Alisha Foster

It’s a tough time of year for a lot of people. Whether you currently have a job you love, have a job you want to leave, or are looking for a job, the holiday season can cause a lot of pressure on us, and the lack of sunlight affects most of us, even if we don’t talk about it or realize it. If you are someone who is struggling, it’s important to know you are not alone. Many people around you have struggled similarly, and many have come out stronger and happier on the other side.

We've all experience pain points, impediments, processes that just aren't working, and other things that make our day-to-day work more difficult. Many of us have taken those complaints straight to our leadership and said, "Hey, this isn't working," but how many of you have come up with ideas or solutions you've thought through when presenting those issues? Don't get me wrong, I've worked with some great individuals who always have at least one idea to share when they come to me talking through pain points, but more often than not, I hear the pain point without an idea accompanying it. While I attempt to be someone who presents an issue with at least one solution idea, I have gotten caught in the cycle of complaining without solutions, too. The 1-3-1 Rule will help us avoid the complaint cycle without helping solve the issues.

Interviewing is a time-consuming and expensive process for all individuals involved. In the tech industry, having a 4-6 hour interview process is not abnormal. This can be spread across several days or fall into one day. This also doesn't include time spent on applications, job description preparation, interview prep, take-home assessment completion and reviews, written reviews, or candidate review panels. By the time everything is considered, candidates spend about one workday on each role they interview for, and the company also pays for that.

So how can we improve our interviewing process to be more accommodating, less time-consuming, and less expensive? While this may be an unpopular opinion, I have outlined a possible approach below to accomplish all of this.

It's a hot topic in the tech industry: "Shifting Left." Still, in practice, many companies struggle to understand what shifting left means and how to accomplish it. Let's walk through the Product Development Lifecycle (PDLC) and Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC) and discuss how we can shift left in our processes.

Whether you are in leadership, recruiting, managing your own company, or any direct report, this post can help you. We all have basic needs that we expect our job to fulfill. At a very high level, these can be bucketed into three categories: Money, Passion, and Happiness. While endless contributing factors fall into these three buckets, and there may even be some other buckets you can think of, we will focus on just these three today. A leader did this exercise with me once, and I've utilized it with my direct reports ever since and have also learned more about how this can help everyone along the way.

We've all encountered this in our tech careers. We plan out a fantastic feature. As we're building it, we come across some areas we know are not being built with our best practices in mind, and we've found some low-priority bugs through testing that we want to fix, but that deadline is approaching quickly. It's ok, though; we'll incur just a bit of tech debt and promptly resolve it right after launch. Everyone is on board, the feature looks good to go, and we release it. Then WHAM! We get hit with unexpected bugs. We tested everything, completed end-to-end testing, and have automation coverage and unit test coverage. What's happening? We now have tech debt and live production bugs immediately after our new feature release. So what do we do? How do we handle this? We have another feature we're supposed to work on in 2 weeks, but that isn't enough time to fix all the bugs and tech debt.

We see it almost every day on LinkedIn - yet another company is doing layoffs, or they're in their second, third, or fourth round of layoffs. Tens of thousands of individuals are jobless. It can be overwhelming to the point of despair trying to find a job in this market. So how do you survive it? Well, I'm right here with you. I was laid off in January, and I've found some tricks that have helped me out, and maybe they can help you too.