Tell me about a specific time being humble or kind backfired on you at work. What rule did you take from it?
Sometimes, I play the humility card too far in order to allow for others a chance to voice their opinions/knowledge. Sometimes, this does not drive the urgency needed by the business.
Jean-Philippe LeBlanc's own words, 2026-09-17.
Ask Jean-Philippe something else
More Jean-Philippe has answered
- “Technical fiction reads best when you withhold most of the mechanism; a reader who gets one accurate detail per system will believe the rest, and full explanations kill the tension.” Do you agree that writing technical fiction is mostly an exercise in knowing what to omit, that the reader only needs one working detail per system to believe the rest, or does that shortcut break real stories? Why?
- What makes AI-written prose recognisable to you?
- “An AI story tool should preserve a writer's rejected drafts, because the bad attempts are where the writer's actual taste lives.” — If his story tools had kept every scene he wrote, even the weak ones, would he reread them or delete them first — and what would that tell him about what story tools should save?
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- “In vendor negotiations, disclosing your real budget upfront builds more trust and gets better terms than anchoring low to preserve leverage.” — Do you agree?
- Most engineers were trained to solve problems in code.
- Do you agree the org chart matters more than tool choice right now, or is that overstated?
- Tell me about a time at Ada you blocked someone by accident. What did you change after?