Communication

I believe good work begins with how people communicate.

I value intellectual honesty. I would rather hear an uncomfortable truth than a comfortable distortion, and I try to offer the same in return. Disagreement is not a problem to me; avoiding a useful disagreement is. I don’t expect people to agree with me—I expect us to be able to explain why we think what we think.

I value shared understanding over authority. Titles, conventions, and confident opinions are not substitutes for reasoning. When something matters, I want to understand the mechanism, the assumptions, and the trade-offs behind it.

Systems Thinking

Many of my preferences and the way I approach problems come from how I tend to think. I don’t take a phenomenon at face value; my mind tends to see it as an expression of underlying causes.. I guess that’s why complexity pulls me in rather than putting me off.

This results in a common pattern in how I approach problems:
Whether it is a machine learning model, an organization, a car’s brakes, or a social/cultural issue, I build a rough model of the thing, push on it until it breaks, then fix the model. Most of what I actually enjoy about my work — architecture, debugging, tracing a problem back to its real cause — comes from that same instinct.

And yes, I sometimes find myself at risk of getting trapped in analysis paralysis!

Team

I enjoy working with people and in environments where I find clarity, autonomy, and trust. I prefer people to have enough context and freedom to take responsibility for their work, while making their reasoning and decisions visible enough that others can follow and contribute.

These are the things that make work exciting to me: complex problems, knowledgeable people, honest and open conversation, and the freedom to design and to build.

I don’t expect every collaboration to be easy. I expect it to be real.