Welcome to the holiday season. For those still searching for a job, it’s bittersweet. Thankfully, the holiday season is more stretched than ever, and we’re only starting the Halloween season, so it is still very early. Still, the thought of not having a full-time role lined up before Christmas has been looming over my head for a few weeks. I’m thankful to have the opportunity to take up a contract role and I recognize that not everyone has that opportunity, but the holidays are still in the back of my mind. My advice is to keep the holiday plan as normal as possible. Those traditions are the baseline for memories, and while this has been a dark year for many, having a bit of light at the end of the year can be a lift.

I love this time of year. The weather finally starts to cool off, baseball is into the post-season (even if my team didn’t make it this year), and the joy of kids anticipating the costumes, candy, and presents is a great way to wrap up each year. Expect more sentimentality than usual from me here for the next few months.

Non-traditional Numbers

4,632 more people were laid off in September, down from the high of nearly 90,000 back in January. source

83,328 job ads for software engineering jobs were posted on LinkedIn last week, a weakening number but still better than the low point in Q2. source

45% of those laid off were women, while women only represent 39% of the workforce overall (thus they were overrepresented in layoffs) source

Busy, Busyness, Business

“The bad news is time flies. The good news is you’re the pilot.”

— Michael Altshuler

Talking with laid-off teammates, they mention being busier than ever, even without a full-time job. I have had the same experience. Between job searching, filing for unemployment, networking, interviewing, exploring contract work, and all the daily life work of raising a family, the days are long, but the weeks are short. It’s critical to pay attention to where the time is going and look for ways to a) stay busy on things that progress my knowledge or career, b) avoid being overly committed and too busy to be available, and c) keep looking for the new opportunities on the horizon and cultivating them.

I’ve enjoyed more time for family life and getting my hands deep into code again for the first time in years. Starting a consulting business provides excellent opportunities to learn the broader parts of running a company I’ve only ever brushed up against previously. The trick has been choosing which events and activities to say no to. It’s still a real struggle and an area for improvement.

Focus Fuels Velocity

Staying in the theme of team principles that we operated the Indeed Incubator under, we had an unrelenting focus on delivering new products as efficiently and as effectively as we could. We very rarely allowed teams to have multiple distinct product bets going at the same time, instead focusing them on the one they thought was most likely to produce the outsized outcome we were looking for.

Having one key thing to work on helps teams to be laser focused on the most important thing. It also helps leaders as they lay out the priorities. Having only one thing to change at a time is clarifying to the team. It makes it clear that anything else is, at best, second priority. When we set a clear focus we clear away the cobwebs of the other things that could be distracting us.

This doesn’t have to be hard (but often it is). Establishing a clear objective and the key results you’re going to use to measure the success isn’t difficult on its own. It becomes difficult when you see that you have 10 objectives and an average of seven key results for each. First, you’ve got to narrow down the objectives. Three at the most per team and generally these are rolling up to higher level objectives, each time increasing in breadth & depth, but still only around three in total per level. 

Next the key results have to be reduced. Again, to avoid the problem of too many things to track, you reduce the number of measures to approximately three as well. This will give you approximately nine key metrics per team feeding into three overall objectives. The other important part here is to avoid vanity metrics. Each of these results should be a measure of how your business or product is improving, not just a number that’s moving or a feature that’s delivered.

Fun

Final Words

If I can help with your search, please contact me. Please give me feedback on what you like or don’t care for in this newsletter, and I’ll adjust. For total transparency, I have no affiliation with any of the tools, companies, or resources I share. These are my impressions, not colored by any outside influences.