Everyone runs into problems that they can't solve on their own. I've hit this at every juncture of my career. When I was a new manager, I had peers but no one who could look at the whole big picture with me. And when I was promoted to Staff Software Engineer at a small startup, there was no one higher on the technical track for me learn from. I forged my own path and had to learn more slowly than I could have—and I got burned along the way.

My coaching practice serves engineers who are in the position I was earlier in my career. What would I have given to have a coach who had been through the problems I was running into and could listen, explain, and help me grow?

My focus is on helping engineers who are at a growth stage and who feel like they could grow faster and more effectively with some extra help. We can work together on improving your leadership and interpersonal skills, your big picture and systems thinking, your technical skill trajectory, and we can work on any career problems that come up.

If you want to explore working together, email me. In your introduction email, please let me know who you are and what you want to work on together. I typically recommend that we book multiple sessions at a time, since coaching work takes time to pay off.

Testimonials

Sometimes it's helpful to hear it from someone who I've worked with. Here's a testimonial written by one of my clients.

As a senior dev for a while now, I've mentored a lot of junior devs. I'm often asked to be the person with the answers, or at least how to find the answers. But what do I do when I have questions myself?

The higher up I've gone, the harder it's been for me to find someone that feels like they can help answer those questions well. But Nicole has definitely been one of those people. I appreciate her strong technical expertise, her empathy in seeing from my point of view and from the point of view of others around me, and most of all her ability to see other possible solutions I didn't think of. These are all important skills in a mentor, and I think it's rare to find them in one person, personally.

I just wish I'd reached out sooner. I've helped a decent number of people do better in their jobs, and I used to wonder if it was because I was doing a good job. I hope that's part of it, but over the years, I've started to realize that actually the thing that probably made these people successful the most is that they were self-reflective enough to ask for a mentor. It took me too long to realize that myself, but it's been great for me to have Nicole as a mentor so far!

-Ed