Leadership on about:rileycsillag fka drewcsillag

Self Retros

Sun, 11 Feb 2024 13:30:00 -0400

I’ve done various forms of retros over the years, one of which I blogged about too. Following Cian Synnot’s example, I had done Four L’s. I also had done a quarterly “plate spinning” check to make sure I’m not spreading myself too thin, and also had a quarterly calendar audit (I’m in a lot of meetings) to make sure I was spending time in the right places. But as much as I had done, I realized that I wanted for something more regular (monthly, rather than quarterly or yearly) and more concrete, as for me, a retro like Four L’s is too nonspecific.

I Got Blogged About

Sat, 14 Oct 2023 16:21:00 -0400

I did a talk for my org, Developer Experience (formerly part of EEE), based on my Influence Without Authority post I did back in 2021. It circulated a bit inside, and the Pup Culture Blog at Datadog decided to write a blog post about me based on it!

Influence Without Authority

Sun, 21 Mar 2021 15:30:00 -0400

As you get more experience in being a software engineer, the trajectory that companies I have worked for look for you to be able to expand your scope. Something they will call out as a way to accomplish this is the term “influence without authority”, which is just a really fancy set of words that mean “persuasive”.

I’ve had good soft skills for a while, but if you asked me what exactly it was I was doing, I’d have had a hard time explaining what it was. Some time ago, I started thinking about what exactly it was I was doing, and have been digging into them ever since, and hope to write more frequently about how they apply in a business context. When I started thinking about influence without authority, and made the link to persuasion, my first thought was: how is persuasion distinct from manipulation - one is considered good; the other, bad. The best way I can think of to distinguish them is simply this: would the other person be pissed off at you for doing what you did?