2 posts tagged “rachel-kroll”
2025
Documenting what you’re willing to support (and not) (via) Devious company culture hack from Rachel Kroll:
At some point, I realized that if I wrote a wiki page and documented the things that we were willing to support, I could wait about six months and then it would be like it had always been there. Enough people went through the revolving doors of that place such that six months' worth of employee turnover was sufficient to make it look like a whole other company. All I had to do was write it, wait a bit, then start citing it when needed.
You can have an unreasonable amount of influence by being the person who writes stuff down.
This reminded me of Charity Majors' Golden Path process.
2024
Figure out who’s leaving the company: dump, diff, repeat (via) Rachel Kroll describes a neat hack for companies with an internal LDAP server or similar machine-readable employee directory: run a cron somewhere internal that grabs the latest version and diffs it against the previous to figure out who has joined or left the company.
I suggest using Git for this - a form of Git scraping - as then you get a detailed commit log of changes over time effectively for free.
I really enjoyed Rachel's closing thought:
Incidentally, if someone gets mad about you running this sort of thing, you probably don't want to work there anyway. On the other hand, if you're able to build such tools without IT or similar getting "threatened" by it, then you might be somewhere that actually enjoys creating interesting and useful stuff. Treasure such places. They don't tend to last.