My father was the Commander of the Honor Guard at Arlington National Cemetery. He taught me from a very young age about character, honor and integrity. He told me one day that the only thing you really own in your life is your integrity. I took his words very seriously. So seriously that I built…
I’ve been helping clients build mission-driven executive and engineering teams, and helping friends find the best new opportunities for twenty-four years, which is a bit mind-bending. What’s even more mind-bending is the lack of clarity and even ‘resigned-to-whatever-may-come’ approach with which so many engineers and execs approach their searches. The ‘system’ seems to have beaten…
Like many entrepreneurs early in their careers, I believed that strength as a business leader meant having a stiff upper lip, grinding and hustling harder than the day before and just pushing through…and that cost me dearly. Then more than a decade ago, I learned there was a different way to do business…and that hustle…
The Shared Cultural Attributes That Help Our Favorite Clients FLOW The average person spends 90,000 hours- one third of their life at work. That’s almost hard to comprehend. It certainly stands to reason that if you’re going to spend that much time with your fellow humans that you’d want to be surrounded by amazing…
Thank you to Jake Jorgovan and the Mile High Tech podcast for inviting me to join for this wide ranging discussion. We cover A LOT of ground from community building, living and working in the mountains of Colorado after 20 years in Boulder, maintaining and improving mental health in the startup realm and how candidates…
In recent months we’ve placed a number of new hires into executive roles, upper level engineering management positions and pure senior software development jobs, with several different clients. As I stepped away from each situation, I recently noticed one beautiful common thread among the successful candidates that received offers; They were each the most empathetic…
I was honored to be invited on the Scrimba Podcast recently to cover a topic that we tackle daily with job seekers of every level- finding the cultural AND technical attributes in an organization that resonate most with your personal values. It’s no easy task to define these values, much less find them in a…
Part Two of Two 22 Unique Approaches Startups Can Use to Attract and Retain Top Talent in 2022 In part one of this blog, we addressed the surprising hockey-stick-curve for software engineering salaries in North America in 2021. You can read the full blog here. Every week, more data comes to light around how employers…
Part 1 of 2 Software Engineering Salary Guides Were All Wrong in 2021- How We Got Here. Each year, countless organizations release their projected salary guides to help you plan your hiring budgets. Some of the data they use are based on historical increases of salaries targeting about 3 – 4.5% to adjust for inflation,…
It was 2006 and I was sitting in the back of the room at the Boulder / Denver New Tech Meetup in the Wolf Law Building on the University of Colorado campus. I was a regular at these monthly standing-room-only Meetups, and the energy and enthusiasm in the room was palpable. The appetizers were done…