Charity Majors (@mipsytipsy) / X

Charity Majors

64.1K posts

Charity Majors

@mipsytipsy

honeycomb, observability, the second edition of "Observability Engineering" is coming out soon. find me on substack, bsky, LI, and occasionally here. 🐝🏳️‍🌈🦄

San Francisco

Joined November 2009

Charity Majors
@mipsytipsy
Jul 17, 2019
Do 10x engineers exist? Tautologically yes, they must, since some people exist and are 10x more productive than some other people. But I guarantee you this: anyone who *refers to himself* as a 10x engineer is just an asshole. Who will poison your team.
Charity Majors
@mipsytipsy
May 17, 2018
Been thinking about the advice we give folks, esp jr and intermediate engineers. I love telling people to go home, have life/work balance, take a vacation etc, but also feel uncomfortably hypocritical. Why am I urging them *not* to do the things that got me to where i am today?
Charity Majors
@mipsytipsy
Sep 8, 2019
alright, it's up! 17 reasons not to be a manager, charity.wtf/2019/09/08/rea…. thank you for all the extremely thoughtful commentary, that was a terrific thread. 🌈🖤
charity.wtf
17 Reasons NOT To Be A Manager
Yesterday we had a super fun meetup here at Intercom in Dublin. We split up into small discussion groups and talked about things related to managing teams and being a senior individual contributor…
Charity Majors
@mipsytipsy
Feb 29, 2020
Most tech companies struggle with gender diversity, especially at senior leadership levels. Sadly, so do we. 😵 (Ftr I would LOVE to hire more dudes, but it's just...so...hard to find qualified candidates)
Megan Gleason
@fishmegs
Feb 26, 2020
The product leadership team of @honeycombio — fucking solid
Charity Majors
@mipsytipsy
Feb 11, 2020
spent 30m in the linkedin mines, stumbled out w keys to enlightenment. * anyone who calls themselves a visionary, isn't * anyone who says they do thought leadership, doesn't * 'global' means 15 layers bureaucracy * 'transformation' means 20yr behind * 'innovation' is meaningless
Charity Majors
@mipsytipsy
Apr 15, 2019
Replying to @mipsytipsy
If you're scared of pushing to production on Fridays, I recommend reassigning all your developer cycles off of feature development and onto your CI/CD process and observability tooling for as long as it takes to ✨fix that✨.
Charity Majors
@mipsytipsy
Mar 7, 2021
new blog post up on why you don't get credit for extracurricular helpfulness at work unless your core responsibilities are taken care of first.
Know your “One Job” and do it first
From charity.wtf
Charity Majors
@mipsytipsy
Aug 15, 2018
Let's talk about influence. As an engineer, how do you get it, earn it, wield it, or lose it? (The answer is NOT "become a manager.". In a well-functioning org, managers have mostly separate sphere of influence. If this is not true of yours, change it or leave.) Thread.
Charity Majors
@mipsytipsy
Feb 22, 2018
That reminds me ... about a year ago we posted our first open job rec. Here are some things I have observed since then. 1) There is a huge, underserved pool of skilled senior engineers who are actively repelled by bro culture. Of all genders.
Charity Majors
@mipsytipsy
Jun 6, 2022
Interviewing and hiring managers is really hard. It’s hard for all the reasons that interviewing and hiring engineers is hard, times 10. It’s easy to give answers that sound decent; it’s harder to evaluate their judgment or dexterity in applying an answer to a situation.
Charity Majors
@mipsytipsy
Sep 8, 2020
I keep talking to engineers who are antsy to get to senior and beyond, frustrated that it is taking so long. And I've encountered one very, very widespread blind spot around leveling Which is ...✨not every opportunity exists✨at every company✨at every time.✨
Charity Majors
@mipsytipsy
Jun 10, 2020
if you're on a 5-7 person eng team and have not automated the shit between merging your code and going live on prod, i'll bet each one of you wastes nearly a full day per week waiting on/tending to deploys. if you fix this, you've added a whole person of focus time to your team.
Charity Majors
@mipsytipsy
Dec 22, 2017
I think people think women want to work with/for other women for like ... chumminess reasons, or bathroom pals or something. 🤔 IME it's because they just want to get treated like equal human beings. Automatically. Without having to blaze a trail or fight or make it An Issue.
Charity Majors
@mipsytipsy
Feb 15, 2021
one of my favorite things we've done at honeycomb, which i encourage others to steal shamelessly, is to make sure there is at least one 3-day weekend per month. if one doesn't exist, we pick a friday and *make* one.