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The limits of ‘it depends’ management
December 09, 2020

I’m a big believer in ‘it depends’ as an all-purpose answer to questions on engineering and management.

How should I decide what to work on? It depends. How do I get promoted? It depends. How should I store this data? It depends. 

In the case of giving general advice to an audience that you don’t know well, this is still the best short answer (followed by a bunch of questions to tease out something more specific). But I’ve realized that I fall into a related trap too often as a manager. I provide very little structure, requirements, or processes to my team to help them figure out how to do things.

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