benkuhn

I’ve been thinking recently about what sets apart the people who’ve done the best work at Anthropic. You might think that the main thing that makes people really effective at research or engineering is technical ability, and among the general population that’s true. Among people hired at Anthropic, though, we’ve...

This post was adapted from an internal doc I wrote at Wave. Welcome to being a manager! Your time-management problem just got a lot harder. As an IC, you can often get away with a very simple time-management strategy: 1. Decide what your one most important thing is. 2. Work...

My few most productive individual weeks at Anthropic have all been “crisis project management:” coordinating major, time-sensitive implementation or debugging efforts. In a company like Anthropic, excellent project management is an extremely high-leverage skill, and not just during crises: our work has tons of moving parts with complex, non-obvious interdependencies...

This is an adaptation of an internal doc I wrote for Anthropic. Recently I’ve been having a lot of conversations about how to structure and staff teams. One framework I’ve referenced repeatedly is to break down team leadership into a few different categories of responsibility. This is useful for a...

This is an adaptation of an internal doc I wrote for Anthropic. I’ve been noticing recently that often, a big blocker to teams staying effective as they grow is trust. “Alice doesn’t trust Bob” makes Alice sound like the bad guy, but it’s often completely appropriate for people not to...

This is an adaptation of an internal doc I wrote for Wave. I used to think that behavioral interviews were basically useless, because it was too easy for candidates to bullshit them and too hard for me to tell what was a good answer. I’d end up grading every candidate...

Many large companies today are software monopolies that give their product away for free to get monopoly status, then do the most horrible things once they’ve won. (Previously, previously.) Can we do anything about this? Unfortunately, “you’re the product” is a popular business model for a reason: businesses like Facebook...