The concept and format for this document is taken from GitLab’s employee README practice. The intent is to provide an overview of who I am and how I work in order to facilitate interactions1 help people know what to expect with working with me.

About me

tl;dr

  • middle age, middle class, straight, cisgendered, white male; but not one of the evil ones
  • US East timezone
  • 3 kids, all boys, one singleton and a pair of fraternal twins
  • one spouse
  • 2 cats
  • compulsive reader, mostly sci-fi
  • considers “geek” to be an honorific
  • cheerful pessimist
  • idea of the perfect date: YYYY-MM-DD
  • thinks there’s something kind of sexy about a well normalized database, a clear and thorough BPMN flow diagram, and well written code
  • happy to change almost anything if I can be shown the need for that change
  • visceral negative reaction to buzzwords

Factoids

I intended to be head-shrink when I grew up. I got into SAS programming while finishing a master’s degree because I needed a job and had some SPSS background from my course work. From there, I picked up PHP and MySQL and spent years doing Drupal development. I picked up a little Python in the days before PHP really supported object orientation and it has been my hobby language since then.

Originally a night-owl, when my youngest sons were infants I got in the habit of getting up to feed and change them about 0400. It was easier to stay up than to go back to sleep after setteling them and then have to get myself back out of bed to go to work. Over the years, that has turned into me being most productive early in the morning and feeling like I’m behind if the sun is up before I am.

My working style

Personality

Leadership style

My go-to style is delegative/laissez faire. I trust that the people who report to me are working dilligently and, given a problem space and solution success criteria, are capable of finding a solution. However, in times of crisis or when working with junior staff, I tend to shift to a more autocratic style.

Work habits

Schedule

I’m usually up and working early in the morning, log off for a bit to get kids off to school, then am back to work until about 1600 my time. Outside those times, I tend to be a cognitive ruminant and, when something is on my mind, I’d rather work on it then than wait until the next scheduled working period.

GTD adherence

I follow a loose-ish GTD methodology, with daily and weekly reviews as promininant features of the implementation. If tasks don’t get into my to-do list, they probably will not get done. In meetings, I prefer hand writing notes to typing and review those notes after the fact for summarization and to extract action items.

What I assume about others

I assume you manage your communication notifications to fit your life.

I send emails, meeting invites, slacks, etc., when I’m working, which is often early in the day in my timezone. I expect you have your devices set to alert you or not based on your working schedule and that you will respond to the messages I send in your working schedule. If there’s something that absolutely cannot wait, I’ll call you.

I assume all cards are on the table.

In my counseling education, the phrase make the implicit explicit really resonated with me as a basis for improving group dynamics. In my work life, I try to be clear with everyone as to my motivations and success criteria and I trust others are equally forthcoming.

I (try to) presume good intent.

I do my best to presume good intent on the part of everyone I deal with. This one’s sometimes challenging for me but I’ve found that, when I’m having trouble with it, it usually indicates the other party I’m working with has a motivation that I’m not seeing.

Communicating with me

In internal, small group communcation, like within a project team Slack, I tend to let my snark out. Slack’s :headdesk: emoticon is not entirely infrequent in my lexicon in that setting.

Obviously in broader communication, and especially in communications with clients, I aim for greater professionalism. In those communications I’m going for a conversational yet precise tone and commonly include a BLUF of tl;dr section to convey an executive summary before going into a more verbose discussion of the issues.

Preferred formats by use case

  • Slack/messaging - quick questions, low-context action items
  • Email - formal communications, high-context action items
  • Zoom/video conferencing - feedback (particularly if negative), discussions where efficient disambiguation is needed (e.g., requirements elicitation)
  • Telephone - emergency off-hours communication (e.g., “OMG, it’s all on fire. Can you please get online right away?”)

Learning style

I learn best in an old-school verbal, lecture format where I can ask questions interactively during the lesson. If that’s not an option, text-based is my next best format, particularly in tree-ware format.

Strengths/Weaknesses

Strengths

  • tactical planning and task decompostion - Give me a strategic goal and I can figure out a path to get there. Absent a goal, I can come up with a plan to determine the goal.

Weaknesses

  • networking - This may stem from my maxing out of the I in INTJ, but small talk and unstructured interactions take a lot of energy and conscious effort for me.