2025 Weeknote 52 : End of line

December 22 – 28

📆 My weeknotes capture events, thoughts, and other items from the past week, often focused on work, but with personal stuff, too. Learn more about weeknotes.

I have an abbreviated weeknote this week, as I’m busy with family matters over these holiday weeks and my last post was pretty long.

Professional weeknotes

Hiring success

This week I posted on LinkedIn about our recent #hiring efforts, in which we ended up hiring 3 people for 3 positions after just posting just 1 role and conducting interviews with 6 candidates. This is a personal-best and organization-best record of sorts—though I would be hard-pressed to name the award category.

The post included the following Sankey diagram, which started with 23 applicants on the left, and then 6 candidates passed through different phases, with 3 getting (and accepting) job offers:

We’re still in hiring mode now with 2 positions being filled on my teams: an Atlassian Engineer role (which is proving to be very difficult to find), and a Full Stack Developer role, which is a bit easier for finding candidates, but is a bit harder to sift through the candidates because software development is such a dynamic and fluid career path for everyone.

Of all the skills I’ve expanded over the past 6 years, I think hiring is probably my favorite and perhaps most valuable skill because it impacts the organization deeply and for multiple years beyond onboarding. My “hit rate” — the ratio of “good hires” to “bad hires” (to use oversimplified terms) — is through the roof. I’m also better at “selling” the organization, our teams, and the culture we are trying to build, which makes converting candidates to employees easier, and it helps build momentum toward a positive culture with each hire.

Hiring, like so many other professional activities, requires a lot of practice, self-reflection, and actual work. Like hours and hours of work for each role and each candidate. You can’t just read resumes and schedule interviews. You have to think deeply about your goals for any given role, and you have to keep your mind flexible to possibilities, because any given role can be done many different ways, and people bring a lot of different qualities to the table. Plus you’re also building a team, and must consider how the team will change with each hire.

In the past I was too quick to dismiss candidates that didn’t look right on paper. I was also too quick to embrace candidates that checked the right boxes but—and this part was never on paper—also dragged attitudes or behaviors with them that were counterproductive or could disrupt a team’s culture or flow too much. Like so many things, this isn’t a science. It’s an art. There are rules to follow, and you need to learn them. But in time you learn which rules you can selectively break in order to make something new and interesting.

I don’t think I would like the professional world of recruiting, as that’s a purely numbers game (which is why so many recruiters are so frustrating to candidates). But it turns out I’ve enjoyed building up my jigsaw-puzzle-solving skills when it comes to matching up tasks, teams, and talent.

I kinda wish our broader local government leadership would tap me, our HR team, and a few others as a recruiting super team to drive all recruiting across all agencies. They would hate us at the start, but love us in the end. We could transform our agencies for the better over the next decade. Sooooooo much depends on who you bring into the organization.

More digital accessibility progress

It’s hard to make a lot of tracks on our accessibility journey during the holidays, but it’s happening little by little. We had a pre-kickoff kickoff chat with our new consulting team lead. And a major software vendor appears to be coming through for us, despite some limitations in their platform (for our specific use cases). We’re gonna be putting two tons of butt in some one-ton pants for the first half of the new year, but we don’t have much choice but to push ahead. And while I’d like to give some credit by name to a key leader on our teams that’s making it rain right now, I don’t have permission to share their name, so I’ll keep that to myself. 😊

Meanwhile a key meeting is coming up this week and it will set the stage for sooooo many more meetings. Definitely worried that our pretty savvy strategy (if I do say so myself) might get sidelined by some folks that don’t yet get it. We simply haven’t yet had the time or opportunity to educate our top leaders on this topic and how we plan to attack it. We’ll get there. But man… time is ticking away.

Thinking career thoughts

Here at the end of the year and start of another, my thoughts turn to long-term objectives—for my teams, for myself, for my career, for the broader organization and public we serve. What is the best use of the talents I’ve built so far? And what talents do I need for the next wave? Plus… just what is the next wave? Team Topologies is in there somewhere. But I’m thinking bigger, too. Team Topologies is a tool in service of a broader strategy. So what’s the broader strategy?

I get like this at the ends and beginnings of years. Kinda wish other folks did, too, as it’s fun to play “what if?” with the future. But I know “big” thinking like this is an acquired taste. Plus it requires a ton of faith in the future, and there are plenty of reasons—right here, right now, in our faces—to doubt in bigger ideas, bigger missions, and impact beyond what we can see ourselves or understand individually.

Like Frank Costanza on Festivus, “I got a lot of problems with you people and now you’re gonna hear about it.” But that’s just my corrugated exterior. I’ve always aspired to live up to the description of Henry David Thoreau that accompanied the paperback edition of The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail, which I can only paraphrase: “He loved the world so much it seemed he didn’t love it at all.”

Personal weeknotes

• Got the latest COVID-19 shot on Christmas Eve, since I had all of Christmas Day to be “sick” at home. Ever since the shot was introduced during the pandemic it’s made me feel sick for 24-36 hours. I’ll be doing the pneumonia shot this coming week. Because I’m a party animal. The shingles shots got me a couple years ago, too. But the flu shot never bothers me. Not even a bit.
• At the end of this weekend and start of the coming week it’s pseudo-family-time (family time mixed with work time). I’m in the Toledo area and so is my sister and of course my parents. Not sure much will change while we’re here. I think all we can do with my parents is be supportive and hope for the best, knowing that we’re likely to have to wait for either tragedy or for someone to seek mental health help that is—to an older generation—a sign of weakness rather than strength.
• Also getting worried about the April/May Camino de Santiago right now. It’s 120 days away and my wife is having some issues that might cause trouble for the walk. She’s working on it, and we’ll see how that plays out. But I’m nervous we may have to make modifications. What I don’t know is whether the modifications are a shorter/slower Camino (like the Ingles route), or just not doing a Camino at all because walking long distances is a barrier. Time will tell. But for now, I just want to get past the holidays so we can get some normal rhythms established.

About this week’s header photo