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Chelsea Troy πŸ³οΈβ€πŸŒˆ Profile picture
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21 Oct, 5 tweets, 2 min read
I want to share an observation that might prompt some thought.

Anytime a colleague who has been at a company <6 months has tried to get me to apply to their team, they either didn't stay for 6 months or they wanted out by 6 months.

This impacts how I respond to that request.
/1
I don't blame my colleagues for this.

I think tech companies (maybe all companies but I'll stick to what I know) tend to try hardest at the recruitment step and a lot less hard at the retention step.

And sometimes they effectively sell a fantasy to hire.

/2
Look.

Working for someone is a big bet.

Selling my friends on working somewhere is a BIGGER bet, by an order of magnitude.

More on that specific topic in the post below.

To me, the corollary to that is...

/3
chelseatroy.com/2020/08/24/tec…
...that I have taken on significant risk to offer my talent to an org.

Maybe they'll use it exactly how they promised. Probably they won't, in my experience.

Like, hell, I publicly expressed that concern about Mozilla. And they're MOZILLA.

/4

chelseatroy.com/2020/12/09/ano…
I definitely want to make sure I placed my personal bets correctly before I double down and risk my network or their trust in me.

I'm not offering a judgment, an interpretation, or a path forward. This is just how I've come to approach things.

5/5

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More from @HeyChelseaTroy

Chelsea Troy πŸ³οΈβ€πŸŒˆ Profile picture
22 Oct
I have, four times now, witnessed a group of software and machine learning whizzes gather in a room (or Zoom) to brainstorm the reinvention of transport for eco-friendliness and human convenience.

All four times, the brainstorm "invented" buses. To the letter. All four times.
This is why, when people ask "can AI save XYZ," I usually think to myself "If AI can save XYZ, listening to folks who didn't grow up rich can save XYZ for like a millionth of the cost of AI trying to save it"
By the way, all four times were personal experiences.

I'm not counting the time when E**n M**k tried to reinvent transportation and invented the bus, or when Via tried to reinvent transportation and invented the bus, or when Uber tried to reinvent transportation and invented th
Read 6 tweets
Chelsea Troy πŸ³οΈβ€πŸŒˆ Profile picture
15 Jul
@venikunche This is a tricky question. Here's why:

I think what you're asking is "at what age did you experience your age used against you personally."

But ageism has affected my career in tech separately from my personal age. It does this by shaping the ecosystem itself. Examples:

1/
@venikunche 1. I have never, at a tech company, had a manager over the age of 29, with one exception, who was 32.

It has therefore been impossible for any of them to possess significant management experience. This has affected my experience of, and expectations for, being managed.

2/
@venikunche 2. I have never had a mentor within my same employer with more than ten years' field experience.

To get these, I have had to specifically go find people outside my employer. Most of them have their own businesses because employers fail to recognize their value as FTEs.

3/
Read 8 tweets
Chelsea Troy πŸ³οΈβ€πŸŒˆ Profile picture
13 Jul
You know what, yeah, lemme opine on recorded meetings for a second.

It has three parts. I'll attempt to present them in an organized fashion.

A thread.

1/
1. Most meetings already suck. They don't get better because the folks planning the meetings disproportionately hate meetings less due to they have what we call a high Caucus Score.

Now that I've dropped spoilers on this post, here's the details:

/2
chelseatroy.com/2018/03/29/why…
2. Remoteness EXACERBATES the way business as usual discounts the needs & contributions of low Caucus Score, remote, or asynchronous teammates. If a meeting is recorded, it's also, consequently, remote.

More on the consequences of colocation culture:

/3
chelseatroy.com/2018/04/17/but…
Read 5 tweets
Chelsea Troy πŸ³οΈβ€πŸŒˆ Profile picture
5 Jul
Oh, I LOVE this question.

Let's talk about contract work versus permanent roles, specifically as an engineer (maybe it applies outside engineering, but I'll stick to what I know).

I have done, and still do, both of these, and I'd love to bust some myths about them.

Thread. 1/
MYTH 1: You have to choose one or the other at a given point in time.

I realize that, for plenty of folks with children and other obligations, having anything in addition to a full time job is not tenable, and I acknowledge that.

That does not mean it's always impossible...

/2
...to try a contract role while in a full time role, if they are curious about it.

Before I started my consultancy, I picked up teaching on the side of my day job. Once I started feeling more fulfilled in teaching than at work, I got A LOT more curious about contract roles.

/3
Read 26 tweets
Chelsea Troy πŸ³οΈβ€πŸŒˆ Profile picture
22 Jun
So, this thread put some ideas on the table about how to approach product & business development from the exec/director angle.

Now let's talk about it from the angle of a product manager, engineer, or designer.

Thread. (this one will be a little bit stop-and-go today :)
Once upon a time, during the dawn of the internet era, early web products often came from some college kid. The kid was almost always wealthy & well-connected, but he wasn't MARKET-savvy.

These people, now billionaires, have given beaucoup interviews on how they got started.

/2
Look: I'm as concerned about survivorship bias in drawing conclusions from these interviews as you are. But one thing stands out.

Asked how they got started, they all go "I was playing around and made a thing I wanted to use. Other people liked it. That was literally it."

/3
Read 36 tweets
Chelsea Troy πŸ³οΈβ€πŸŒˆ Profile picture
19 Jun
Y'all, Twitter is dunking on a Helen Lewis article originally published under the title "There's Too Much Life in our Work Life Balance."

Most of the dunks are witty stuff like "Did a work write this"

But there's a catch and we need to talk about it.

Thread.
The catch: the article isn't about doing more work. It's about acknowledging the work that we currently categorize as "life."

In their effort to meme back at lean in culture, the Twitterati are falling into another harmful trope.

2/
A friend once succinctly observed: "Twitter is not a community." Because communities don't treat relationships as disposable.

On Twitter, people pile on because it's fun, and then wield this (sometimes super shaky) justification that they're sticking up for the little guy.

3/
Read 10 tweets

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