Some Open-Source Projects Are More Open Than Others

Piotr Zakrzewski is a sometime-contributor to open source projects. He’s not a regular on any one project, but more of a dabbler — a self-described “outsider contributor” who sometimes submits pull requests to projects he enjoys using.

In fact, Zakrzewski said, many contributors to open-source projects are outsiders.

“We are talking about people who usually use the project,” he said. “They don’t work on the project directly, they just use it for something else. And they found a bug or a missing feature, and because they were passionate about it and they like open source, they decided to give it a chance and make a contribution.”

Tools for Effective Delegation in Engineering Management

Maybe it’s a piece of code that we’ve shepherded for many years, or maybe it’s a program or project that has special importance. And, while many times we will have confidence in the person to whom we are delegating, it may still feel uncomfortable letting go. Delegating has been a frequent topic among my clients of late, so I thought I’d share some of the lessons I’ve learned over the years.

Leading your engineering team with ‘experiments’ not ‘processes’

Process monster (n): a manager for whom the answer is always, always ‘process’. The process monster will add more and more processes to the team until the team collapses under the weight of them. Eventually, the monster will move to another role, and the failure of the team will be explained as ‘resistance to process’.

I’m sure you’ve encountered process monsters in the wild before. Some have enough empathy and are in the right roles to be successful, while some have the effect of strong glue: slowly grinding a team to a halt under the illusion of improving efficiency that never materializes.

6 Lessons I Learned While Implementing Technical RFCs as a Decision Making Tool

Process is what I ship 🚢

This situation was the result of a process failure, and given that process is what I ship as the VP of Engineering, I was also responsible for improving the process so the team doesn’t find itself in these positions. We needed a way to make decisions as a team that would allow us to:

How We Introduced Levels to Our Engineering Organisation Without Losing People or Hurting Our Productivity

#### Dafna Rosenblum

Jan 30·6 min read

Photo by Chad Greiter on Unsplash

Why

The good thing about levels, is the transparency. When it’s clear to people what’s expected of them, stress goes down. It’s much easier to give frequent feedback with reference. “Remember that expectation from the list? I think you can improve in it by doing this and that”. With frequent feedback and low stress levels, productivity goes up. Aspiring to progress towards the next level can encourage managers to be more mindful about careers when allocating people to certain projects or tasks.

What I’ve Learned in 45 Years in the Software Industry

BTI360 teammate Joel Goldberg recently retired after working in the software industry for over four decades. When he left he shared with our team some of the lessons he learned over his career. With his permission, we reshare his wisdom here.

Looking back on four decades in the software industry, I’m struck by how much has changed. I started my career with punch cards and I am ending in the era of cloud computing. Despite all this change, many principles that have helped me throughout my career haven’t changed and continue to be relevant. As I step away from the keyboard, I want to share six ideas I’ve learned from my career as a software engineer.

2021 State of Remote Work

Overview

The world of remote work is growing more than ever before. This year, we not only surveyed people who were remote by choice, but also people who started working remotely suddenly and during a pandemic. Forty-five percent of respondents to this year’s State of Remote Work survey are working remotely due to COVID-19 (see chart #5).

Despite nearly half of the respondents being pushed to work from home in 2020, the responses to our first two questions stayed nearly the same as in previous years when that wasn’t the case. Overwhelmingly, remote workers would like to work remotely at least some of the time for the rest of their careers (see chart #1) and, just as we’ve seen in the past few years, 97 percent of remote workers would recommend remote work to others (see chart #2).

What Is Product-Led Growth & Why It’s Taking Off?

Product-Led Growth is defined as a go-to-market strategy that relies on using your product as the main vehicle to acquire, activate, and retain customers. If you’ve used Slack or Dropbox, you’ve witnessed this first-hand-you didn’t read a lengthy whitepaper on the benefits of strong internal communication or cloud-based file sharing. You wanted to see the product in action!

What Makes Product-Led Growth Unique?

Unlike sales-led companies where the whole goal is to take a buyer from Point A to Point B in a sales cycle, product-led companies flip the traditional sales model on its head. Product-led companies make this possible by giving the buyer the “keys” to use the product and helping them experience a meaningful outcome while using the product. At this point, upgrading to a paid plan becomes a no-brainer.

How to Join a Team and Learn a Codebase

Home > Articles > new codebase, who dis? (How to Join a Team and Learn a Codebase)

new codebase, who dis? (How to Join a Team and Learn a Codebase)

I have switched teams more often than I have had to implement an AVL tree, and you can guess which one of those two was taught in school. I wish someone had taught me how to join a new team! While learning a new codebase can be daunting, I’ve found a few things that work for me.

How Big Technical Changes Happen at Slack

Most new things in technology turn out to be fads: patterns of talking and doing that come and go without leaving a permanent mark. Microkernels; EPIC architectures like IA-64; object request brokers; and 1990s’-style neural nets are gone, and will not return. Sorry for the deep throwbacks; only time proves which things are fads, so for uncontroversial examples we have to reach pretty far back.

How to Measure and Improve Success in Your Engineering Team

Eric Rabinovich

Jan 24·13 min read

As an engineering leader, senior developer, or founder of a new startup, I want you to take a minute and think — really think — about a project you are currently working on.

Now, let me ask you four questions about that project:

1. What will you consider a huge success?
2. What will you consider a massive failure?
3. How do you know that you are currently on the right path towards success?
4. And my last question is, once finished, how can you tell if you nail what you wanted to achieve?

As developers or engineering managers, we run many projects — including:

“How Do I Feel Worthwhile as a Manager When My People Are Doing All the Implementing?”

“How do I feel worthwhile as a manager when my people are doing all the implementing?”

— An Engineering Manager

Hey, real quick: how long have you been managing? If it’s less than two years, honey, the answer is “you don’t.” Your feelings about your performance don’t mean much in a new role. If you think you’re crushing it, you probably aren’t. But hey, if you think you’re screwing it up royally, you probably aren’t that either. ☺️

From Software Engineer to CTO. Cathy Polinsky, former CTO @ Stitch Fix… | by Pear VC | Sep, 2020 | Medium | Medium

Laying the groundwork as a software engineer scaling early Amazon

Like many young graduates in computer science today, Cathy’s first job out of school was as a software engineer at a fast growing company — Amazon, in 1999, right before the dotcom crash.

“I thought I’d missed the interesting times at Amazon. I thought I’d missed the early stage startup. Little did I know, I was living the interesting times. It was a gritty time. I was there during the dotcom collapse and all my stock was underwater,” Cathy recalls.

How to Start a New Tech Exec Job

#### Nir Rubinstein

Jan 21·5 min read

This will be a bit different from the usual stuff I write about, which usually deals with tech stacks and architecture. Why? Well, I recently took on a new position and I knew that I had to set up some clear basic guidelines to myself on how I’m going to tackle this new challenge.
See, my last place of employment was the longest stint of my career — close to 9 years. In that time, I had the privilege of joining a startup of 2 co-founders and watching it grow to a 1000+ people company. Needles to say, growing a company means that you get to witness, firsthand, a lot of new people take on new roles. That being the case, and if you’re a vigilant learner, you can learn a lot about the dos and don’tsof how tostart a new job.

The Codeless Code: Case 154 A Bridge To Nowhere

A bridge builder was completing his inspection

of Zjing’s Bridge when he spied master Kaimu standing nearby.

The builder said to Kaimu: “I have heard your monks

speak of themselves as ‘software engineers.’ As a true

engineer I find such talk absurd…

“In my profession we analyze all aspects of our task

before the first plank is cut.

When our blueprints are done I can tell you exactly how much

Strategy Turns

Real rockets don’t go straight up. They go up, and then they turn.

Rockets do this to transition from “mostly going up” to “mostly going sideways” in order to achieve orbit. This is known as a gravity turn (technically, they pitchover, but that’s a less catchy title).

I see a lot of “turns” in life – when something makes sense to do at first, but becomes a bad idea once you’re established, and you notice the “pros” do something else instead.

Feedback

Feedback

1/12/2021

By: Josh Sloat

Why do we stink at giving feedback?

​Giving feedback is hard … really hard … because we tend to focus more on the criticism and less on the human receiving it. As a giver of feedback, we must learn to separate these and deliver our message in a more emotionally friendly manner.

Humans are highly emotional creatures and receiving feedback puts us in a highly vulnerable position. If navigated without awareness and sensitivity, feedback often leads to an emotional response. It’s well understood by psychologists that our brain’s emotional muscle is far more dominant than its objective counterpart. Once engaged – especially in a negative manner – any logical, constructive conversation immediately becomes an impossible journey.

The Middle Slump: The Power of Weekly Project Goals

There’s a thing writers call the middle slump. It’s that period in the middle of writing something when the author has lost initial momentum, feels stuck and has difficulty making forward progress.

A post in the writing subreddit frames it well: “The beginning of your story is so far behind you and yet the end is nowhere in sight”.

The idea of the middle slump is pretty universal. There are examples everywhere. From the infamous mid-life crisis to the way 2/3ds of the population feels in the afternoon.

How to Do Pay Transparency Right | Built In CO

For most of her career, Caryn Hubbard thought of salaries as a private matter. Then, she joined Buffer as its VP of finance.

Known for its culture of radical transparency, Buffer posts salary information for its employees online. That means anyone — not just other employees — can find her and her coworkers’ salaries on Buffer’s website. The exposure took some getting used to at first, she said, but it’s also had a profound impact on how she thinks about salaries.

No, Engineers Don’t Suck at Time Estimates

No, engineers don’t suck at time estimates – and generally speaking humans are better estimators than what most people believe. This seems rather surprising given all we’ve heard about the problems of bad time estimations, projects going overboard, etc and of course, your personal experience with software time estimates. But if people are really bad at estimation, how does that fit with our obvious evolutionary need to make quick decisions based on partial data? if we can’t estimate well how did we decide if a gap is wide enough to jump over, if an animal is worth the hunt, if a certain area is more likely to have water and shade? Without estimation skills we wouldn’t survive. So what’s going on?

Principles of the Urban Sky

Image: World Economic Forum

Safety

The dawn of the jet age unlocked new possibilities for long-distance travel and commerce, with commercial aviation becoming the world’s safest form of travel. The aviation industry’s ability to effectively manage operational risk has created expectations among the travelling public, regulatory authorities and other government stakeholders regarding safety. Therefore, to gain acceptance, new forms of air transport will need to achieve levels of safety performance consistent with conventional aviation operations. UAM operations will need to assure safety through adherence to regulatory requirements and industry standards that have contributed to aviation’s current safety record.

Best Satellite Messengers: Comparison & Reviews | REI Co-op Journal

With the recent launch of two new satellite messengers, the Garmin inReach Mini and the SPOT X, backcountry enthusiasts have more options than ever for staying connected when venturing off the grid. You might be wondering, “Which satellite messenger is best for me?”

We’re here to help you make that decision with a rundown of the major differences between four of the most popular satellite messengers we carry at REI—the Garmin inReach Mini, Garmin inReach Explorer+, SPOT X and SPOT Gen3.

[DATA] Post-Pandemic Silicon Valley Isn’t A Place

Where are tech companies going to go once the pandemic subsides as vaccines reach more and more Americans?

I wanted to provide granular data to the question of how concentrated the technology in the Bay Area will be after the pandemic. I’ve been tracking data on this question for several years internally within the Initialized Capital portfolio, both through annual founder surveys and in looking at the geographic composition of company headquarters across funds. Typically, we get around 90 companies responding per survey.

Think You Don’t Have Enough Time? Think Again.

“Not enough time” is likely not the source of your inability to get things done. The “Vicious Cycle of Distraction” is to blame.

#### Nir Eyal

6 hours ago·5 min read

A few weeks ago I saw this chart, and I haven’t stopped thinking about it:

According to this data, the average working American spends more than two hours watching TV per day, and has more than four hours per day of overall leisure time.

Principles of the Urban Sky | World Economic Forum

The future of the skies is in development today, as next-generation aviation technologies are tested, certified and piloted for commercial operations in coming years. A different type of aircraft – one better suited to urban transport – is emerging. This reflects a mix of novel designs (combining vertical take-off-and-landing configurations with distributed propulsion), improvements in alternative energy sources, and greater quality and availability of digital connectivity.

They Can’t Leave the Bay Area Fast Enough

San Francisco doesn’t have the same hold on the tech world, now that remote work is here to stay.Credit…Lucas Foglia for The New York Times

As a tech era draws to an end, more workers and companies are packing up. What comes next?

San Francisco doesn’t have the same hold on the tech world, now that remote work is here to stay.Credit…Lucas Foglia for The New York Times

Cracking the Engineering Manager Interview

Cracking the Engineering Manager interview — Part 1

Srivatsan Sridharan Dec 14, 2020 · 9 min read

Practical steps to prepare for and ace your next engineering manager interview

Image credits: Nick Youngson

While coding interviews have become more or less standardized across the industry, there is still a big variability when it comes to hiring for Engineering Manager roles. What questions get asked in an EM interview, is a concern on many peoples’ minds. It certainly was on my mind during my recent job search a few months ago. I ended up interviewing for EM roles at several top tech companies and learned a lot through the process. I’ve also built EM interview loops in the past and have been a hiring manager for EMs.

My Favorite Management Hack of 2020

2020 was a rough year for everyone, even for those of us blessed to be able to work from home. Psychologically and emotionally, it’s easy to feel disconnected and lonely when you don’t see people outside your household for weeks and months on end. And this presents some unique challenges for maintaining culture and productivity, and keeping morale up in general.

The Challenge

When the pandemic hit in March and everyone in the world started working remotely, we were worried about how to keep people connected and plugged in. We had to adapt quickly to keep communication flowing and make sure that everyone felt connected and a part of the community that we somewhat lost when everyone stopped going into the office.

100 Tips For A Better Life

The other day I made an advice thread based on Putanumonit’s from last year! If you know a source for one of these, shout and I’ll edit it in.

Possessions

1 .If you want to find out about people’s opinions on a product, google reddit. You’ll get real people arguing, as compared to the SEO’d Google results.

2. Some banks charge you $20 a month for an account, others charge you 0. If you’re with one of the former, have a good explanation for what those $20 are buying.

3. Things you use for a significant fraction of your life (bed: 1/3rd, office-chair: 1/4th) are worth investing in.

Beer Mode and Coffee Mode – David Perell

Creatives have two ways of working: open mode and closed mode.

Open mode is a state of unfocused play where you discover new ideas. In contrast, closed mode is a state of focus where you work towards a specific outcome.

The problem with traditional productivity advice is that it doesn’t take open mode seriously. Standard tropes like turn off the Internet, tune out distractions, and turn towards your goals are all examples of closed mode thinking. The productivity world is oriented around closed mode because it’s easy to define, easy to measure, and therefore, easier to write about.

A Team Charter Template You Can Use Today

August 17, 2018

Digital Collaboration

Remote Work

Visual Thinking

Templates

[

Back to All Posts](https://www.mural.co/blog) David Chin

Design Strategist at MURAL // Moving beyond the pixels to connect intuition, reason, and opportunity.

What qualities define a successful, productive team?

✔︎ Dedication

✔︎ Transparency

✔︎ Empathy

✔︎ …

The list goes on and on…

There are many concepts that qualify as “positive team attributes”, but not every team works in the same way or values the same things – so there’s no universal guide that every team can follow to find success.

The 3 most effective ways to build trust as a leader – Know Your Team | Blog

Based on data from 597 people, the best ways to build trust as a leader aren’t what you think they are.

How do you build trust as a leader? The answer seems intuitive enough.

For many of us, we hold company off-sites and run team-building activities. Informal lunches, monthly social get-togethers, and one-on-one meetings are part of how we build trust at work.

A 25-Year-Old Bet Comes Due: Has Tech Destroyed Society?

In 1995, a WIRED cofounder challenged a Luddite-loving doomsayer to a prescient wager on tech and civilization’s fate. Now their judge weighs in.

On March 6, 1995, WIRED’s executive editor and resident techno-optimist Kevin Kelly went to the Greenwich Village apartment of the author Kirkpatrick Sale. Kelly had asked Sale for an interview. But he planned an ambush.

Kelly had just read an early copy of Sale’s upcoming book, called Rebels Against the Future. It told the story of the 19th-century Luddites, a movement of workers opposed to the machinery of the Industrial Revolution. Before their rebellion was squashed and their leaders hanged, they literally destroyed some of the mechanized looms that, they believed, reduced them to cogs in a dehumanizing engine of mass production.

Reverse Engineering the source code of the BioNTech/Pfizer SARS-CoV-2 Vaccine – Articles

Welcome! In this post, we’ll be taking a character-by-character look at the

source code of the BioNTech/Pfizer SARS-CoV-2 mRNA vaccine.

*I want to thank the large cast of people who spent time previewing this

article for legibility and correctness. All mistakes remain mine though,

but I would love to hear about them quickly at [email protected] or

@PowerDNS_Bert*

Now, these words may be somewhat jarring – the vaccine is a liquid that gets

Owning Your Onboarding (Specially in Remote Work)

Career moves like starting a new role are challenging, can often be unnerving, and for sure requires leveling up.

A few months back, I accepted an offer with another business group at Intel. To me, it was a great way of exploring new opportunities within the company and experiencing another flavor of its engineering culture. This new role was a scale-up from my previous one, a lot of new areas for me to contribute, learn, and explore.

3 Ways to Increase Running Cadence for Speed – PodiumRunner

To run faster, you either need to take longer strides or quicker strides. While both stride length and rate will increase as you become a fitter, stronger, more experienced runner, focusing on increasing your running cadence, or stride rate, may help you get faster quicker and more safely.

Runners, especially inexperienced or developing runners, often take longer strides when they speed up. “Among most distance runners, bias is always toward stride length initially,” says Bryan Heiderscheit, Director of the Runner’s Clinic through the University of Wisconsin Sports Medicine Center and a leading researcher on cadence. “Then they start to have that overstriding, overreaching landing.”

The Rise Of Everywhere – AVC

This is a theme I have come back to many times over the last decade but in the wake of all of the headlines about high profile founders, VCs, and companies leaving the bay area, I thought I would return to it.

There is no question that the bay area is losing some talent to other markets but I don’t think that is anywhere near the most important thing. It is also the case that Google and Apple show no signs of leaving the bay area any time soon. Silicon Valley will remain a mecca for talent and tech for as far into the future as I can see.

Doing Old Things Better vs. Doing Brand New Things

New technologies enable activities that fall into one of two categories: 1) doing things you could already do but can now do better because they are faster, cheaper, easier, higher quality, etc. 2) doing brand new things that you simply couldn’t do before. Early in the development of new technologies, the first category tends to get more attention, but it’s the second that ends up having more impact on the world.

Manager OKRs, Maker OKRs: How Early Stage Startups Should Think About Goal-Setting

Manager OKRs, Maker OKRs: How Early Stage Startups Should Think About Goal-Setting

You’re Not Yet Google, So Don’t Blindly Mimic Their Processes

#### Hunter Walk

Dec 21, 2020·4 min read

Google’s internal management approach has sustained and scaled pretty impressively over the years. Quantitative goal-setting, setting stretch targets — these principles are as evident in the 2020s as they were when I arrived in 2003. Underpinning it all are OKRs — Objectives and Key Results — the framework by which individuals, teams and the entire company is managed. Xoogler Don Dodge did a…

Team Initiatives — Stop Starting and Start Finishing

Team Initiatives — Stop Starting and Start Finishing

Dennis Nerush Dec 31, 2020 · 5 min read

Let me know if this sounds familiar: your teammate comes up with an idea to do something great with our infrastructure, a suggestion to improve some bad process, or just a question that is worth discussing with the team, however, it stops there — in the “idea” or “suggestion” phase. How about another scenario where the team actually agrees to change something in their process, but, a few weeks later, everyone forgets about it as it wasn’t fully adopted. A week later another teammate suggests a different thing, and this cycle repeats itself.

Freezing, Ornot. Tips for cool weather riding.

December 22, 2020

4 min read

Riding in the summer is 100% more comfortable than the winter. No argument. But, zwifting all winter may be 100% of a bummer. So, get out in the cold, ride your bike, feel that cold air in your lungs. Below are some tips beyond the typical, “dress in layers”, “wear our wool cap“, “use this jacket“, you need these full length bib tights, etc.

Gather & Give – Snow Peaker Responses

< Back to Blog

Written by: Savanna Frimoth

November

30th

,

2020

During the week of Thanksgiving, we asked our community of Snow Peakers to join us in spreading the spirit of giving through a series of giveaways. Your answers blew us away and we’re grateful to each person who participated. We’ve rounded up a few of our favorites and hope you enjoy reading them as much as we did! Despite the year’s challenges, we hope you all can find some solace in the outdoors, gratitude for loved ones and hope for the new year to come.

Stripe: Platform of Platforms – Stratechery by Ben Thompson

Today Stripe is announcing Stripe Treasury; from the company’s press release:

Stripe, the technology company building economic infrastructure for the Internet, today announced that it is launching Stripe Treasury. This gives Stripe’s platform users powerful APIs to embed financial services, enabling their customers to easily send, receive and store funds…

Stripe Treasury…enabl[es] platforms like Shopify to easily offer its merchants access to critical financial products to manage their businesses’ finances. With Stripe Treasury, platforms can offer their users interest-earning accounts eligible for FDIC insurance in minutes, enabled by Evolve Bank & Trust. Platform business customers can have near-instant access to revenue earned through Stripe, spend this directly from their balance with a dedicated card, transfer it via ACH or wire transfer, pay bills, and more.

(more…)

Stripe’s Remote Engineering Hub, One Year In

Last May, Stripe launched our remote engineering hub, a virtual office coequal with our physical engineering offices in San Francisco, Seattle, Dublin, and Singapore. We set out to hire 100 new remote engineers over the year—and did. They now work across every engineering group at Stripe. Over the last year, we’ve tripled the number of permanently remote engineers, up to 22% of our engineering population. We also hired more remote employees across all other teams, and tripled the number of remote Stripes across the company.

7 ways of giving feedback that encourage change – Know Your Team | Blog

You’re giving feedback because you want your team to improve. Here’s how to give feedback that precisely helps nudge your team in the right direction.

The reason you’re giving feedback is that you want something to be different, in the first place. You want a direct report to make sure he’s not rubbing the rest of the team the wrong way. You want a new hire to improve how she interacts with clients.

Brutal Honesty And Radical Candor: 6 Ways You’re Getting Radical Candor Wrong And 5 Ways To Get It Right | Radical Candor

We have learned something really important from the way that the press sometimes covers Radical Candor. And we want your advice on how to communicate this idea more clearly. We want to learn to describe Radical Candor in a way that is not open to misinterpretation: too often press articles assert that Radical Candor is the same thing as brutal honesty, as front-stabbing, or that it is some sort of license to be a jerk. It is none of those things!

Open-source excursions: A journey into remote record keeping – Increment: Remote

Can you list the key points of the last meeting you attended? No? You’re not alone.

Let’s be real: We spend way too much time in meetings to leave them wondering what the point was.

Why is this so often the case?

Because we tend to leave meetings without a record of what happened, we don’t have useful artifacts to guide further action. Whether 30 minutes or two hours, the time spent in these discussions is unfulfilling, lost, and—dare I say—depleting.

How to Ruthlessly Prioritize Tasks to Get More Done

Checking items off your to-do list is a beautiful thing—but it’s also easier said than done. The best way I’ve found to make sure you complete your tasks is through ruthless prioritization. That means deciding not to do things you’d really like to do. It also means deciding what’s the most important task even when everything on your list feels crucial.

Why Everyone’s Suddenly Hoarding Mason Jars

How the must-have hipster vessel of DIY authenticity also became a foreboding signal of the economy.

#### Jen Doll

12 hours ago·12 min read

Illustration: Ariel Davis

Late this summer, after the pandemic turned everyone into an amateur gardener and home cook, a frenzy erupted on Facebook. Food historian Sarah Wassberg Johnson first spotted it while perusing a private Facebook group called Recipes of North Dakota — everyone was talking about mason jars. “For many of them, food preservation is a part of their daily life,” says Wassberg Johnson, who grew up in Fargo. They were keeping tabs on where they saw canning jars and lids, trying to nail down a fast-moving target. “It was this live tracking of them — this store in this town, this hardware store had them — where can you get them?”

Relax for the Same Result

from the book “Hell Yeah or No”:

Relax for the same result

2015-10-02

A few years ago, I lived in Santa Monica, California, right on the beach.

There’s a great bike path that goes along the ocean for seven and a half miles.

So, fifteen miles round trip.

On weekday afternoons, it’s almost empty.

It’s perfect for going full speed.

So a few times a week, I’d get on my bike and go as fast as I could for the fifteen-mile loop.

The Future of Work Is Written

Contrary to popular belief, distributed work isn’t a modern invention. The Roman Catholic Church, for example, has been working at a distance for centuries; so have organizations like the Hudson’s Bay Company.1 Distributed work is the evolution of telecommuting, which originated with in-home sales like the Tupperware parties of the 1950s. Telecommuting itself was later adopted by government institutions like NASA, motivated by the 1970s energy crisis, and eventually found its way to technology companies like IBM.

Can You Really Measure Individual Developer Productivity?

A reader asks a question that comes up at some point in every engineer’s and engineering manager’s career, where their manager, or the one above will pop the question. Can you measure engineering productivity? And if so, how can we measure it right now? They ask:

I work as an engineering manager for a company whose non-technology leadership insists there has to be a way to measure the individual productivity of a software engineer. I have the opposite belief. I don’t believe you can measure the productivity of “professional” careers, or thought workers (ex: how do measure productivity of a doctor, lawyer, or chemist?). For software engineering in particular, I feel that metrics can be gamed, don’t tell the whole story, or in some cases, are completely arbitrary.

(more…)

The Age of Infinite Leverage

Guest Author & Illustrator: Andrew Yu Text adapted from Eric Jorgensen and The Almanack of Naval Ravikant

Leverage allows you to accomplish 100x what others can – it is a force multiplier for your effort, skill, and judgement.

Today, we live in an age of infinite leverage where our work can be replicated at no cost, and we don’t need permission to get started.

The economic rewards for genuine intellectual curiosity have never been higher – it’s time to make today’s labor tomorrow’s leverage.

Product Thinking vs. Project Thinking

Kyle Evans Follow

Oct 22, 2018 · 8 min read

One of the biggest challenges a product manager will face (or an organization for that matter) is trying to elevate thinking and culture from a project level to a product level.

Project Thinking

Project thinking is fairly pervasive. Many folks, especially in software development, have spent a lot of their careers focused on projects and project management. Large organizations often have PMO departments, focused exclusively on project management. It’s not surprising, because project management has been around a very long time. And we as humans tend to think in terms of projects: things we need to get done.

How The ‘Lost Art’ Of Breathing Can Impact Sleep And Resilience

Breathing slowly and deeply through the nose is associated with a relaxation response, says James Nestor, author of Breath.As the diaphragm lowers, you’re allowing more air into your lungs and your body switches to a more relaxed state.

Sebastian Laulitzki/ Science Photo Library

Humans typically take about 25,000 breaths per day — often without a second thought. But the COVID-19 pandemic has put a new spotlight on respiratory illnesses and the breaths we so often take for granted.

When Covid hit, I started walking 20,000 steps a day. It’s changed my life | Walking | The Guardian

Show caption

Walkers at Prospect Park in Brooklyn, New York. Photograph: Caitlin Ochs/Reuters

The uplift

When Covid hit, I started walking 20,000 steps a day. It’s changed my life

Setting a daily goal made me fitter, boosted my mood and allowed me to explore parts of New York I’d never seen before

Your First Day as a New Engineering Manager

When you join a new team as a manager, it may seem like complete chaos to you. Everything and everyone is unfamiliar. The amount of information you need to absorb is immense. It feels overwhelming and confusing. You’re trying to understand the product, meet the team, learn architecture, and, at the same time, make sure the execution continues.

Usually, you have to push back on requests and demands to protect the team from over-commitment on day one. It may feel uncomfortable or even stressful as a new person on the team, but necessary.

Growing with your company’s complexity.

When finishing up a difficult project, I sometimes pause to dream

about how it’ll nudge my career forward. My thinking advances

down the storyline of “If I bundle this project with a few others, mix in good team health,

add a dash of time for the flavor to deepen, and undoubtedly this

will get me to the coveted next level.”

Then I’ll take a few minutes to savor the future.

How Real Product Teams Make OKRs work: Survey Results – Mind the Product

In collaboration with NEO Culture, Mind the Product conducted a short survey on OKRs investigating their use in product teams in real companies. Now, the results are in.

In this post, we’ll provide an overview of the survey results and, if you’re a Mind the Product member you can access an extended report including analysis of all the areas covered below – go to the extended report.

Assign Problems (Not Work) to Your Teams to Build Extraordinary Products

To leverage the huge unused potential, we need to define the primary role of product managers and their collaboration with development teams quite differently. Product managers should be assigning their teams problems to solve instead of predefined work to get done. We need product managers and team leads to become experts in facilitating inclusive participatory problem-solving in their teams to build innovative products long-term, and to solve the hard problems of their businesses.

Frameworks

#### Sarah Tavel

Sep 28·3 min read

A successful framework distills the complex, and in that synthesis, gets to a timeless insight. That’s always my aspiration, to varying degrees of success.

Here’s a running list of frameworks I’ve written on a range of topics.

Recipes to build enduring, mass-market businesses:

• 10x and Cheaper — What do Airbnb, Amazon, Netflix, Uber, and WhatsApp all have in common? They created a 10x better product and made it cheaper by recasting cost structures of incumbents.
• Saving people money — Fintech edition for 10x and Cheaper. It’s not just about being able to buy something better for less. This recipe also applies if you help someone do more with their money.
• Democratizing development — If you can democratize something that is valuable but previously the domain of a few specialized talents, you can dramatically expand (and capture) a market. In this (very old) post I talk about this framework with a focus on software development.
• Rocks, Sand, Water —We know that consumer companies fight a zero-sum game for a user’s attention, but some companies find it easier to get that DAU than others. Why? A framework for thinking about how a consumer divides their time up in a day.

Product / Strategy