# Darren's Manager Readme

**Engineering Manager at Carta**

# The most important things to me

1. Be well, stay well. Your physical and mental health are most important. If they're starting to dip, you should do what's necessary to bring them back up.

2. Under Promise AND Over Deliver. Leave yourself room for error. **"I think the answer is this, but I'm only 25% sure."**

3. There are no stupid questions, only lazy questions. Propose solutions instead of asking for the answer to your problem.  When you're asking for help, tell the person what you've tried already.

4. Anticipate -- failing to prepare is preparing to fail. But don't get into analysis paralysis. Document your decision making process so future-you knows what information past-you used for making the decision.

5. Observe those around you (team, manager, peers) and take inspiration from the things they do well (AKA copy them) and don't repeat their mistakes.

6. Be thankful and show your appreciation to everyone and everything.  Don't assume people know.  Give people their flowers while they can still smell them.

7. Everything in life is easier with organization, a pattern, or a framework, so use them.

8. I state my opinions and advice, feel free to take it or leave it. Do you. You're the driver of your career, not me. I'm just your GPS.

## Performance

My system:

**Green** - keep doing what you're doing. I share feedback with you on areas to improve; however, in general, your good work outweighs any shortcomings.

**Yellow** - I've observed at least 2-3 occurrences that have caused me to lose some confidence in your ability or causes a net negative impact on our team/company. Let's work to correct it. I will usually share this formal feedback with you. If we cannot correct, we'll transition to Red.

**Red** - You've been informed that if something is not corrected within a set time period or we see another instance of a specific behavior, it will lead to termination.

## Personality Quirks

\* People have said I have an aggressive tone.  I'm trying to improve it.

\* I like to joke. Life is too short to be serious all the time.

\* Names are important to me. People's names, variable names, division names, code names, project names, team names, company names. If you come up with a name, at least show you've put some thought into it.

\* I appreciate directness but you may not e.g. "This process sucks" immediately after going through the process is better than pretending the process is fine. If that's not your preference, let me know.

\* I like sports. They've taught me a lot about team dynamics, shared goals, individual personalities and failure.

\* I like analogies and quotes. If I'm using an analogy you don't understand, let me know.

\* I appreciate humility.