Renee Whitfield

I had to tell four people they were laid off. Here is what I would do differently.

Earlier this year our company cut about 12% of engineering. I found out 36 hours before. The list was decided above me. Four of the people on it were mine. I've thought about those four calls almost every week since. Here's what happened, what I'd change, and what I wish every laid-off person knew to ask for. How it went HR gave us a script and 15-minute slots. Access would be cut at the end of each call. I pushed…

Performance review season: how calibration actually works (from the manager side)

Review season starts at my company in two weeks, and every year I get the same questions from engineers: what actually happens in calibration? Who decides? Can I do anything about it? Here's an honest answer, based on the companies I've worked at. Details vary, but the shape is similar almost everywhere. What calibration is Managers write ratings for their reports. Then a group of managers sits in a room with a…

Burnout isn't a resilience problem. Here's what I check as a manager.

Every time burnout comes up, someone recommends a meditation app. I have nothing against meditation. But in my experience, most burnout on engineering teams is caused by how the work is set up, and that's the manager's job, not the engineer's. There's decades of research on this. Christina Maslach's six areas of worklife (workload, control, reward, community, fairness, values) are a good starting point if you want…

I burned out as a manager and nobody noticed. Including me.

Last fall I took six weeks of medical leave. Officially it was "a health matter". Unofficially, I had been running on fumes for most of a year and my body finally made a decision my calendar wouldn't. I'm writing this because when I came back, three people on other teams quietly asked me how I knew. The honest answer is that I didn't, not until very late. So here are the signs I missed, in the hope that you catch…

How I run 1:1s (the template, the three questions, and the thing I never do)

I've been managing for six years and I've run something like 2,000 one-on-ones. Most of what I know about being a manager came out of those 30-minute meetings, including the ones I ran badly. Here's how I run them now. The basics 30 minutes, weekly. I reschedule if I have to. I don't cancel. Cancelling tells people they're the first thing to go. It's their meeting, not mine. They set the agenda first. I add my items…