🧰 The Doghouse
Dispatches from inside the machine.
The unspoken rules of work, stripped of LinkedIn platitudes. First-person field reports on startup culture, corporate decay, and org-chart archaeology.
- 13 min read
How to Read a Job Posting Like a Forensic Accountant
A job posting is a disclosure document written by a party with an interest in the outcome. Nobody taught you to audit one — so here is the method, including what a salary range 60 grand wide is actually telling you.
- 10 min read
Every Estimate You Have Ever Given Was Wrong in the Same Direction
Nobody accidentally overestimates. The error only ever points one way, which means it isn't really an error — and about half the time it isn't even a mistake.
- 14 min read
The Meeting That Should Have Been an Email Was Actually a Power Ritual
Forty minutes, eleven people, one decision already made before anyone sat down. 'This should have been an email' is the wrong complaint — and knowing why is the difference between being annoyed and being effective.
- 10 min read
The Handover Document Is Not the Handover
She wrote fourteen pages before her last day and every sentence in it was true. Six weeks later we were still finding the things that weren't in it, because they were never the kind of thing that goes in a document.
- 12 min read
Notes From the Second Shift: A Field Report on Side Hustle Psychosis
8.6 million Americans work more than one job. The hustle-culture industry sells this as freedom and never once does the arithmetic. So I did the arithmetic, and the number is $21.81 an hour, and we need to talk about it.
- 13 min read
The Org Chart Is a Lie: A Field Guide to Reading Actual Power
Every company publishes a diagram of who reports to whom. Every company also runs on a completely different diagram that nobody has ever drawn. Here is how to find the second one — and why your career depends on it more than your performance review does.