Engineering leader at AWS
If you're a senior leader, if you have authority or influence, your actions and words carry weight. People pay attention to what you say — a lot more than you think. Sometimes because they respect you, sometimes just because they have to. Either way, your words land heavier. Your
Let’s talk about KISS. No, I’m not talking about the Kiss Cam everyone’s been posting about since the Coldplay concert last week. I’m talking about Keep It Simple, Seriously. (I never liked the original last word.) Lately, I’ve found myself saying things like: “don’t
Your coworkers are not your family. At least not in the way I think of family. To me, family is about unconditional love.At work, we have conditions — and we need them. They’re what make professional relationships sustainable and fair. Some of the best times in my career were
Frontline managers and senior engineers often ask how much visibility I need into their work. There’s a simple but powerful way to manage up: say you’re going to do the thing, say you’re doing the thing, and say you’ve done the thing. It’s a lightweight
This might sound controversial, but stay with me before you call me a terrible leader. This topic came up in one of my one-on-ones today, and I felt I needed to write about it. Sometimes, the long-term is too late. Sometimes, we just don’t have the luxury of time.
When a company survey shows that people don’t feel like they can innovate in their day-to-day work, the automatic response is: let’s run more hackathons. Hackathons are fun. Some good ideas come out of them. But they don’t build a culture of continuous innovation. In my experience,
There’s a scene in the Oscar-winning Argentine film The secret in their eyes that I like a lot: “A guy can change anything. His face, his house, his family, his girlfriend, his religion, his God. But there’s one thing he can’t change. He can’t change his
The hype around AI didn’t come overnight. It’s the result of decades of technological progress and converging trends. But in November 2022, OpenAI made it real for everyone. Most people in tech didn’t see it coming, even if they now want to tell a different story. Big
Today is a sad day. A day that moved slowly and felt heavier than usual. A day that made me feel deeply connected to my roots. Pope Francis, the most important Argentinian in history, has passed away. I remember seeing him when he was Jorge Mario Bergoglio, Cardinal of Buenos
Most people look and sound the same. I’ve been hiring recently, and I noticed something interesting: most people reach out to me in the same way—using similar words, asking for the same things. Their resumes look alike too. I remember that a few years ago, the problem was
Do it because you can’t not. Some decisions don’t require deep analysis. In 2013, I left my comfortable life in Argentina to join Groupon. In 2016, I stepped away from management to move to the U.S. as an individual contributor. In 2020, I went from leading a
Interviews feel a lot like democracy—far from perfect, but we don’t know anything better yet. The fact that people must prepare for the interview process rather than for the actual work they’ll perform is a clear indicator of its flaws. Most candidates spend months preparing for a