elainecchao.bsky.social
Principal product manager at Adobe; 5th degree black belt; musician; novelist; volunteerism advocate. Opinions are my own.
215 posts
463 followers
283 following
Regular Contributor
Active Commenter
comment in response to
post
Just saw your post on Threads, and it looked fine. Temp glitch, maybe?
comment in response to
post
Just wanted to say I’ve appreciated your boots on the ground coverage in China and Taiwan. Excited to hear your work going forward as well!
comment in response to
post
They ended earlier than usual!! I’m so thankful!
comment in response to
post
Spoke too soon. It’s now time for out of tune karaoke 😮💨
comment in response to
post
FWIW, this one: xkcd.com/2347/
comment in response to
post
I would probably do that same itinerary again if I had to; it was really nice not having to think about toiletries, I slept in my own bed, and was able to feed and cuddle the cats on either side of my day.
I had scheduled the day off today, but had to get up earlier for an unexpected obligation.
comment in response to
post
TBH had the flight been on time, I'm fairly sure I would have been okay. Woke up this morning absolutely parched, despite having pounded back a hydration beverage before passing out. Ended up feeling lousy this morning until I got some salt and carbs in me, even WITH another hydration beverage.
comment in response to
post
Still woozy until about a half hour before landing and irritated with my seatmate, who was having an animated conversation with the person next to her (a stranger) and kept waving her arms and elbows into my personal space. (Thankfully, she didn't make connection with me.)
comment in response to
post
... my flight was delayed by an hour. The flight out? 34 people on board. The flight back? Almost all full. On the way back, I slept sitting straight up through taxi and take off (tbh kind of a superpower) and woke up once we hit cruising altitude.
comment in response to
post
Any chance we could get the dates in the posts so that we don't have to click through to get that info? Thank you for putting this together!
comment in response to
post
Any other thoughts? Any other hiring managers want to chime in with opinions?
comment in response to
post
8) I am a former high school English teacher. My superpower is catching typos on sight. If your resume is a BS word salad or horribly misspelled, I am not going to be impressed by your resume, no matter how pretty it is.
comment in response to
post
7) Tell me how long you've been in the position. I saw some people basically try to stretch the truth into claiming they had a lot more experience than they had by combining two different titles into one larger chunk of time. I was not impressed.
comment in response to
post
6) Not all technical experience is equivalent. There were some people I had to pass on because their experience wasn't quite at the depth or in the area of expertise I was looking for.
comment in response to
post
5) Don't be disappointed with a no if you're applying for a senior position and you have zero or little applicable experience. Unfortunately, about 20% of the applicants fell into this bucket. Admire the chutzpah. I can't hire on it, though.
comment in response to
post
4) Tell me what kind of technology you worked on. There were those that just sent me summary of impact, but no description as to what technology was delivered. Was it a front end feature? Back end technology? Server-side? Client side? Web-based? Desktop or mobile native?
comment in response to
post
2) Please attach your resume. I'm not kidding - I got a couple of cover letters with no resume or LinkedIn attached.
3) Tell me the impact of what you did. I got a lot of resumes that talked a lot about customer interviews and A/B testing, as well as grooming backlogs.
comment in response to
post
Okay, let's talk about resumes.
1) FOR THE LOVE OF PETE, avoid applying via LinkedIn if your profile is just a list of job titles and dates. I got about 10 (out of 2k) resumes that were like this. I probably got another ~40 that were just really poorly formatted - bullet points into block text.
comment in response to
post
Out of the 2k resumes I read, I passed about 50 to my talent partner to screen. I interviewed about 40 of them. I passed about half along to the next phase. I hired 2.
comment in response to
post
I also knew this job would be working on high-visibility initiatives with high impact in a very technically complex stack. I needed someone who could show up to executive meetings, dig deep with our architects, and advocate with our technical partners.
comment in response to
post
That being said, I made sure to evaluate everyone who had more than a few years' experience based on the projects they led. I interviewed people without traditionally technical backgrounds who had PM'd incredibly technical projects.
comment in response to
post
Job seekers: it's probably not about you. I was looking for an incredibly specific set of skills to lead two technically deep initiatives. I'm talking GPU, memory, networking infrastructure, architecture reviews. This is not something that your typical non-technical candidate could handle.
comment in response to
post
This strategy means you build complacency into your opponent before hitting from a different vector. Defenders are worried about the current attack, not thinking about the next incoming strike until it's too late to respond.
comment in response to
post
A year ago, 7 mistook the word “falafel” for “colossal” and gave me a 5 min lecture on the colossal squid, largely from the Octonauts. When I read the word colossal now, I automatically inset the word “falafel.” (But yeah, agreed.)
comment in response to
post
However, the leg becomes useless or a liability if you try to wedge too late or allow your opponent to put their entire weight on the leg, trapping it. You have to think ahead and place the leg before you think you need it, and use it strategically before your opponent takes advantage of it.
comment in response to
post
Tbf I’m used to the days when I’d get like 10k views easy, so 2k is a blip. But it’s an outlier blip for this tiny account I’m running…