What I read

I have been doing this for years, and the hardest parts of the job were never about…

2026-03-24T19:24:11+01:00

I have been doing this for years, and the hardest parts of the job were never about typing out code. I have always struggled most with understanding systems, debugging things that made no sense, designing architectures that wouldn’t collapse under heavy load, and making decisions that would save months of pain later.

None of these problems can be solved LLMs. They can suggest code, help with boilerplate, sometimes can act as a sounding board. But they don’t understand the system, they don’t carry context in their “minds”, and they certianly don’t know why a decision is right or wrong.

And the most importantly, they don’t choose. That part is still yours. The real work of software development, the part that makes someone valuable, is knowing what should exist in the first place, and why.

— David Abram, The machine didn’t take your craft. You gave it up.

Authoritative Leadership: Definition, Pros, and Cons - Work Life by Atlassian…

2024-11-08T20:13:41+01:00

Authoritative Leadership: Definition, Pros, and Cons - Work Life by Atlassian

AUTHORITATIVE VS. AUTHORITARIAN LEADERSHIP: WHAT’S THE DIFFERENCE?

The authoritative leadership style gets a bad rap — probably because it’s frequently confused with the authoritarian leadership style. While the two terms are similar, the approaches are quite different:

Authoritative leadership: The leader sets a goal and encourages the team to work together to achieve it, leading by example and balancing autonomy with support.

Authoritarian leadership: The leader sets a goal and the exact path to get there, expecting employees to comply with strict directives without voicing concerns or disagreement.

Harvard Business School summarizes it perfectly: “Authoritative leaders say, ‘Come with me;’ authoritarian leaders say, ‘Do what I tell you.’”

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39288669&utm_term=comment] I have a 4-quardrant way…

2024-02-25T09:32:33+01:00

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39288669&utm_term=comment]

I have a 4-quardrant way of thinking about this that’s similar.

- Y-axis is “drive”

- X-axis is “aptitude”

- low drive + low aptitude: never hire

- low drive + high aptitude: hire for targeted use cases where you need expertise

- high drive + low aptitude: hire, train, and foster aptitude growth

- high drive + high aptitude: hire on the spot

There’s an indirect way of testing for this which is to test for curiosity and lack of ego. My experience has been that candidates with high curiosity tend to have low ego (they know what they don’t know and are curious to learn). These candidates make great hires because you can teach them anything.

Wrote about this a little bit here (with a handy diagram): https://charliedigital.com/2020/01/15/effective-hiring-for-small-or-all-teams/

The Procrastinator The Lone Wolf The Negative Nancy The Over-Promiser The Know-It-All The…

2023-11-26T10:21:47+01:00

The Procrastinator
The Lone Wolf
The Negative Nancy
The Over-Promiser
The Know-It-All
The Silent Type
The Perfectionist
The Unreliable One
The Conflict Instigator
The Burned-Out Employee

One powerful communication tool I’ve found particularly useful is Nonviolent Communication (NVC). Developed by psychologist Marshall Rosenberg, NVC is a method of communication that promotes empathy and understanding.

At its core, NVC involves four steps: Observation, Feeling, Need, and Request.

Observation involves stating the facts we observe that are affecting our well-being.
Feeling is about sharing how we feel in relation to what we observe.
Need is expressing what we need or value that is causing our feelings.
Request involves clearly requesting what we want without demanding it.

In a management context, NVC can be a game-changer. It can help you communicate effectively with your team, constructively address issues, and build strong, positive relationships.

10 hard-to-swallow truths they won’t tell you about software engineer job 1) 2) 3) … 10)…

2023-11-12T10:42:03+01:00

10 hard-to-swallow truths they won’t tell you about software engineer job

1)
2)
3)
…
10) You will profit more from good soft skills than from good technical skills

Technical skills are the ones you can learn easily. With different projects, you can understand a particular programming language. You can learn its syntax, pros and cons. It’s just a matter of practice.

On the other hand, soft skills are much harder to improve. Improvement takes a lot of mental strength. You must do things you are not comfortable with.

You have to put yourself in situations where you can improve or practice particular soft skills.

For example, communication is one soft skill that people always talk about. Let’s say you suck at public speaking. You have to force yourself into situations where you can practice some public speaking.

It’s very hard to intentionally put yourself into situations where you know you will suck at. Your mind will do everything to avoid those situations. It will bring hundreds of excuses and it’s easy to give up.

Besides communication, there are other soft skills:

teamwork
learning mindset
organization/time management
emotional intelligence/empathy
approachability
persistence/patience
confidence

I have met a lot of folks who are good with technical skills but awful to work with.

Dropbox, Twitter, Netflix, Facebook, GitHub, Instagram, Shopify, StackOverflow - these…

2023-10-07T07:45:15+02:00

Dropbox, Twitter, Netflix, Facebook, GitHub, Instagram, Shopify, StackOverflow - these companies and others started out as monolithic code bases. Many have a monolith at their core to this day.

Numbers To Know For Managing (Software Teams)

2023-04-19T07:25:36+02:00

https://staysaasy.com/management/2023/03/20/numbers-to-manage-by.html

0 - the number of times you should lie
0 - the number of pages your team should get off hours
1 - the number of times you should try to reverse a sincere resignation
2 - minimum number of direct reports anyone should ever have
3 - the minimum number of candidates you should interview before making a decision
4 - the number of minutes to spend on chit chat in the beginning of a meeting
5 - the number of comments on a document before you should ask to talk about the issue
6 - the number people tell you when they’re very unhappy
7 - the number of days before a new hire should have merged a pull request
8 - the % of people that should be rated as underperforming in a growth company during a bull market
10 - the max % you should be looking to negotiate an offer
30 - the number of days before a small support issue becomes a large support issue
50 - the number of Pull Requests a solid engineer should merge per 6 months
70 - the target % close rate for recruiting in a “regular” market
90 - the number of days a role should stay open
100 - the way you should keep it
200 - the maximum size of “small data”
500 - the number of employees before your CEO becomes a political figure
1000 - the size of company when you’re at risk of losing accountability
3905 - the average number of days from initial funding to IPO, for companies that make it

Reminiscing: the retreat to comforting work.

2022-11-06T14:03:37+01:00

https://lethain.com/reminiscing/

Hunter Walk’s idea of snacking: doing work that is easy to complete but low impact. (…) Snacking isn’t necessarily bad, a certain amount gives you energy to redeploy against more impactful tasks, but you do have to be careful to avoid overindulging.

To catch my own reminiscing, I find I really need to write out my weekly priorities, and look at the ones that keep slipping. Why am I avoiding that work, and is it more important than what I’m doing instead? If a given task slips more than two weeks, then usually I’m avoiding it, and it’s time to figure out where I’m spending time reminiscing.

What “Work” Looks Like

2022-11-06T13:55:37+01:00

https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2022/what-work-looks-like/

The mantra of sharing your work and involving everyone in decisions naturally leads to inviting and copying people into things that add no value to them, or you.

Work at MIT found that brainstorming generally “reduced creativity due to the tendency to incrementally modify known successful designs rather than explore radically different and potentially superior ones.”

I think Business with a capital B loves “collaboration” because of the seeming evidence of the feat: the potential for innovation is visible, even palpable when people are in a room — “I can see people meeting and talking and there are sticky notes all over the wall!”.

The funny thing is, sitting alone thinking doesn’t “look” like work. Even more so if it’s away from your computer. However, my own process for brainstorming and ideating often looks like this:

Load my brain with all the context of a problem.
Step away from the computer and go live — do the dishes, go for a run, vacuum the carpet.
Once potential solutions distill in my mind, go back to my desk and write them down or sketch them out.
Prepare a presentation, demo, or prototype to convey my idea to others and gather their feedback.
Rinse & repeat.

Loving Your Job Is a Capitalist Trap

2022-02-15T18:38:49+01:00

https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2021/11/danger-really-loving-your-job/620690/

more than 75 percent of college-educated workers believe that passion is an important factor in career decision making. And 67 percent of them say they would prioritize meaningful work over job stability, high wages, and work-life balance. Believers in this idea trust that passion will inoculate them against the drudgery of working long hours on tasks that they have little personal connection to. For many, following their passion is not only a path to a good job; it is the key to a good life.

frankly, the white-collar labor force was not designed to help workers nurture self-realization projects. It was designed to advance the interests of an organization’s stockholders. When people place paid employment at the center of their meaning-making journey, they hand over control of an essential part of their sense of self to profit-seeking employers and the ebbs and flows of the global economy.

Recommending that career aspirants do what they love and figure out the “employment stuff” later (…) ignores the structural obstacles to economic success that many face, and blames career aspirants if they cannot overcome obstacles. It guides workers to avoid the grind of paid work by transforming it into a space of fulfillment. But it does nothing to address the factors that make paid work feel like drudgery in the first place. Many companies also tend to exploit workers’ passion. My research finds that employers prefer workers who find their jobs fulfilling, precisely because passionate employees often provide additional uncompensated labor.

In order to circumvent the existential problems of passion, individuals can shift their personal philosophies about work. One solution is to trim paid work to fit into a more confined space in our lives: Work that can be contained in predictable hours, that provides freedom to engage in meaningful outside activities, and that allows ample time for friends, family, and hobbies may be a more desirable and self-preserving goal.

The more pertinent question, then, isn’t “How can I change my career path to do work that I love?” but rather “How can I wrangle my work to leave me with more time and energy for the things and people that bring me joy?”

No one should entrust the bulk of their sense of self to a single social intuition, especially one within something as tempestuous as the labor market.

Beware SAFe (the Scaled Agile Framework for Enterprise), an Unholy Incarnation of Darkness

2021-12-08T18:54:18+01:00

https://seandexter1.medium.com/beware-safe-the-scaled-agile-framework-for-enterprise-an-unholy-incarnation-of-darkness-bf6819f6943f

At the highest level, called the “Portfolio”, SAFe does advocate funding indefinite “Value Streams”. However, the Lean Portfolio Management function that controls funding are given sole authority to approve which Portfolio Epics (large initiatives) move into each stream. Epics are not explanations about a problem that needs to be solved. They are pre-formed ideas about how best to solve those problems.

SAFe collects small product teams (often Scrum teams) into “Agile Release Trains” — groups of teams with an additional layer of management roles spanning each group at what is called the “Program level”.

Generally these roles impede the autonomy of teams. They add process and communication overhead out of proportion with the value they provide.

Right away we can see signs of the old-school mindset of viewing teams as a “delivery” function instead of a strategic one. The high level thinkers come up with ideas, and the low level doers execute on those ideas. Ignored is the possibility that those closest to the work might be best equipped to make decisions about it.

The Product Owner and team might theoretically be able to prioritize other, smaller pieces of work against the work imposed on them, but these efforts have limited visibility and buy-in from above.

SAFe actually chooses to manage dependencies is by increasing focus on planning, process, hierarchy, and standardization. Predictably, this results in lots of meetings that interfere with the ability to get work done. It imposes this approach through a universal roll-out that affects the entire organization at once.

There is definitely some value in having people get together in person to build relationships, share information, and orient around goals. On the other hand, using that limited time window to make 10 week plans of specific user stories based on pre-defined features, and then requiring commitment to those plans is much less valuable.

As soon as PI planning ends, those plans created based on limited understanding and numerous assumptions will become obsolete as soon as anything new is learned. Teams will be continuously torn between sticking to the plan they’ve learned doesn’t make sense and and reorienting expectations for reasons those above them may not be in a position to understand.

Roles at the program level and above cannot possibly attend all team retrospectives. This means retrospectives will not be directly heard by the people who can actually change many of the things being discussed.

Systems design explains the world: volume 1

2021-12-08T13:44:53+01:00

https://apenwarr.ca/log/20201227

As a Novice going for Junior, you had to prove you could fix bugs without too much supervision;
Going for Senior, you had to prove you could implement a whole design with little supervision;
Going for Staff, you had to show you could produce designs based on business problems with basically no management;
Going for Senior Staff, you had to solve bigger and bigger business problems; and so on.

People who are naturally excellent at glue work often stall out early in the prescribed engineering pipeline, even when they’d be great in later stages (staff engineers, directors, and executives) that traditional engineers struggle at. In fact, it’s well documented that an executive in a tech company requires almost a totally different skill set than a programmer, and rising through the ranks doesn’t prepare you for that job at all. Many big tech companies hire executives from outside the company, and sometimes even from outside their own industry, for that reason.

In systems design, there is rarely a single right answer that applies everywhere. But with centralized vs distributed systems, my rule of thumb is to do exactly what Jo Freeman suggested: at least make sure the control structure is explicit. When it’s explicit, you can debug it.

Chicken-egg problems

Video game console makers (Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft) have become skilled at this; they’re the only ones I know who do it on purpose every few years. Some tricks they use are:

Subsidizing the cost of early console sales.
Backward compatibility, so people who buy can use older games even before there’s much native content.
Games that are “mostly the same” but “look better” on the new console.
Compatible gamepads between generations, so developers can port old games more easily.
“Exclusive launch titles”: co-marketing that ensures there’s value up front for consumers (new games!) and for content producers (subsidies, free advertising, higher prices).

The next level up is a two-sided market, such as Uber or Ebay. Nobody can get a ride from Uber unless there are drivers; but drivers don’t want to work for Uber unless they can get work. Uber has to attract both kinds of users (and worse: in the same geographic region! at the same time of day!) before either kind gets anything from the deal.

The most difficult level I know is a three-sided market. For example, UberEats connects consumers, drivers, and restaurants. Getting a three-sided market rolling is insanely complicated, expensive, and failure-prone.

Second-system effect

Second system effect arises through the following steps:

An initial product starts small and is built incrementally, starting with a low budget and a few users.
Over time, the product gains popularity and becomes profitable.
The system evolves, getting more and more hacks on top, and early design tradeoffs start to be a bottleneck.
The engineers figure out a new design that would fix all the mistakes we know about, plus more! (And they’re probably right.)
Since the product is already popular, it’s easy to justify spending the time to “do it right this time” and “build a strong platform for the next 10 years.” So a project is launched to rewrite everything from scratch. It’s expected to take several months, maybe a couple of years, and a big engineering team.

The results are remarkably consistent:

The project takes longer than expected to reach feature parity.
The new design often does solve the architectural problems in the original; however, it unexpectedly creates new architectural problems that weren’t in the original.
Development time is split (or different developers are assigned) between maintaining the old system and launching the new system.
As the project gets increasingly overdue, project managers are increasingly likely to shut down the old system to force users to switch to the new one, even though users still prefer the old one.

Innovator’s dilemmas

A summary of the Innovator’s Dilemma is as follows:

You (Intel in this case) make an awesome product in a highly profitable industry.
Some crappy startup appears (ARM in this case) and makes a crappy competing product with crappy specs. The only thing they seem to have going for them is they can make some low-end garbage for cheap.
As a big successful company, your whole business is optimized for improving profits and margins. Your hard-working employees realize that if they cede the ultra-low-end garbage portion of the market to this competitor, they’ll have more time to spend on high-valued customers. As a bonus, your average margin goes up!Genius.
The next year, your competitor’s product gets just a little bit better, and you give up the new bottom of your market, and your margins and profits further improve. This cycle repeats, year after year. (We call this “retreating upmarket.”)
The crappy competitor has some kind of structural technical advantage that allows their performance (however you define performance; something relevant to your market) to improve, year over year, at a higher percentage rate than your product can. And/or their product can do something yours can’t do at all (in ARM’s case: power efficiency).
Eventually, one year, the crappy competitor’s product finally exceeds the performance metrics of your own product, and promptly blows your entire fucking company instantly to smithereens.

The dilemma comes from the fact that all large companies are heavily optimized to discard ideas that aren’t as profitable as their existing core business. Any company that doesn’t optimize like this fails; by definition their profitability would go down. So thousands of worker bees propose thousands of low-margin and high-margin projects, and the company discards the former and invests heavily in the latter (this is called “sustaining innovation” in the book), and they keep making more and more money, and all is well.

Fancy expensive databases were the only way to get high transaction throughput, until SSDs came along and made any dumb database fast enough for most jobs.

Complicated database indexes and schemas were great until AWS came along and let everyone just brute force mapreduce everything using short-term rental VMs.

JITs were mostly untenable until memory was so much slower than CPU that compiling was not the expensive part. Software-based network packet processing on a CPU was slower than custom silicon until generic CPUs got fast enough relative to RAM. And so on.

But in the book, it had a meaning. There are two kinds of innovations: sustaining and disruptive. Sustaining is the kind that big companies are great at. If you want to make the fastest x86 processor, nobody does it better than Intel (with AMD occasionally nipping at their heels). Intel has every incentive to keep making their x86 processors better. They also charge the highest margins, which means the greatest profits, which means the most money available to pour into more sustaining innovation. There is no dilemma; they dump money and engineers and time into that, and they mostly deliver, and it pays off.

A “disruptive” innovation was meant to refer to specifically the kind you see in that plot up above: the kind where an entirely new thing sucks for a very long time, and then suddenly and instantly blows you away. This is the kind that creates the dilemma.

If you’re a startup and you think you have a truly disruptive innovation, then that’s great news for you. It’s a perfect answer to that awkward investor question, “What if [big company] decides to do this too?” because the honest truth is “their own politics will tear that initiative apart from the inside.”

The Art of Not Taking Things Personally

2021-12-08T12:12:17+01:00

https://medium.dave-bailey.com/the-art-of-not-taking-things-personally-b7a8395ce172

Overreaction is Often Driven by Something Else Entirely
Blame is Often Driven by Anger
Anxiety comes from not seeing the full picture.
Avoidance is Often Driven by Insecurity
Criticism is Often Driven by Shame
Unrequested Advice is Often Driven by Regret
Mistrust is Often Driven by an Unspoken Expectation
Doubt is Often Driven by a Lack of Clarity
Selflessness is Often Driven by Guilt
Every Negative Emotion is Driven by an Unmet Need

If You’re So Successful, Why Are You Still Working 70 Hours a Week?

2021-11-12T20:03:45+01:00

https://hbr.org/2018/02/if-youre-so-successful-why-are-you-still-working-70-hours-a-week

In the old days, if you were a white-collar worker, the deal was that you worked as hard as you could at the start of your career to earn the right to be rewarded later on, with security of tenure and a series of increasingly senior positions. This is no longer true. Today, many senior leaders work longer and harder than ever.

My research (…) shows that our tendency to overwork and burn out is framed by a complex combination of factors involving our profession, our organization, and ourselves. At the heart of it is insecurity.

A professional’s insecurity is rooted in the inherent intangibility of knowledge work. How do you convince your client that you know something worthwhile and justify the high fees you charge? The insecurity caused by this intangibility is exacerbated by the rigorous “up or out” promotion system perpetuated by elite professional organizations

Exacerbating this problem, elite professional organizations deliberately set out to identify and recruit “insecure overachievers” — some leading professional organizations explicitly use this terminology, though not in public. Insecure overachievers are exceptionally capable and fiercely ambitious, yet driven by a profound sense of their own inadequacy. This typically stems from childhood, and may result from various factors, such as experience of financial or physical deprivation, or a belief that their parents’ love was contingent upon their behaving and performing well.

In the short term, insecure overachievers respond by delivering exceptional performance.

The tendency to hard work is reinforced by the strong culture of social control created by elite professional organizations. On the one hand, this is comforting. Some professionals I have studied refer to their firms as being like a “family,” or something even more intense.

Paradoxically, the professionals I studied still believe that they have autonomy and that they are overworking by choice. They do not blame their organizations, which after all have invested in work-life balance initiatives and wellness programs. Instead, they blame themselves for being inadequate

As a result, by the time insecure overachievers become leaders of their organizations, they unconsciously replicate the systems of social control and overwork that helped to create them.

Your insecurities may have helped to get you where you are today, but are they still working for you? Is it time to acknowledge that you have “made it” and to start enjoying the experience a little bit more? And if your boss is an insecure overachiever, recognize how they are projecting their insecurity onto you — how they make you feel insecure for not being able to keep up with them.

Work exceptionally long hours when you need to or want to, but do so consciously, for specified time periods, and to achieve specific goals. Don’t let it become a habit because you have forgotten how to work or live any other way.

If you are a leader, you have a responsibility not just to your firm but to the people who work within it. Help your colleagues to achieve their full potential, but do not allow yourself to exacerbate and exploit their insecurities. And remember that your ultimate “duty of care” is to yourself.

How Big Tech Runs Tech Projects and the Curious Absence of Scrum

2021-11-11T15:02:07+01:00

https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/project-management-at-big-tech/

Autonomy for software engineers and teams. The expectation of developers at traditional companies is to complete assigned work. At SV-like companies, it’s to solve problems that the business has. This is a huge difference. It impacts the day-to-day life of any engineer.
Curious problem solvers, not mindless resources. A motivated engineer easily makes multiple times the impact of a “factory worker” who only does what they’re told. For organizations with a factory worker attitude, this approach will bias towards more heavyweight project management approaches that leave little room for interpretation, on purpose.
Internal data, code, and documentation transparency. Employees – and not just engineers – often have access to real time business metrics and data sources, to write their own queries and create custom reports.
Exposure to the business and to business metrics. Engineers are encouraged to interact with the rest of the business and build relationships with non-engineers. In contrast, traditional companies often make it impossible for developers to interact with the rest of the business.
Engineer-to-engineer comms over triangular-communication.Traditional companies will encourage hierarchical communication that slows down information flow, and results in slower decisions.
Investing in a less frustrating developer experience. Companies that care about engineers solving problems quickly set up various platform teams, which reduce the developer experience churn.
Higher pay, justified by higher leverage. Companies that leverage engineers well, have no trouble paying close to the top of the market, or above it.
Caliber of the talent hired. These companies hire highly competent and highly motivated people, thanks to the combination of all the above. They have a large pool to choose from, as they are known for generous compensation packages, and strong career growth opportunities.

Empowered and autonomous teams are the building blocks of all these companies. They are also the key differentiator between many companies in the tech industry.

Stage of company, not name of company

2021-11-11T14:22:04+01:00

https://theskip.substack.com/p/stage-of-company-not-name-of-company

When choosing your next company, first determine which stage (pre-product fit, post-product fit, growth, or scale) is the best match. Usually only 1 or 2 stages make sense for any given job search.

Post-product fit companies need functional experts who can introduce stability.

People who thrive here can introduce the right amount of structure and process without frustrating founders and entrepreneurs.
Growth is taking place slowly and consistently, and many areas of expertise are completely missing and unstaffed.
If you are five to 10 years into your career, you are unlikely to be a director or executive in a late-stage company. But at this phase, if you get hired, you might be more experienced than anyone in the company and can lead a team. It’s the trade-off between being a crew member on an ocean liner versus captain of a small vessel.

Being Nice and Effective

2021-11-06T09:01:25+01:00

https://m.subbu.org/being-nice-and-effective-aba6a4c84303

I’m writing this article for the nice people in leadership roles. By the meaning of the word “nice,” such people are kind, polite, and friendly. They generally trust the goodness of the people they lead. They are not usually difficult to work with, care for others, are patient, and listen. They venture to be vulnerable. You don’t hesitate to approach them.

Here are the six leadership styles.

Coercive: This style demands immediate compliance. You get told more often than being asked about what you think. This style hurts the climate.
Authoritative: This style mobilizes people towards a vision. They motivate people through vision and work to maximize your commitment to goals. You would know how your work is contributing to the broader vision. This style has the most positive impact on the climate.
Affiliative: This style creates harmony and builds emotional bonds with the people. Under such leadership, people share ideas and their inspiration with one another. This style also has a positive impact on the climate.
Democratic: This style forges consensus through participation. This style is characterized by listening to people and getting their buy-in to drive flexibility and responsibility, even if it takes more time. This style also has a positive impact on the climate.
Pacesetting: This style sets high standards for performance and creates “do as I do, now” pressure on people in an “I know it all” mode. Of course, this style also harms the climate.
Coaching: This style develops people for the future. In this style, you will see delegation get challenging assignments. You will be lucky to work with such leaders since you grow. This style also has a positive impact on the climate.

He identifies that authoritative, democratic, affiliative, and coaching styles have “the best climate and business performance.” The other two styles, coercive and pacesetting, hurt the climate. I’m sure you all have worked with or for managers that employed these two negative styles, and you could not run away from them fast enough.

Three crucial skills that leaders must develop to become executives

2021-07-25T09:37:44+02:00

https://theskip.substack.com/p/three-crucial-skills-that-leaders

Becoming a great executive requires a set of skills beyond what’s needed to be a leader. Executive skills are subtle and can be elusive to managers, demanding a great deal of focus, courage, and dedication. These skills include taking (almost irrational) career risk, learning to scale by trusting your team, and developing advanced soft skills. New skills are hard for leaders to develop simply because they’ve already found success, which makes them less motivated to make substantive skill shifts. But those who see change as a path to growth will ascend to top roles within an organization.

Ideally, your career will go through three acts. Act I is the “setup.” It’s where you transition from being an individual contributor to a leader. Act II is your transition from a leader to an executive. And Act III is where you start your second career, hopefully unconstrained by previous financial and personal needs.

most leaders, like clockwork, complete Act I roughly 10 to 15 years after they enter the workforce. Not everyone ends up as a leader, but those who rise to that level follow a pretty consistent timeline. Some start fast, lucky enough to land in a rapidly growing environment and be supported by a good manager and team, and are able to quickly move from learning a skill to mastering it

unlike in the first dozen years, career paths become highly inconsistent. Some people continue to rise, but most will stall or even decline. This is highly unintuitive, but in reviewing the careers of a myriad of leaders, I see he’s absolutely right

When you reach Act II, you’re comfortable and have a successful career. But to grow, you need new experiences, which likely means you need to change jobs. Change now takes courage and significant risk—you have more to lose than you had in Act I. So most prefer to avoid making big changes, resulting in fewer new challenges and much slower growth than they experienced in Act I.

Now fast-forward 10 to 15 years, after you’ve purchased your first or second home and you’ve established roots in that particular city. What will it take to move again? No doubt, we could always move again to a bigger, better home. But it’s more of a luxury than a necessity. So many people simply don’t do it, instead being content with staying the course, avoiding the pain and cost of moving, and focusing their energies elsewhere.

Getting things done in a workplace is some combination of what you know (“IQ,” or hard skills) and how to use your knowledge (“EQ,” or soft skills). Act I is where you build out functional expertise. For a software developer, it’s how to effectively write quality code, tackle more complex technical problems, work in a team, and eventually manage a group of individuals. For a product manager, it’s how to run a meeting, set goals and direction, drive accountability, and deliver useful products to end users.

to grow you must take risks and constantly put yourself in new, challenging, and increasingly ambiguous settings. Your current expertise will help navigate these new roads, but you’ll need to build new talents and adjust your existing skills to truly excel. Most leaders don’t have an intense desire to reinvent themselves—they’d prefer to continue pushing on the skills that made them a leader to begin with. But new challenges require new approaches that fit the new environment, not just replicating the past

The majority of my leadership coaching is to help people manage these anxieties and frustrations. These include:

“I get nearly zero feedback so I feel like I don’t belong.”
“The company simply doesn’t acknowledge my importance. It’s taking far too much time to get promoted, increase my compensation or my scope.”
“I’m frustrated by how slow it takes to make things happen.” Or, “The bureaucracy around here is crippling.”
“I just don’t understand my tenured co-workers. They just feel so stuck in their ways, unable to consider new ideas.” Or I hear, “These new people just have no sense of how things are done around here. They are impatient and shoot before they aim.”

With this added responsibility, at first you might just end up working harder and increasing your level of engagement. Up to this point, your success has mainly come from making good decisions and mastering the details. So naturally, as the problem space gets bigger, you increase focus and absorb more context. Sadly, there are only so many hours in a day and your capacity is finite. So on your path to becoming an executive, mastering each detail will hold you back. You’ll need to develop a new, crucial skill: building teams and trusting the people in them.

So to scale yourself, you will need to recruit leaders who can work and thrive under you, likely from outside the company. And you’ll need to learn to trust them, even when you don’t have full context. Leaders who are scaling learn:

how to prioritize and be efficient with their time
invest in finding and managing great people
dive in at the right altitude
how to make the right decisions by asking just the right questions

After reading the challenges that come with Act II, please don’t feel discouraged from pursuing an executive career path. If you are in Act I, do your best to recognize and pull forward the skills noted above. And if you are in Act II, realize that career growth will rapidly decelerate by default. To keep pace and continue to grow, you will need to aggressively seek new talents and skills.

Career Ladders for Tech, Open Sourced

2021-05-11T11:59:32+02:00

https://career-ladders.dev

Roles up to and including Senior, ladders are constructed around becoming the best at what one does that one might personally be.

At Staff level, the career expands to help others be successful with what you do and know, and scale yourself.

At Principal and beyond, you are trying to help others be the best that they can be, removing yourself and meeting others where they are.

Learning Speed: What Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, And Bill Gates Know That Most People Don’t

2021-03-21T11:02:50+01:00

https://medium.com/accelerated-intelligence/learning-speed-what-jeff-bezos-elon-musk-and-bill-gates-know-that-most-people-dont-220f830e1d53

Most people play popular games — games with predefined boundaries that are played in crowded sandboxes. Popular games are often those with the most short-term, concrete rewards. (..) Hidden games are played in sandboxes that people don’t even realize exist. Hidden games have a higher return, but they are more long-term and abstract.

Playing hidden games allows these innovators to walk to their own tune, to make incredible innovations, and to be camouflaged even when they are well known. (..) I associated speed with being hurried, working long hours, low quality work, and feeling overwhelmed. I was wrong. There was a lot of nuance I didn’t appreciate — nuance like the quote below offers. (..) As I dug deeper, I realized that speed isn’t fundamentally about “doing more” or “running faster.” Rather, it is more a way of thinking.

“Be quick, but don’t hurry.” — John Wooden

“For pretty much any technology whatsoever, the progress is a function of how many iterations do you have, and how much progress do you make between each iteration.” - Elon Musk

“Everybody must realize that if you don’t meet customer demand quickly enough, without sacrificing quality, a competitor will.” - Bill Gates

“The only way to win is to learn faster than everybody else.” - Eric Ries

Both learning speed and execution speed are important, but they’re often conflated with each other. This is a big deal. Execution speed is about getting more done by either putting in more resources or by operating more efficiently. Examples of execution speed include:

Working a longer day
Making decisions faster
Finding a tool that helps you work faster
Making sure people aren’t waiting on one another to move forward
Removing a bottleneck in an assembly line

When most people think about speed, they’re really thinking about execution speed. This is why the idea of speed is associated with long hours and hurry. Learning speed is special in two ways:

Higher leverage. You can 10x your learning speed through compounding and better learning techniques. At most, you can 2x how many hours you work.
Fewer sacrifices. When you work too long, you sacrifice your health and relationships with friends and family.

You can increase your learning speed in several ways:

Spending more time learning
Learning knowledge that doesn’t become outdated so your knowledge compounds
Finding breakthrough knowledge in a sea of info overwhelm
Remembering what you learn so you can use it for the rest of your life
Creating an experimentation engine so you can rapidly try new ideas without procrastinating and without taking on huge risk
Systematically identifying and removing your blindspots

#1. The pace of life is increasing, and our pace needs to increase with it or we will be left behind

the rate of paradigm shift in the world is doubling every 10 years. This means that by 2040, the pace will be 4x what it is now. And in 100 years, it will be 1,024x what it is now.

When we are ahead of others, we are in demand, get promoted sooner, and can charge a premium. When we are behind others, we are the first to be let go.

As the world becomes more global and digital, tens of millions of people will realize that they are further behind than they realized and that catching up feels impossible. The solution is to increase your learning speed now and not wait until you are forced to.

#2. Being a little bit faster can be the difference between winning and losing

Being a little bit ahead vs being a little bit behind is the difference between winning and losing. Therefore, be proactive rather than reactive.

#3. Little gains compound into huge gains

Speed matters because small gains often compound into large gains over time. (..) You can think of speed as being the first to release a minimum viable product to a market or to have a new skill that is really valuable to your employer. This is the first-mover advantage. You can also think of it as how quickly you iterate based on feedback from the market. This is the fastest-iterator advantage.

#4. Speed is the underdog’s #1 weapon

The fact that a startup can disrupt a huge company is startling when you think about it. The big company has tens of thousands of the world’s smartest employees, billions of dollars in profit, and a global reputation.

Changing markets create new customer needs. In other words, customers are always open to a better mousetrap.
New technologies create new ways of meeting those needs. Because those technologies are new, individuals who go all-in early can rapidly become world experts.
Startups don’t have sunk costs, and they can rethink how to solve a new customer need from scratch. Then, they can go all-in on the solution and “burn their boats.” For startups, getting the new idea to work is existential, whereas it isn’t for the large company.
Finally, startups can iterate faster than larger companies. Large companies have multiple layers of approvals and have a brand to protect.

#5. The best career opportunities are often time-bound

Tool adoption. If you’re the first to adopt a game-changing technology in your industry or position, you can use that to stand apart.
Investment opportunities. The earlier you get in on a great investment opportunity, the larger the return.
Cultural shifts. The sooner you realize an important cultural trend, the more you are seen as a pioneer rather than as out-of-touch.
Startup opportunities. Bill Gross runs both the longest running technology incubator and also one of the most successful. Of the 150 companies they’ve started, an amazing 45 have gone public. In 2015, Gross did an in-depth analysis to try and understand what separated the winners from the losers. He looked at teams, markets, ideas, funding, business models, and timing. Amazingly, he found that timing was the #1 key.
Social media. When a new social media platform gains traction, new users tend to be looking for people to follow. Furthermore, it is easier to get engagement. As time passes, users start to unfollow more than they follow, because they feel info overwhelm. Also, as the platform monetizes, it reduces organic engagement and offers more and more traffic on a paid basis.
Skills. When a new skill suddenly becomes in demand, there is a shortage of workers to fill that demand. As a result, employees can earn a premium for having that skill. For example, at one point, programmers with experience with autonomous vehicles were worth over $1 million dollars per year to their companies.

Speed is great in theory, but it’s difficult in practice.

On the one hand, if we keep on top of all the latest tools, skills, social media platforms, and investment opportunities, we can quickly become overwhelmed with no time to do our core work. Furthermore, many of the changes we track won’t end up panning out.

If we are too late, we will miss out on the best opportunities. We also risk being considered out of touch. There is one rule that has helped me find the balance between the two poles in my own life. I call it the Hockey Stick Rule. When I see something grow exponentially in the shape of a hockey stick, (..) at the very least I immediately devote 10 hours to truly understanding it before passing judgement on it. This approach helps me understand what’s happening without getting overwhelmed.

5 second feedback

2020-12-12T15:22:56+01:00

https://critter.blog/2020/11/26/5-second-feedback/

Ask (“Can I give you some feedback?”)
State the behavior (“When you X…”)
State the impact (“…the result is Y.”)
Encourage effective future behavior (“Keep it up!” for positive feedback or “Can you change that?” for negative feedback)

Are you angry? If so, don’t give the feedback.
Are you focused on the past instead of the future (i.e., reminding them about something they did wrong or punishing them)? If so, don’t give the feedback.
Are you able to let it go? If not, don’t give the feedback. In other words, if you can’t let it go in terms of how you feel, you shouldlet it go by not giving negative feedback. If you feel an urge to deliver feedback, you’re probably doing it for the wrong reasons.

Ask HN: Moving from a startup to a big co, what should I be aware of? | Hacker News

2020-11-24T15:05:27+01:00

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23455415

do I put in 40% to get 90% completed, or do I put in 150% to get 99% completed?

How to achieve career growth: opportunities, skills & sponsors - Blog by Damian Schenkelman

2020-11-24T15:04:57+01:00

https://yenkel.dev/posts/how-to-achieve-career-growth-opportunities-skills-sponsors

Mental Wealth

2020-11-22T12:08:35+01:00

https://jjbeshara.com/2020/06/04/mental-wealth/

• When it comes to mental health, our society approaches it like we did with physical health 50 years ago. We only think about it when something goes wrong.

• To the wider public, mental health is synonymous with mental illness. Our notion of physical health is, however, very different than our notion of physical illness.

• We might benefit from approaching mental health like we invest in anything else in our lives (finances, relationships, careers, physical health, etc), where one builds wealth in this area by continuous, conscious investment.

• Estimates say that 83% of us will be hit with a mental health crisis in our lives, we can all make the choices to invest wisely in this area to improve our ‘mental durability’ to deal with it properly.

• In my 19 years of paying close attention to mental health, my experience has taught me that there are five foundations towards a concept I will call ‘mental wealth’ — sleep, diet, exercise, stress management, and exogenous compounds (anything from coffee to alcohol to prescription medication)

Testing Strategies in a Microservice Architecture

2020-11-22T12:00:27+01:00

https://martinfowler.com/articles/microservice-testing/

① Write as few end-to-end tests as possible

② Focus on personas and user journeys

③ Choose your ends wisely

④ Rely on infrastructure-as-code for repeatability

⑤ Make tests data-independent

Spotify’s Failed #SquadGoals

2020-11-22T11:55:33+01:00

https://www.jeremiahlee.com/posts/failed-squad-goals/

Why efficiency is dangerous and slowing down makes life better | Psyche Ideas

2020-11-06T14:52:58+01:00

https://psyche.co/ideas/why-efficiency-is-dangerous-and-slowing-down-makes-life-better

Economists teach us that increased efficiency is the major way to improve our standard of living. If your company gives you a pay rise without becoming more efficient, it will also have to raise its prices to make up the shortfall. If all companies do the same, everyone ends up running in place – you’ll need your higher wages to match the higher prices of the things you buy. So, if we want to make material progress, we must become more efficient. Streamlined supply chains, just-in-time deliveries and no slack in the workforce all serve to raise efficiency. Achieve this, and all our lives will get better and better, or so we’re promised.

The Light Triad vs. Dark Triad of Personality

2020-09-23T11:01:27+02:00

https://getpocket.com/explore/item/the-light-triad-vs-dark-triad-of-personality

The dark triad has already been well-studied. (…) the dark triad of personality consists of narcissism (entitled self-importance), Machiavellianism (strategic exploitation and deceit) and psychopathy (callousness and cynicism). While these three traits had traditionally been studied mostly among clinical populations (…) each of these traits are clearly on a continuum—we are all at least a little bit narcissistic, Machiavellian and psychopathic.

To our surprise, three distinct factors emerged from our studies, which we labeled: Kantianism (treating people as ends unto themselves, not mere means), Humanism (valuing the dignity and worth of each individual) and Faith in Humanity (believing in the fundamental goodness of humans)

(…) dark triad was positively correlated with being younger, being male, being motivated by power, instrumental sex, achievement and affiliation (but not intimacy), having self-enhancement values, immature defense styles, conspicuous consumption, selfishness and viewing their creative work and religious immortality as routes to death transcendence. The dark triad was negatively correlated with life satisfaction, conscientiousness, agreeableness, self-transcendent values, compassion, empathy, a quiet ego, a belief that humans are good and a belief that one’s own self is good.

The dark triad also showed positive correlations with a variety of variables that could facilitate one’s more agentic-related goals. For instance, the dark triad was positively correlated with utilitarian moral judgment and the strengths of creativity, bravery and leadership, as well as assertiveness, in addition to motives for power, achievement and self-enhancement. Also, an unexpected correlation between the dark triad and curiosity was found, which was localized primarily to the embracing (“I like to do things that are a little frightening,” “I prefer jobs that are excitingly unpredictable”) and deprivation (“It disturbs me when I don’t understand a solution,” “It bothers me if I don’t know a word”) forms of curiosity.

In stark contrast, the overall picture provided by the pattern of correlations with the light triad was quite different than the dark triad. The light triad was associated with being older, being female, less childhood unpredictability, as well as higher levels of religiosity, spirituality, life satisfaction, acceptance of others, belief that others are good, belief that one’s self is good, compassion, empathy, openness to experience, conscientiousness, positive enthusiasm, having a quiet ego and a belief that one can live on through nature and biosociality (having children) after one’s personal death.

Individuals scoring higher on the Light Triad Scale also reported more satisfaction with their relationships, competence and autonomy, and they also reported higher levels of secure attachment style and eros in their relationships. In general, the light triad was related to being primarily motivated by intimacy and self-transcendent values. Many character strengths correlated with the light triad, including curiosity, perspective, zest, love, kindness, teamwork, forgiveness and gratitude.

Additionally, in line with our predictions, the light triad was related to greater interpersonal guilt—including survivor (“I sometimes feel I don’t deserve the happiness I achieved”), separation (“It makes me anxious to be away from home for too long”) and omnipotent responsibility (“I worry a lot about the people I love even when they seem to be fine”) forms of guilt. While it may be adaptive to experience these forms of interpersonal guilt for facilitating relationships and repairing damage in a relationship, these forms of guilt may limit one’s ambitions for fear of succeeding while others remain less successful.

Written communication is remote work super power

2020-08-27T20:05:24+02:00

https://snir.dev/blog/remote-async-communication/

When everyone is expected to be available at any point, the cost of interrupting someone and getting an immediate answer is lower than looking for an answer yourself.

Planning is another culprit. Most people will not go through proper in-depth planning for their tasks ahead of time. They’ll prefer to define the end goal, and discover issues and details as they go. They know they will never get stuck, people will answer their questions on time.

This creates a culture of interruptions in the organization. It feeds itself so deeply, that the organization can’t really operate without interruption. Since the organization as a whole is dependent on that, it becomes part of the culture. Once you have culture of interruptions, even the best communicator in the world will not be able to change it.

Work time flexibility will be broken too. Since everyone is dependent on everyone else to be available for interruptions within the work day, you have a work day.

You must be in sync about your work day times with everyone else. You therefore give up the ability for real work time flexibility.

Working from home and dreaming on picking up your children at noon, hangout with them and get back to some work later in the night? Forget about it. You will get stuck on something very quickly and no one will be there for you. Not to mention you will get your colleagues stuck as you won’t answer their questions on the afternoon.

Writing intentionally for asynchronous communication can solve all the issues mentioned above. Async writing is different from chat messages. It lives longer, targets more potential audience and is easy to discover.

To live longer, the text needs to be aware of a larger reader group context. Where chats often consider just one/two readers that have the context to understand what you talk about, the long live text should consider entire group of potential readers. Now, and at some point in the future.

Async communication allows for self discovery without interruptions:

You can keep on your flow without waiting for someone to give you details
You can get into “deep focus” session without context switching that allows for better productivity
You can work whenever, since you are not dependent on anyone immediately

50 Ideas That Changed My Life — David Perell

2020-08-27T12:53:16+02:00

https://www.perell.com/blog/50-ideas-that-changed-my-life

Inversion: Avoiding stupidity is easier than trying to be brilliant. Instead of asking, “How can I help my company?” you should ask, “What’s hurting my company the most and how can I avoid it?” Identify obvious failure points, and steer clear of them.

Theory of Constraints: A system is only as strong as its weakest point. Focus on the bottleneck. Counterintuitively, if you break down the entire system and optimize each component individually, you’ll lower the effectiveness of the system. Optimize the entire system instead.

Preference Falsification: People lie about their true opinions and conform to socially acceptable preferences instead. In private they’ll say one thing. In public, they’ll say another.

Mimetic Theory of Desire: Humans are like sheep. We don’t know what we want, so we imitate each other. Instead of creating our own desires, we desire the same things as other people. The entire advertising industry is built on this idea.

Talent vs. Genius: Society is good at training talent but terrible at cultivating genius. Talented people are good at hitting targets others can’t hit, but geniuses find targets others can’t see. They are opposite modes of excellence. Talent is predictable, genius is unpredictable.

Competition is for Losers: Avoid competition. Stop copying what everybody else is doing. If you work at a for-profit company, work on problems that would not otherwise be solved. If you’re at a non-profit, fix unpopular problems. Life is easier when you don’t compete. (Hint: don’t start another bottled water company).

Russell Conjugation: Journalists often change the meaning of a sentence by replacing one word with a synonym that implies a different meaning. For example, the same person can support an estate tax but oppose a death tax — even though they are the same thing.

Opportunity Cost: By reading this tweet, you are choosing not to read something else. Everything we do is like this. Doing one thing requires giving up another. Whenever you explicitly choose to do one thing, you implicitly choose not to do another thing.

Planck’s Principle: Science doesn’t progress because people change their views. Rather, each new generation of scientists has different views. As old generations pass away, new ideas are accepted and the scientific consensus changes.

Bike-Shed Effect: A group of people working on a project will fight over the most trivial ideas. They’ll ignore what’s complicated. They’ll focus too much on easy-to-understand ideas at the expense of important, but hard to talk about ideas. For example, instead of approving plans for a complicated spaceship, the team would argue over the color of the astronaut’s uniforms.

Table Selection: This idea comes from poker, where you’re advised to choose your opponents carefully. That means you shouldn’t compete against the best people. You don’t need to get good at doing difficult things if you get good at avoiding difficult things. If you want to win, pick an easy table and nail your execution.

Goodhart’s Law: When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. One hospital took too long to admit patients so a penalty was given for 4+ hour wait times. In response, ambulance drivers were asked to slow down so they could shorten wait times.

Gall’s Law: A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system.

Hock Principle: Simple, clear purpose and principles give rise to complex and intelligent behavior. Complex rules and regulations give rise to simple and stupid behavior.

The Second Law of Thermodynamics: The world tends towards disorder. That’s why your room becomes messier and messier over time. It’s also why an engine converts only ~35% of its energy into useful work. Time moves towards increasing one direction: increasing entropy.

The Paradox of Specificity: Focus isn’t as constraining as it seems. In the age of the Internet, when everybody has Google search and personalized social media feeds, differentiation is free marketing. The more specific your goal, the more opportunities you’ll create for yourself. Narrowing your aperture can expand your horizons.

Occam’s Razor: If there are multiple explanations for why something happened and they are equally persuasive, assume the simplest one is true. In the search for truth, remove unnecessary assumptions. Trust the lowest-complexity answer.

Hormesis: A low dose of something can have the opposite effect of a high dose. A little bit of stress wakes you up, but a lot of stress is bad for you. Lifting weights for 30 minutes per day is good for you, but lifting weights for 6 hours per day will destroy your muscles. Stress yourself, but not too much.

Horseshoe Theory: Extreme opposites tend to look the same. For example, a far-right movement and a far-left movement can be equally violent or desire a similar outcome. People on both sides are more similar to each other than they are to people in the center.

Creativity Begins at the Edge: Change starts away from the spotlight. Then, it moves towards the center. That’s why the most interesting ideas at a conference never come from the main stage. They come from the hallways and the bar after sunset

The Paradox of Consensus: Under ancient Jewish law, if a suspect was found guilty by every judge, they were deemed innocent. Too much agreement implied a systemic error in the judicial process. Unanimous agreement sometimes leads to bad decisions.

Convexity: If you want to be lucky, look for opportunities with big upsides and low downsides. In addition to increased optionality, your errors will benefit you more than they harm you. Convex payoffs let you tinker your way to success and innovation.

The Go-For-It Window: Large gaps between accelerating technologies and stagnating social norms create lucrative new business opportunities. But they are only available for a short time when people can capitalize on the difference between the real and perceived state of the world. For example, 2007 was the perfect time to launch the iPhone, but Google Glasses launched too early.

Via Negativa: When we have a problem, our natural instinct is to add a new habit or purchase a fix. But sometimes, you can improve your life by taking things away. For example, the foods you avoid are more important than the foods you eat.

5 Engineering Manager Archetypes - patkua.com

2020-06-20T10:16:48+02:00

https://www.patkua.com/blog/5-engineering-manager-archetypes/

View the role of the Engineering Manager as one of five different archetypes: The Tech Lead EM, Team Lead EM, Delivery EM, Product EM and the Lead of Leads EM.

You find the previous four archetypes at a team level, leading a group of 3-8 people. What makes this 5th archetype different is that they lead a much larger group of 9-30 people. The larger the group size, the less sustainable it is for one person to lead individuals and manage work. Thus the Lead of Leads EM leads a group of people, each themselves acting in a leadership role.

The Lead of Leads EM appears more often in larger organisations with a focus on maximising the effectiveness of a group of teams.

The Lead of Leads EM is an evolution of one of the other EM archetypes. Yet it is still often labelled as an “Engineering Manager”. This archetype requires more experience and owns a greater set of responsibilities. Some organisations use a different name for this archetype. Some may use the title “Senior Engineering Manager” or “Head of Engineering.”

The Lead of Leads EM archetype requires the added ability to lead other leaders. This is a significantly different skill set from leading individual contributors. Leading other leaders demands a broader understanding of different leadership styles. It also means a person must adapt their own leadership style in response. Successful Lead of Leads EMs first built their skills leading at a team level before transitioning to this archetype.

The Definition of a Tech Lead - patkua.com

2020-06-20T09:47:51+02:00

https://www.patkua.com/blog/the-definition-of-a-tech-lead/

A Tech Lead is a software engineer responsible for leading a team and alignment of the technical direction. Providing a strong technical direction involves establishing a technical vision, resolving technical disagreements and managing the technical quality of team deliverables. Effective technical leadership ensures the team uses appropriate engineering practices (such as CD or automated testing), invests in continual improvements to tooling or technical debt, and that the system evolves to meet its changing needs and environment.

Production Oriented Development

2020-04-05T20:03:05+02:00

https://paulosman.me/2019/12/30/production-oriented-development.html

1. Engineers should operate their code

Engineers are the subject matter experts for the code they write and should be responsible for operating it in production. In this context, “operating” means deploying, instrumenting, and monitoring code as well as helping to resolve incidents related to or impacting that code.

2. Buy Almost Always Beats Build

If you can avoid building something, you should. Code is the most expensive way to solve a problem that isn’t addressing a core area of your business. For most small to mid-sized companies, there are open source or better yet, hosted solutions that solve a wide range of common problems.

3. Make Deploys Easy

Deploying should be a frequent and unexciting activity. Engineers should be able to deploy with minimal manual steps and it should be easy to see if the deploy is successful (this requires instrumenting your code for observability, which - tada - is covered above), and it should be easy to roll back a deploy if something doesn’t go well. Deploying frequently implies that deploys are smaller, and smaller deploys are generally easier, faster and safer.

4. Trust the People Closest to the Knives

The people who work with a system are the ones who understand it best. This applies to any part of the socio-technical systems within which we all work. In the case of software systems, the engineers who deploy every day and are on-call for critical services understand the level of risk they operate in.

5. QA Gates Make Quality Worse

Many teams have a manual QA step that gets performed before deploys. The idea, I guess, is to have someone run automated or manual tests to verify that a set of changes are ready to be released. This sounds like a comforting idea - having a human being (or team of human beings) “verify” a release before it goes out - but it falls victim to several false assumptions and creates some misalignments that do more harm than good.

Luckily, solving this one is easy. Instead of having a dedicated QA team work on creating manual and automated test cases that run in a fictitious QA environment, reassign that team to work on continuous testing in production. Instead of being a gate for deploys, a QA team could continuously verify that production is working as expected. QA teams are also well situated to lead Chaos Engineering initiatives, where faults are intentionally injected in production. QA engineers could also work on making the CI/CD pipeline more reliable, so that deploys are no longer a nightmare.

6. Boring Technology is Great.

With thanks to Dan McKinley, always strive for boring tech when possible. Systems are inherently unpredictable, and you want a wide area of expertise to fall back on when shit goes sideways. There are also routine operations that you’ll have to do (deploys, database migrations, etc) and it’s Very Nice to have widely used and tested tooling for this stuff. I think of databases most often when I think about this belief. MySQL is a database with many, many quirks, but it is so widely used, that you should still just use it most of the time.

Very few organizations have the bandwidth to debug unique problems. You don’t want unique problems, especially when performing routine operations - i.e. storing bytes on disk, choosing a new leader in a cluster, garbage collecting objects, querying time-series data, etc. Having unique problems will kill a small to medium size team. It will sap you of your creative energy, which is better used creating value for customers who want to pay you monies for your software. Use your innovation tokens wisely!

7. Simple Always Wins

I don’t have much to say about this, but we’re all writing YAML and JSON instead of XML and we’re all using HTTP instead of CORBA, RMI, DCOM, XPCOM, etc. Right? In that same spirit, I’d rather debug problems in a LAMP stack than a Microservices architecture any day.

Quick sidebar on Microservices: as with so many trends in tech, they are often sold as a panacea. Let me be clear: Microservices, designed well, solve some specific problems and as with most solutions to complex problems, involve several trade-offs.

8. Non-Production Environments Have Diminishing Returns

A more direct heading for this section would be “Non-Production Environments are Bullshit”. Environments like staging or pre-prod are a fucking lie.

9. Things Will Always Break

It’s impossible, even undesirable, to avoid failure. Lean into the fact that failure is inevitable, and focus on how you respond to it.

Don’t Let Perfection Be the Enemy of Productivity

2020-04-05T19:27:32+02:00

https://hbr.org/2020/03/dont-let-perfection-be-the-enemy-of-productivity

Productivity isn’t about getting more done. It’s about what you get done.

1. You’re reluctant to designate decisions as “unimportant.”

But perfectionists have a hard time designating decisions as unimportant. They like to be in control of everything. Why? Because imperfections bother them more than they do other people.

Try using heuristics to quickly decide or delegate with the expectation that you will get much faster and pretty good decisions overall but not perfect ones.

2. You feel morally obligated to overdeliver.

Let’s say someone offers to pay you $1,000 for a service. If you’re a perfectionist, providing $1,000 of value might not seem like enough. You might think that you need to give what your competitors would charge $1,500 for because you want to outperform. You think: “If I don’t overdeliver, I’m underdelivering.”

Understand what it’s costing you to always aim for outperformance. What else don’t you have time, energy, attention, and willpower for? Perhaps your own health, your big goals, or your family. If you assess that the costs are significant, try having a rule of thumb for when you’ll overdeliver. For instance, you might decide that in three out of ten situations in which you have the urge to do so, you will, but not in the other seven.

3. You get excessively annoyed when you aren’t 100% consistent with good habits.

When perfectionists want to adopt new habits, they tend to fall into one of three categories. They bite off more than they can chew and their plans are too onerous to manage; they avoid starting any habit unless they’re 100% sure they can hit their goal everyday, which leads to procrastination; or they take on only those habits that they can stick to no matter what.

Have a mechanism in place for checking that you’re not sticking to a habit just because you’re worshiping at the altar of self-discipline.

Perfectionism is often driven by striving for excellence, but it can be self-sabotaging if it leads to suboptimal behavior like continuing habits beyond their usefulness, overdelivering when you don’t have to, or overthinking every decision you make.

What do executives do, anyway?

2020-04-04T08:18:32+02:00

https://apenwarr.ca/log/20190926

(…) the job of an executive is: to define and enforce culture and values for their whole organization, and to ratify good decisions.That’s all.Not to decide. Not to break ties. Not to set strategy. Not to be the expert on every, or any topic. Just to sit in the room while the right people make good decisions in alignment with their values. And if they do, to endorse it. And if they don’t, to send them back to try again.

If the decision is already made before the meeting, why do we need the meeting? Because the right decision might not happen without the existence of that meeting. The executive gives formal weight to a major decision. The executive holds the two disagreeing leads responsible: they must figure out not what’s best for them, but what’s best for the company.

If the executive makes their own decisions and forces them downstream: the executive doesn’t have enough information to make good decisions in detail, so the decision won’t be optimal. And there won’t be much buy-in from people downstream

If the executive chooses not to be involved in conflicts that are “not important enough; you figure it out”: political power games ensue. Whoever can force their way will win, killing morale

If the executive accepts escalations, then tries to make a tie-breaker decision: non-optimal decisions get made, because again the executive is, out of the three people, the least qualified to decide

If the executive brings in more people to discuss the issue: this is something the two leads should have done already. If they didn’t, they are failing at their job, and need to learn how to do it better. Step one is the executive sends them a message: “Go back. Include these additional people/groups in your decision. Come back when you’ve thought it through properly.”

in a large organization, executives don’t set strategy. Not even the CEO sets strategy. Why? Because it’s an illusion to believe you can enforce a strategy. (…) if the person at the top is trying to “set a strategy” by making operational decisions, those decisions will be based on insufficient facts, because there are simply far too many facts for one person. That means, if your decisions should be based on facts, you will make worse decisions than your subordinates.

What executives need to do is come up with organizational values that indirectly result in the strategy they want. (…) If one of your values is to make the tools that run faster and smoother, your employees will probably make less bloatware and you’ll probably hire different employees than if your values are to scale fast and capture the most customers in the shortest time.

If your old strategy is failing, you can’t fix the company by just declaring a new strategy. You do it by declaring new values. Then you enforce those values. And that’s going to make a lot of people very upset. (If you do this too often, you deserve what you get.)

Why to Start a Startup in a Bad Economy

2020-03-30T20:50:50+02:00

http://paulgraham.com/badeconomy.html

(…) a recession may not be such a bad time to start a startup. I’m not claiming it’s a particularly good time either. The truth is more boring: the state of the economy doesn’t matter much either way.

If we’ve learned one thing from funding so many startups, it’s that they succeed or fail based on the qualities of the founders. The economy has some effect, certainly, but as a predictor of success it’s rounding error compared to the founders.

Technology progresses more or less independently of the stock market. So for any given idea, the payoff for acting fast in a bad economy will be higher than for waiting. Microsoft’s first product was a Basic interpreter for the Altair. That was exactly what the world needed in 1975, but if Gates and Allen had decided to wait a few years, it would have been too late.

Everyone knows you’re supposed to buy when times are bad and sell when times are good. But of course what makes investing so counterintuitive is that in equity markets, good times are defined as everyone thinking it’s time to buy. You have to be a contrarian to be correct, and by definition only a minority of investors can be.

Fortunately the way to make a startup recession-proof is to do exactly what you should do anyway: run it as cheaply as possible. For years I’ve been telling founders that the surest route to success is to be the cockroaches of the corporate world. The immediate cause of death in a startup is always running out of money. So the cheaper your company is to operate, the harder it is to kill. And fortunately it has gotten very cheap to run a startup. A recession will if anything make it cheaper still.

What if you quit your job to start a startup that fails, and you can’t find another? That could be a problem if you work in sales or marketing. In those fields it can take months to find a new job in a bad economy. But hackers seem to be more liquid. Good hackers can always get some kind of job. It might not be your dream job, but you’re not going to starve.

Another advantage of bad times is that there’s less competition. Technology trains leave the station at regular intervals. If everyone else is cowering in a corner, you may have a whole car to yourself.

So maybe a recession is a good time to start a startup. It’s hard to say whether advantages like lack of competition outweigh disadvantages like reluctant investors. But it doesn’t matter much either way. It’s the people that matter. And for a given set of people working on a given technology, the time to act is always now.

Don't Call Yourself A Programmer, And Other Career Advice | Kalzumeus Software

2020-02-16T19:48:25+01:00

https://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/10/28/dont-call-yourself-a-programmer/

90% of programming jobs are in creating Line of Business software: Economics 101: the price for anything (including you) is a function of the supply of it and demand for it.

Software solves business problems. Software often solves business problems despite being soul-crushingly boring and of minimal technical complexity. (..) It does not matter to the company that the reporting form is the world’s simplest CRUD app, it only matters that it either saves the company costs or generates additional revenue.
There are companies which create software which actually gets used by customers, which describes almost everything that you probably think of when you think of software. It is unlikely that you will work at one unless you work towards making this happen. Even if you actually work at one, many of the programmers there do not work on customer-facing software, either.

Engineers are hired to create business value, not to program things: Businesses do things for irrational and political reasons all the time (see below), but in the main they converge on doing things which increase revenue or reduce costs. Status (..) is awarded to people who successfully take credit for doing one of these things.

The person who has decided to bring on one more engineer is not doing it because they love having a geek around the room, they are doing it because adding the geek allows them to complete a project (or projects) which will add revenue or decrease costs. Producing beautiful software is not a goal. Solving complex technical problems is not a goal. Writing bug-free code is not a goal. Using sexy programming languages is not a goal. Add revenue. Reduce costs. Those are your only goals.

Profit Centers are the part of an organization that bring in the bacon: partners at law firms, sales at enterprise software companies, “masters of the universe” on Wall Street, etc etc. Cost Centers are, well, everybody else. You really want to be attached to Profit Centers because it will bring you higher wages, more respect, and greater opportunities for everything of value to you.

Engineers in particular are usually very highly paid Cost Centers. This is what brings us wonderful ideas like outsourcing, which is “Let’s replace really expensive Cost Centers who do some magic which we kinda need but don’t really care about with less expensive Cost Centers in a lower wage country”. (..) Nobody ever outsources Profit Centers.

Don’t call yourself a programmer: “Programmer” sounds like “anomalously high-cost peon who types some mumbo-jumbo into some other mumbo-jumbo.” If you call yourself a programmer, someone is already working on a way to get you fired.

You know Salesforce, widely perceived among engineers to be a Software as a Services company? Their motto and sales point is “No Software”, which conveys to their actual customers “You know those programmers you have working on your internal systems? If you used Salesforce, you could fire half of them and pocket part of the difference in your bonus.” (There’s nothing wrong with this, by the way. You’re in the business of unemploying people. If you think that is unfair, go back to school and study something that doesn’t matter.)

Instead, describe yourself by what you have accomplished for previously employers vis-a-vis increasing revenues or reducing costs. If you have not had the opportunity to do this yet, describe things which suggest you have the ability to increase revenue or reduce costs, or ideas to do so.

Similarly, even though you might think Google sounds like a programmer-friendly company, there are programmers and then there’s the people who are closely tied to 1% improvements in AdWords click-through rates.

Do Java programmers make more money than .NET programmers? Anyone describing themselves as either a Java programmer or .NET programmer has already lost, because a) they’re a programmer (you’re not, see above) and b) they’re making themselves non-hireable for most programming jobs.

Talented engineers are rare — vastly rarer than opportunities to use them — and it is a seller’s market for talent right now in almost every facet of the field. Everybody at Matasano uses Ruby. If you don’t, but are a good engineer, they’ll hire you anyway. (A good engineer has a track record of — repeat after me — increasing revenue or decreasing costs.) Much of Fog Creek uses the Microsoft Stack. I can’t even spell ASP.NET and they’d still hire me.

There are companies with broken HR policies where lack of a buzzword means you won’t be selected. You don’t want to work for them, but if you really do, you can add the relevant buzzword to your resume. (..)

Co-workers and bosses are not usually your friends: You will spend a lot of time with co-workers. You may eventually become close friends with some of them (..) You should be a good person to everyone you meet — it is the moral thing to do, and as a sidenote will really help your networking

You radically overestimate the average skill of the competition because of the crowd you hang around with: Many people already successfully employed as senior engineers cannot actually implement FizzBuzz. Key takeaway: you probably are good enough to work at that company you think you’re not good enough for.

Networking: it isn’t just for TCP packets: Networking just means a) meeting people who at some point can do things for you (or vice versa) and b) making a favorable impression on them.

Strive to help people. It is the right thing to do, and people are keenly aware of who have in the past given them or theirs favors. If you ever can’t help someone but know someone who can, pass them to the appropriate person with a recommendation. If you do this right, two people will be happy with you and favorably disposed to helping you out in the future.

Academia is not like the real world: Your GPA largely doesn’t matter (modulo one high profile exception: a multinational advertising firm). (..) it only determines whether your resume gets selected for job interviews.

Your major and minor don’t matter. Most decisionmakers in industry couldn’t tell the difference between a major in Computer Science and a major in Mathematics if they tried.

In general, big companies pay more (money, benefits, etc) than startups. Engineers with high perceived value make more than those with low perceived value. Senior engineers make more than junior engineers. People working in high-cost areas make more than people in low-cost areas. People who are skilled in negotiation make more than those who are not.

We have strong cultural training to not ask about salary, ever. This is not universal. In many cultures, professional contexts are a perfectly appropriate time to discuss money. (If you were a middle class Japanese man, you could reasonably be expected to reveal your exact salary to a 2nd date, anyone from your soccer club, or the guy who makes your sushi.)

If I were a Marxist academic or a conspiracy theorist, I might think that this bit of middle class American culture was specifically engineered to be in the interests of employers and against the interests of employees. Prior to a discussion of salary at any particular target employer, you should speak to someone who works there in a similar situation and ask about the salary range for the position.

Engineers are routinely offered a suite of benefits. It is worth worrying, in the United States, about health insurance (traditionally, you get it and your employer foots most or all of the costs) and your retirement program, which is some variant of “we will match contributions to your 401k up to X% of salary.” The value of that is easy to calculate: X% of salary. (It is free money, so always max out your IRA up to the employer match. Put it in index funds and forget about it for 40 years.)

How do I become better at negotiation? This could be a post in itself. Short version:
a) Remember you’re selling the solution to a business need (raise revenue or decrease costs) rather than programming skill or your beautiful face.
b) Negotiate aggressively with appropriate confidence, like the ethical professional you are. It is what your counterparty is probably doing. You’re aiming for a mutual beneficial offer, not for saying Yes every time they say something.
c) “What is your previous salary?” is employer-speak for “Please give me reasons to pay you less money.” Answer appropriately.
d) Always have a counteroffer. Be comfortable counteroffering around axes you care about other than money. If they can’t go higher on salary then talk about vacation instead.
e) The only time to ever discuss salary is after you have reached agreement in principle that they will hire you if you can strike a mutually beneficial deal. This is late in the process after they have invested a lot of time and money in you, specifically, not at the interview.
f) Read a book. Many have been written about negotiation. I like Getting To Yes

Working at a startup, you tend to meet people doing startups. Most of them will not be able to hire you in two years. Working at a large corporation, you tend to meet other people in large corporations in your area. Many of them either will be able to hire you or will have the ear of someone able to hire you in two years.

Working in a startup is a career path but, more than that, it is a lifestyle choice. This is similar to working in investment banking or academia. Those are three very different lifestyles. Many people will attempt to sell you those lifestyles as being in your interests, for their own reasons. If you genuinely would enjoy that lifestyle, go nuts. If you only enjoy certain bits of it, remember that many things are available a la carte if you really want them. For example, if you want to work on cutting-edge technology but also want to see your kids at 5:30 PM, you can work on cutting-edge technology at many, many, many megacorps.

Your most important professional skill is communication: Remember engineers are not hired to create programs and how they are hired to create business value? The dominant quality which gets you jobs is the ability to give people the perception that you will create value. This is not necessarily coextensive with ability to create value.

Some of the best programmers I know are pathologically incapable of carrying on a conversation. People disproportionately a) wouldn’t want to work with them or b) will underestimate their value-creation ability because they gain insight into that ability through conversation and the person just doesn’t implement that protocol

Conversely, people routinely assume that I am among the best programmers they know entirely because a) there exists observable evidence that I can program and b) I write and speak really, really well.

Communication is a skill. Practice it: you will get better. One key sub-skill is being able to quickly, concisely, and confidently explain how you create value to someone who is not an expert in your field and who does not have a priori reasons to love you.

All business decisions are ultimately made by one or a handful of multi-cellular organisms closely related to chimpanzees, not by rules or by algorithms: People are people. Social grooming is a really important skill. People will often back suggestions by friends because they are friends, even when other suggestions might actually be better. People will often be favoritably disposed to people they have broken bread with.

Actual grooming is at least moderately important, too, because people are hilariously easy to hack by expedients such as dressing appropriately for the situation, maintaining a professional appearance, speaking in a confident tone of voice, etc. Your business suit will probably cost about as much as a computer monitor. You only need it once in a blue moon, but when you need it you’ll be really, really, really glad that you have it.

At the end of the day, your life happiness will not be dominated by your career. Either talk to older people or trust the social scientists who have: family, faith, hobbies, etc etc generally swamp career achievements and money in terms of things which actually produce happiness. Optimize appropriately. Your career is important, and right now it might seem like the most important thing in your life, but odds are that is not what you’ll believe forever. Work to live, don’t live to work.

Monoliths are the future

2020-02-15T19:44:34+01:00

https://changelog.com/posts/monoliths-are-the-future

And then what they end up doing is creating 50 deployables, but it’s really a distributed monolith. So it’s actually the same thing, but instead of function calls and class instantiation, they’re initiating things and throwing it over a network and hoping that it comes back. And since they can’t reliably make it come back, they introduce things like Prometheus, OpenTracing, all of this stuff

Radical Candor: Software Edition

2020-01-22T14:37:03+01:00

https://medium.com/@rinaarts/radical-candor-software-edition-d4b5ad401be3

Radical Candor is about giving guidance that’s kind and clear, specific and sincere. To achieve this goal you must care personally and challenge directly.

Being human, we have feelings. And those feelings affect our work. Some cultures might view emotions as an unprofessional design flaw, but truly — it’s not. It’s part of the package.

Ignoring the human feelings part of the equation leads to unhappiness. Unhappiness leads to alienation and cynicism. Alienation and cynicism lead to bad results and attrition.

We all try to avoid saying things that are uncomfortable. Some cultures more than others, perhaps, but everyone will try to avoid awkward and difficult conversations. If we do manage to pluck up the courage to give some tough feedback, we will try and sugar coat it in a way that will soften the blow.

Radical Candor is the quadrant we’re aiming to be in: where you care personally and challenge directly. You have taken the time to establish that you care, understand the person in front of you, and give them clear and actionable feedback. They might still get hurt or feel awkward receiving feedback, but are likely to appreciate it and modify their behavior accordingly.

If I had to summarize Radical Candor in two sentences, I would say: Radical Candor is not about telling the truth no matter what. Radical Candor is about building relationships where the truth is welcome in order to get better quality results and improve personally.

Let me tell you: when there are people involved, it’s never “just a code review”.

Kids’ Video Game Obsession Isn’t Really About Video Games. It’s About Unmet Psychological Needs. - Nir Eyal - Pocket

2020-01-21T23:34:38+01:00

https://getpocket.com/explore/item/kids-video-game-obsession-isn-t-really-about-video-games-it-s-about-unmet-psychological-needs

Fortnite, like any well-designed video game, satisfies what we are all looking for. According to Drs. Edward Deci and Richard Ryan, people need three things to flourish. We look for competence — the need for mastery, progression, achievement, and growth. We need autonomy — the need for volition and freedom of control over our choice. And finally, we strive for relatedness — the need to feel like we matter to others and that others matter to us. Unfortunately, when considering the state of modern childhood, many kids aren’t getting enough of these three essential elements.

WeWork and Counterfeit Capitalism

2019-10-19T18:40:02+02:00

https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/wework-and-counterfeit-capitalism

WeWork describes itself as offering the ‘“space-as-a-service” membership model that offers the benefits of a collaborative culture, the flexibility to scale workspace up and down as needed and the power of a worldwide community, all for a lower cost.” In other words, the company sublets office space.

Generally speaking, Softbank’s model is to manipulate private capital markets as a way of drowning out competitors with cash. For instance, there were several ‘rounds’ of WeWork investment where Softbank was buying more shares at higher valuations. WeWork ostensibly became more valuable because Son said it was more valuable, and bought shares for higher prices. And since there was no public market for these shares, the pricing of the shares was totally arbitrary. WeWork then used this cash to underprice competitors in the co-working space market, hoping to be able to profit later once it had a strong market position in real estate subletting or ancillary businesses.

This is of course Amazon’s model, which underpriced competitors in retail and eventually came to control the whole market. And Amazon has spawned a host of imitators, including WeWork. It has also reshaped venture investing. The goal of Son, and increasingly most large financiers in private equity and venture capital, is to find big markets and then dump capital into one player in such a market who can underprice until he becomes the dominant remaining actor. In this manner, financiers can help kill all competition, with the idea of profiting later on via the surviving monopoly.

Engaging in such a strategy used to be illegal, and was known as predatory pricing. There are laws, like Robinson-Patman and the Clayton Act, which, if read properly and enforced, prohibit such conduct. The reason is very basic to capitalism. Capitalism works because companies that thrive take a bunch of inputs and create a product that is more valuable than the sum of its parts. That creates additional value, and in such a model companies have to compete by making better goods and services.

What predatory pricing does is to enable competition purely based on access to capital. Someone like Neumann, and Son’s entire model with his Vision Fund, is to take inputs, combine them into products worth less than their cost, and plug up the deficit through the capital markets in hopes of acquiring market power later or of just self-dealing so the losses are placed onto someone else. This model has spread. Bird, the scooter company, is not making money. Uber and Lyft are similarly and systemically unprofitable. This model is catastrophic not just for individual companies, but for their competitors who have to *make* money. I’ve written about this problem before. Amazon has created a much less competitive and brittle retail sector. Netflix’s money-losing business is ruining Hollywood.

Endless money-losing is a variant of counterfeiting, and counterfeiting has dangerous economic consequences. The subprime fiasco was one example. Another example was the Worldcom fraud in the late 1990s, which forced the rest of the U.S. telecom sector to over-invest into broadband. Competitors have to copy their fraudulent competitors. It’s a variant of Gresham’s Law, which says that “bad money drives out good.” If you can counterfeit something for cheap, the counterfeit will eventually take over the entire market and drive out the real commodity. That is what is happening in our economy writ large, a kind of counterfeit capitalism as ‘leaders’ like Neumann are celebrated and actual leaders who can make things and manage are treated like dogshit.

This kind of counterfeit capitalism is terrible for society as a whole. At first, with companies like Walmart and Amazon, predatory pricing can seem smart. The entire retail sector might be decimated and communities across America might be harmed, but two day shipping is convenient and Walmart and Amazon do have positive cash flow. But increasingly with cheap capital and a narrow slice of financiers who want to copy the winners, there is a second or third generation of companies asking Wall Street to just ‘trust me.’

As euphoria in capital markets takes hold, predatory pricing scheme come to entirely wastes capital on money losing enterprises, and eventually these companies become Soviet-style generators of white elephants and self-dealing. The men and women who run them have to be charlatans, because they are storytellers justifying losses. Powerful men like Dimon are sucked in, consultants start explaining to old-line economy companies how they too can become like WeWork, and eventually more and more of the economy just adopts counterfeit capitalism.

https://sriramk.com/exec-101-first-thirty-days

2019-10-19T17:39:40+02:00

https://sriramk.com/exec-101-first-thirty-days

Modern applications at AWS - All Things Distributed

2019-10-19T17:12:56+02:00

https://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2019/08/modern-applications-at-aws.html

To succeed in using application development to increase agility and innovation speed, organizations must adopt five elements, in any order: microservices; purpose-built databases; automated software release pipelines; a serverless operational model; and automated, continuous security.

7 Implications of seeing organisations as complex systems

2019-10-19T17:06:34+02:00

https://agileandchange.com/7-implications-of-seeing-organisations-as-complex-systems-996fd2398d58

17 Reasons NOT To Be A Manager

2019-09-17T22:20:48+02:00

https://charity.wtf/2019/09/08/reasons-not-to-be-a-manager/

2. IT IS EASY TO GET A NEW ENGINEERING JOB. REALLY, REALLY EASY
3. THERE ARE FEWER MANAGEMENT JOBS
4. MANAGER JOBS ARE THE FIRST TO GET CUT
6. ENGINEERS CAN BE LITTLE SHITS
7. AS A MANAGER, YOU WILL NEED TO HAVE SOME HARD CONVERSATIONS. REALLY, REALLY HARD ONES
9. YOU WILL GET NONE OF THE CREDIT, AND ALL OF THE BLAME.
12. JOY IS MUCH HARDER TO COME BY
13. IT WILL TAKE UP EMOTIONAL SPACE AT THE EXPENSE OF YOUR PERSONAL LIFE
14. YOUR TIME DOESN’T BELONG TO YOU
15. MEETINGS
16. IF TECHNICAL LEADERSHIP IS WHAT YOUR HEART LOVES MOST, YOU SHOULD NOT BE A MANAGER

What we get wrong about meetings – and how to make them worth attending

2019-09-04T05:16:28+02:00

http://timharford.com/2019/08/what-we-get-wrong-about-meetings-and-how-to-make-them-worth-attending/

“Wagner meeting” (of epic length), the “mushroom meeting” (appears suddenly, multiplies rapidly) and the “Stonehenge meeting” (it’s been a fixture for ages but nobody knows why)

Meetings frustrate when they reveal painful disparities in power. For subordinates, meetings are often the things that get in the way of doing their job. For the person with the power — the manager — meetings are the job.

Some meetings are to transfer information, some to allow discussion and some to reach a decision or resolve a problem. Then there are the meetings that exist purely for the sake of meeting. Don’t dismiss them; there’s nothing wrong with consenting adults enjoying a coffee break together. There doesn’t always need to be a reason.

There’s a big difference between the two types of meeting, but there’s also a clear common thread: people come prepared, have a reason to work together and finish the meeting with a clear sense of what comes next. A good meeting is a good meeting less because of what happens at the time, but because of what came before — and most importantly, what comes after.

Performance speed limits

2019-06-29T23:04:45+02:00

https://travisdowns.github.io/blog/2019/06/11/speed-limits.html

There are many possible limits that apply to code executing on a CPU, and in principle the achieved speed will simply be determined by the lowest of all the limits that apply to the code in question. That is, the code will execute only as fast as its narrowest bottleneck.

What is an Agile mindset?

2019-06-22T06:27:09+02:00

https://about.gitlab.com/2019/06/13/agile-mindset/

Model behavior: The most effective way to help your team shift to an Agile mindset is to exemplify the behaviors you want to see. To create a “no-fault, embrace risk” environment, share your setbacks with the team and tell them what you learned. When someone experiments, praise them for trying something new and discuss the biggest lessons learned. By being transparent and showing your team that this new way of thinking is possible, you become their collaborator.
Storytelling: Share how other organizations or teams have benefited from an Agile mindset. Understanding what others gained from a new way of thinking can help your team feel more enthusiastic about the change.
Take small steps: After doing more research about an Agile mindset, you might get excited and feel tempted to change things overnight. Take small steps and make minor adjustments in the beginning to help your team acclimate.

Micro Frontends

2019-06-11T00:37:06+02:00

https://martinfowler.com/articles/micro-frontends.html

In short, micro frontends are all about slicing up big and scary things into smaller, more manageable pieces, and then being explicit about the dependencies between them. Our technology choices, our codebases, our teams, and our release processes should all be able to operate and evolve independently of each other, without excessive coordination.

5 Ways to stay agile in a growing organization

2019-06-11T00:18:23+02:00

https://about.gitlab.com/2019/06/10/manage-conversation-staying-agile/

1. Make quick, but thoughtful decisions: his is the fundamental thing that allows startups to be competitive against dominant players in a market: It’s using your resources more efficiently and moving faster than anyone else. (…) If it’s easily revertible and makes something better, ship it.

2. Hire the right people: An Agile mentality lets you deliver incremental, low-risk value to customers, allowing you to get feedback or pivot with minimal investment. Accept mistakes: Not every problem should lead to a new process to prevent them. Additional processes make all actions more inefficient and a mistake only affects one.

3. Keep teams small and focused: Team members desperately want to be contributing meaningful changes on time and a reduction in scope lets them focus again on a more specific cross-section of the product, shifting attention away from the larger team discussions that may not be specific to a product area.

4. Allow teams to experiment with their own processes

5. Make sure everyone is on the same page