Hi there 👋

Joshua Bowles

Myself

1. I'm a talker.
   • I often get excited and loud -- I'm not angry, I'm very rarely upset.
   • It's okay to tell me I'm talking too much.
   • I take notes, which means I’m looking down, but I am listening to you.
2. If I'm upset I tell people directly.
3. I'm a linguist by training (and computational linguistics). I didn't study computer science.
   • I see myself as having acquired skill through lots of hard work.
4. I'm an academic at heart: more of a “fox” than a “mole” (ask me about it).
5. I'm not good at small talk, I get nervous at parties or when meeting new people.
6. I've had a few different careers and worked in some very remote places. I have known and interacted with a broad and diverse number of people. I'm happy to meet more.
7. I want to see other people succeed. I want you to succeed. Your success is my success.
   • My goal is to help you multiply your strengths while pushing you out of your comfort zone.
   • Each person is different, my management style may shift depending on your strengths and areas of growth.
8. I've done AI and ML before it was cool, it's not magic, it's a lot of (janitorial) work; I like janitor work.
   • AI is infrastructure
   • The biggest challenges for AI and data are not engineering, but product-market fit.

My Role

My role is to support and develop world-class engineers, then get out of the way. That's it. Everything else follows.

My Sense of Management

Management is mostly common sense and caring about people, products, and customers.

• I expect high functioning individuals, which means that you're proactive about collaborating with teams and services that you may impact or interact with.
• I expect you to find a way around blockers (world-class people are rarely ever "blocked").
• I expect you to learn what you need.
• I expect a general awareness that we're all in this together (whatever it is).
• I hold monthly performance observations.
  • I write down what I've observed, and we meet.
  • This gives you a chance to correct me where I'm wrong, and align our views.
  • By the end of the year, there are no surprises about your performance.
• I hold weekly one-on-one meetings, focusing on feedback for both of us.

Scope

Teams are incubators to develop world-class engineers through focusing on professional development goals and aligning those goals as best we can with specific projects. We solve fundamental problems by focusing on standards and best practices, innovating where needed. We seek to be a resource to others through example, communication, coordination, and collaboration.

Vision

Develop world-class engineers. That's it. Everything else follows.

• Make it work, make it right, make it fast.
• Work the problem, step by step.
• Focus on fundamentals.
  • If you don't understand something, learn it.
  • If you've learned something, implement it.
  • If you've implemented something, make it better.
• Engineering is also about intuition.
  • Listen to your instincts, check them against results, refine.
• Trust and Verify.
  • Trust yourself, check your ego, follow up on what you say.
  • Trust others, follow up on what they say.
  • Trust and verify code, testing, deployments, and architecture.
• Arrogance is ignorance.
• Lead by example.
• Stable is predictable, predictable is scalable.
• Iteration fosters adaptability, adaptability leads to evolution.
• Marginal gains add up.
• Too much planning is procrastinating.
• If you can't measure it, you don't understand it.

A Note on Skill and Talent

Talent is capacity, skill is praxis (putting practice into application). You don't need talent to become a highly skilled person, but you might need to invest a lot more time. On the other hand, talent won't get you anywhere unless you put in the effort. Talent is a false equivalence with skill, nor does it equate with interest or passion.