special meaning as it’s from a longstanding band who is writing about growing up (into their 30s) which we all seem to be stuck in the mindset of these days. It’s very heartfelt and not just the writer’s experience as several of their band members came back from maternity or paternity leaves to support their tour.

On the food side, I gushed about a chance to attend what felt like a show at Archipelago. There’s 8 seats twice a night, and the chef and staff talk about Filipino heritage both at home and in the northwest. It was a beautiful meal and Kaitlin and I were both pleased to find out that we had a very shared history with the chef and his partner at both UW and Kitsap/Vancouver. This last month has been a test in cooking as I try to not break every rule attached to Whole 30 but also not pull my hair out at the instagram posts of test kitchen chefs making ribs, pastries, or other summer treats. This post from Deb Perelman almost put me over the edge – quite literally a perfect summer spin on a BLT. It’s bookmarked until after I can abandon my pre-vacation diet.

Speaking of vacation.. Kaitlin and I are packing our bags for Maui next week. Literally the same vacation we took last year, but it was too relaxing to say no to. I have a short stack of books to read on the beach, my Mai Tai to Piña Colada ratios set (3:3 daily of course), and more sunscreen than ever thought I’d need. I used to tan! Now I burn fairly easily at the sight of sun, so protection is key.

Lastly, I do hope to have a stronger approach to time management for the next few months, which involves spending more time blogging a few times a month. I suspended my Facebook last week; don’t know if it’s more than temporary, but it is freeing to have one less platform to worry about. If I can cut back on reddit time, I’ll be in the clear.

Been a while. Been a long year but lots of friends and family.

1. It’s been a busy few weeks both through work and social life. Luckily I’ve had a good amount of time to spend with friends and see some great music. Last night we went to see Designer Disguise and the Fall of Troy. I don’t think I’ve dusted off Doppelganger in a few years but it held up. A good night out overall. 
2. I’m sitting in a coffee shop (Metronome) in Tacoma, while Kaitlin is out recording a Christmas song with some friends. I remember a lot of late nights out on 6th street as I was growing up – tons of chances to play mini golf and just see the sights and sounds of Tacoma. Always reminded me of how small Port Orchard seems. As I get older, that quiet seems more and more desirable. 
3. Work travel is highly overrated. But every once in a while you get to go somewhere that connects you with family or friends in other spaces. 

1. City life. I miss it. There’s a feeling it inspires that I don’t have in Redmond. Maybe it’s this beautiful restaurant I am in but I feel different.

2. Pablo y Pablo. Ambitious menu and delicious execution.

3. Friends! Breakfast with Morgan was just what I needed.

1. Getting back into the swing of things. I have a tendency to hit a Christmas slump productivity-wise. Some important photos on my desk keep me motivated to push hard.

2. Clearing out old text messages. It’s nice to have little reminders of old, meaningless conversations. Don’t worry I made sure to save the photos and important chats.

3. Kai Market: Today I had time for lunch at a favorite spot. They seem to always have a seasonally appropriate meal no matter the time. A hearty spicy beef curry was a real treat.

1. Going back to work and seeing the team back in the office – excited to see everyone and kick off the new year
2. Meal prep for a healthy week – a chance to cook and visit with Kaitlin after work
3. Driving in to work with a lovely mountain view

I’m sure there are far more interesting things to read, but I wanted to start saving my short list of three things I’m thankful for each day. Below is today.

1. Driving with Kaitlin, Corbin, and Marie to see my Mom

2. Donut day and iced coffees
3. Frasier on the couch to close the evening

Cleaning up dust and debris from a house made home. We’ll do this again in a few years. 

In this place I learned a lot. Both in the work and homework sense but also personal growth. How to be a caring partner, how to plan a wedding, how to pause for moments held dear. 
SLU wasn’t the neighborhood I expected it would quickly become but we made it work. Namely everything closed at six and didn’t open on the weekends. Lots of dinners and drinks with family and friends. 

Thanks again.

Cheers to a new house made home. 

This week, I saw yet another article suggesting that aspiring tech leaders don’t need to attend business school in Silicon Valley. I was very proud to see that the Foster School of Business was featured prominently and favorably in the piece: “Foster is one of a few, highly regarded business schools situated far from the Bay Area with a strong tech contingent among its graduates.” I for one lived this example and so many of my school colleagues went on to prominent tech companies like Amazon, Microsoft, Apple and others.

However, and this won’t be a surprise to many of you, I wish that there would have been additional focus on the evening program offered at Foster, which is a big contributor to tech talent in the area. As a proud graduate of the evening program, I had an opportunity to experience the value of working and going to school, and for that, I am thankful. Evening school provided a lot of benefits that I wouldn’t have had going full time, and I firmly believe it gets lost in the mix of rankings, exit salaries, and other datapoints. Here are a few to consider:

First of all, your classmates are working in tech right now. You interact, discuss, and argue with employees of great tech companies and up-and-coming startups. Every class I attended had current employees of big tech firms discussing ideas, giving their take on real-world case studies and talking about company culture. One particularly great example during my time in business school, Microsoft had very famously shifted away from stack-ranking employees to an all new review process. Collectively, my classmates had spent decades there as developers, marketers, and program managers, and shared their honest thoughts about the shift, how it affected their teams, and how they expected company morale to shift as a result of the change. This experience was not unique – like many business schools, we talk about tech giants and disruptors daily. We just happened to have first-hand examples of the daily impact of big company shifts.

Secondly, you apply what you learn the very next day, and this matters. It’s a simple enough concept – study marketing or finance and you now know a few more reasons why a SWOT or cash-flow analysis is important at work the next day. But in a work-compatible program, your classroom discussions continue to evolve as you do. Much of a business program involves learning how to ‘think like an MBA’ through problem solving and analysis. As the program progressed, my classmates would share increasingly complex (and very timely) examples from work in classroom discussions. This was not only a reflection of the applied learnings from classwork, but also highlighted the fact that many of my classmates were being promoted to roles of greater scope and responsibility along the way. By my third year of school, we were no discussing examples from before business school, rather, we were continuing to discuss and challenge business problems faced daily inside companies.

Lastly, your network is real time. Networking is a crucial part of any business school, and evening programs are no different. However, the recency of your network’s connections cannot be understated. Need to talk to someone at Microsoft or Starbucks? Your classmates can contact their current work colleagues to connect you. As your classmates move into new roles, this continues to expand your network before you leave the program.

In closing, many of these benefits aren’t clear or well-articulated by rankings and exit salaries. However, choosing a business school obviously involves many factors beyond what I’ve presented here. The big takeaway here is that non-traditional programs offer hidden benefits, which could be the difference between a good program and a great program for the right candidate.

I haven’t really shared any thoughts publicly on the NYT piece about Amazon from earlier this summer. In many respects, it didn’t represent my experiences in my 4 years at the company. I had a great time and was able to do some of my best work there. On the other hand, I had friends who spent years there and did feel that the article had the right tone. The mixed response is largely why I expected the story to eventually fade into the constant stream of news. I assumed that Amazon would investigate the examples and if true, they would be resolved and we’d hear nothing again.

This morning Jay Carney penned a response piece to the NYT article. Before I add any additional thoughts, let me be clear: Amazon, just like anyone, has a definite right to defend themselves in the face of false claims or low-quality journalism. However, I think this response missed the mark.

Rather than share my thoughts on what a good response should have been. I will offer an example that Jeff Bezos himself shared in a 2010 Princeton Graduation speech. It’s a wordy story, but goes as follows:

“As a kid, I spent my summers with my grandparents on their ranch in Texas. I helped fix windmills, vaccinate cattle, and do other chores. We also watched soap operas every afternoon, especially “Days of our Lives.” My grandparents belonged to a Caravan Club, a group of Airstream trailer owners who travel together around the U.S. and Canada. And every few summers, we’d join the caravan. We’d hitch up the Airstream trailer to my grandfather’s car, and off we’d go, in a line with 300 other Airstream adventurers. I loved and worshipped my grandparents and I really looked forward to these trips. On one particular trip, I was about 10 years old. I was rolling around in the big bench seat in the back of the car. My grandfather was driving. And my grandmother had the passenger seat. She smoked throughout these trips, and I hated the smell.

At that age, I’d take any excuse to make estimates and do minor arithmetic. I’d calculate our gas mileage — figure out useless statistics on things like grocery spending. I’d been hearing an ad campaign about smoking. I can’t remember the details, but basically the ad said, every puff of a cigarette takes some number of minutes off of your life: I think it might have been two minutes per puff. At any rate, I decided to do the math for my grandmother. I estimated the number of cigarettes per days, estimated the number of puffs per cigarette and so on. When I was satisfied that I’d come up with a reasonable number, I poked my head into the front of the car, tapped my grandmother on the shoulder, and proudly proclaimed, “At two minutes per puff, you’ve taken nine years off your life!”

I have a vivid memory of what happened, and it was not what I expected. I expected to be applauded for my cleverness and arithmetic skills. “Jeff, you’re so smart. You had to have made some tricky estimates, figure out the number of minutes in a year and do some division.” That’s not what happened. Instead, my grandmother burst into tears. I sat in the backseat and did not know what to do. While my grandmother sat crying, my grandfather, who had been driving in silence, pulled over onto the shoulder of the highway. He got out of the car and came around and opened my door and waited for me to follow. Was I in trouble? My grandfather was a highly intelligent, quiet man. He had never said a harsh word to me, and maybe this was to be the first time? Or maybe he would ask that I get back in the car and apologize to my grandmother. I had no experience in this realm with my grandparents and no way to gauge what the consequences might be. We stopped beside the trailer. My grandfather looked at me, and after a bit of silence, he gently and calmly said, “Jeff, one day you’ll understand that it’s harder to be kind than clever.”

I think that today’s response was clever, rather than kind. It was a bold choice to shut down the examples in the article. Not because they aren’t true, but because with all of the controversy and responses coming from current and former employees, the examples in the NYT piece do exist in some form or fashion.

It’s important to take the time as a company to better understand the needs of your employees. With the NYT article and Jay’s response, I hope that the right dialogue was opened for those who feel that they need change from the company.

Disclaimer: these thoughts are 100% my own and are not a reflection of any company I’ve worked for, past or present.

Like many people my age, I was fortunate enough to grow up watching Jon Stewart. Though he was first and foremost a comedian, he was a fascinating storyteller, a formidable interviewer, and clearly a great mentor to up-and-coming comedic talent. I also appreciated his willingness to poke fun at himself and bring levity to tough situations. While he is not dead and gone, his show will be greatly missed by me and many others.

I am not writing this post to point out anything new. Nor do I have much to say that hasn’t been said more eloquently by others. Though people either loved him or hated him, you could see how much he cared about The Daily Show as an institution. On his final episode, Jon left viewers with this piece of advice:

There is very little that you will encounter in life that has not been in some ways infused with bullshit. Not all of it bad — your general day to day organic free-range bullshit is often necessary, or at the very least innocuous:

“Oh, what a beautiful baby. I’m sure he’ll grow into that.”

That kind of bullshit in many ways provides important social contract fertilizer. Keeps people from making each other cry all day.

But then there’s the more pernicious bullshit. Your premeditated institutional bullshit designed to obscure and distract. Designed by whom? The bullshitocracy.

Comes in three basic flavours.

One, making bad things sound like good things. “Organic all-natural cupcakes.” Because “factory-made sugar-oatmeal balls doesn’t sell.” “PATRIOT-ACT”. Because “are you scared enough to let me look at all your phone records act” doesn’t sell. So whenever something’s been titled “freedom”, “family”, “fairness”, “health”, “America”, take a good long sniff. Chances are it’s been manufactured in a facility that may contain traces of bullshit.

Number two: the second way, hiding the bad things under mountains of bullshit. Complexity. You know, I’d would love to download Drizzy’s latest Meek Mill diss (Everyone promised me that made sense.) But I’m not really interested right now in reading Tolstoy’s iTunes agreement. So I’ll just click “Agree”, even if it grants Apple prima nocte with my spouse. Here’s another one: simply put, banks shouldn’t be able to bet your pension money on red. Bullshitly put, it’s, hey, this: Dodd Frank. [Pulls out copy of D.F. Legislation.] Hey, a handful of billionaires can’t buy our elections, right? Of course not. They can only pour unlimited, anonymous cash into a 501(c)4 if 50% is devoted to issue education, otherwise they’d have to 501(c)6 it, or funnel it openly through a non-campaign coordinated super PAC with a quarter… [stage-whispers]I think they’re asleep now, we can sneak out.

And finally, finally, it’s the bullshit of infinite possibility. These bullshitters cover their unwillingness to act under the guise of unending inquiry. We can’t do anything because we don’t yet know everything. We cannot take action on climate change until everyone in the world agrees gay-marriage Vaccines won’t cause our children to marry goats, who are going to come for our guns. Until then, I say teach the controversy.

Now, the good news is this. Bullshitters have gotten pretty lazy. And their work is easily detected. And looking for it is kind of a pleasant way to pass the time. Like an “I Spy” of bullshit. So I say to you tonight, friends: The best defense against bullshit is vigilance.

So if you smell something, say something.

– Jon Stewart, August 6, 2015

I’m posting this here as a reminder for me. Something to look back on. Jon Stewart unlocked a level of skepticism in me that has been a guiding principle for the last decade or so. It has driven me to approach problems through a lens of inquiry, rather than simply expecting to hear how I should feel about an issue. For this, I am thankful.