Covid-19 Is Accelerating Human Transformation—Let’s Not Waste It

The Neobiological Revolution, is here. Now’s the time to put lessons from the Digital Revolution to use.

Back when we started WIRED magazine, it was all digital, all the time. In Silicon Valley, bodies were treated like the somewhat inconvenient and sometimes embarrassing things that needed to be fueled and occasionally rested so that they could support big heads that housed big ideas about the future. Human biology wasn’t exactly on our radar, except in science fiction, where pandemics always seemed du jour.

A Guide to Making Better Decisions

Villi Iltchev Apr 10 · 4 min read

Making decisions is one of the main jobs of a founder and a manager. The average organization, big and small, makes thousands of decisions every day. How teams make these decisions is one of the most important factors in the health, culture, and success of an organization. I believe the cadence and effectiveness with which an organization makes decisions is directly correlated to its ability to stay ahead of competitors and win in the marketplace. Most decisions are sequential and impact other decisions downstream, which means that an inefficient decision making process has magnifying implications as it reverberates through an organization. Today, in this challenging and disruptive business environment, leaders in every organization are facing difficult and important decisions that will impact the trajectory and success of their companies going forward. Strong culture and processes that facilitate clear and efficient decision making are critical to success, which is why I wanted to offer a few thoughts and observations about making decisions.

How to Overcome Dread Tasks

April 2019

There are things you want to do. There are things you need to do. Sometimes these are the same. This post is how to handle life when they aren’t.

The sensation of thinking of a task can be pleasant or painful. This is because your brain is always predicting how rewarding any future scenario will be. You experience joy when your mind is imagining a future fantasy where you’ll be engaged in flow (“when you get to that weekend side-project, things will be interesting, time will fly by”).

Proposal for Near-Future Blogging Megastructures

This post is part of Blogging Futures, a collaborative blogchain-based learning adventure exploring how we can reimagine blogging. Feel free to join the conversation!

Blogging is great, but it sometimes feels like every blog is an island. To have a robust blog society requires connection, community, conversation. Part of the problem is we don’t have many great ways to connect blogs together into larger conversation structures.

Addressable ideas & the connective tissue of the web

We’re forgoing our usual format this week to do a deeper dive on signals in a space that’s very close Addressable ideas & the connective tissue of the web

By Ethical Futures Lab • Issue #28 • View online

We’re forgoing our usual format this week to do a deeper dive on signals in a space that’s very close to our hearts (and work) — reading and writing on the internet. We look at the foundational affordances for writing and linking on the web, and explore how some nascent alternatives might change the way we share ideas and have conversations. —Alexis & Matt

Building Strong OKR’s – Plato

Problem

Teams say that they want to be empowered, but when everything is in front of you, it’s really hard to make decisions, defend them, and show how you measure against them.

Actions taken

• The simplest OKR’s are the best ones. I spend a lot of time with my teams distilling down their OKR’s. I steer them away from flashy words and big adjectives that take them away from what they are actually doing.
• We participate in OKR drafts in a Google Doc that everyone reads and comments on so that it is understood in simple terms by all.
• With metrics, I like to put myself in the mindset of a product manager and work with my product counterpart to decide how the feature is being used and what is most important. I then use that as part of my key results for the things I want to measure while trying to achieve those objectives.

Lessons learned

• The two questions of ‘what you are doing’ and ‘how you will measure it’ are extremely powerful. Those who are really good at explaining the impact know how to write their OKR’s in a way that is simple and easy to measure. If a non-technical person can’t understand what you are doing you have not written your OKR well. Technical background or not, we are all shareholders and fully empowered to make the decisions around what we want to build within a set of constraints and governance.
• I have been in organizations where you do the feature and then you make sure there are enough metrics on it. It doesn’t work that way. Unless you’ve defined the business impact of what you are looking for in your metrics and logs, then it’s just a bunch of garbage data that is being spewed out.
• I am really impressed with how many conversations that were originally happening after features had already been built are now part of a Google Docs document early on in the cycle.

Triggered: How one of Colorado’s smallest protests became its most violent

ALAMOSA — The protesters, about a dozen in all, gathered on June 4 in the intersection of State Avenue and Main Street. Like protesters across the country in the aftermath of George Floyd’s killing by police, they were demanding police accountability and racial justice.

The group occupied the crosswalk during red lights, then stepped to the curb on green. Letting traffic pass, they figured, would help keep things peaceful.

To Be a Great Leader, You Need To Find Time for Yourself – Plato

Problem

As a leader, you often feel short of time. Blocking time for yourself — free of meetings and calls — is vital for boosting your creativity and setting you up in a pro-active mode. Oftentimes great people have their escape; they run marathons, fly planes, or cycle like I do — they are immersed in activities that are taking them away from the noise of the world. As you climb a career ladder you will have increasingly less time and exceedingly more things that will require your attention. The first thing to get compromised will be your time for yourself. While this is true for almost anyone, leaders will particularly experience it. Your time will become the most significant scarcity and you will have to learn how to secure time for yourself.

Leading Virtually – AVC

Most (all?) of our portfolio companies have been working remotely for over three months now. So have we at USV.

The initial experience with remote work has been mostly positive. The typical comment has been “we are doing a lot better than I expected.” Productivity is up in some places, down in some places, but overall our portfolio companies have adapted to the remote work model quickly and well.

What we can learn from early adopters of distributed work

A conversation with InVision and Automattic, two organizations with a combined 24 years of office-less work experience

Filed under

• Made in Dropbox
• Customer Stories

Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, has been fully distributed since its 2005 inception. In 2017, they experimented with a 15,000 square foot event and community space in San Francisco as an option for Bay Area employees. It looked the part: converted warehouse, open design, a custom-made barn door for good measure. But Automattic’s existing work model was so effective that the space was used infrequently, and the company abruptly ended its lease. No good deed, as it were.

5 Engineering Manager Archetypes – patkua.com

Contents

“There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things.”

— Phil Karlton

Introduction

In today’s tech organisations, you find 2 types of technical leadership roles in teams – Tech Leads and Engineering Managers. Tech Leads are better defined with The Definition of a Tech Lead but the Engineering Manager (EM) role remains unclear. In this article, we will explore 5 Engineering Manager archetypes commonly found in the industry.

The Majestic Monolith

Monolith by Rene Aigner

Some patterns are just about the code. If your code looks like this, and you need it to do that, here’s what to do. You’d do well to study such patterns, as they give you a deep repertoire of solutions ready to apply and make your code better every time you hit their context.

Then there are other patterns that are less about the code and more about how the code is being written, by whom, and within which organization. The Majestic Monolith is one of those patterns. But before we dive into all its glory, let’s first examine its opposite pattern: Micro/services oriented architecture.

Using OKR Based Leadership to Empower Teams – Plato

Problem

In most of the previous companies I have worked with, our goal was to keep empowering teams, yet there was somewhat of a confined matrix around it. So much so, that the teams never truly felt empowered. What we were going to do in the matrix had already been decided. Teams were empowered to find the ‘how’ and maybe contest or argue about estimates in order to inform the ‘what’, and make trade-off decisions around that. These companies would continue to claim that teams were empowered, but in talking to the teams, we all felt rather disempowered.

What comes after Zoom? — Benedict Evans

We had video calls in science fiction, and we had video conferencing in the 1990s, just as the web was taking off, as a very expensive and impractical tool for big companies. It was proposed as a use case for 3G, which didn’t happen at all, and with the growth of consumer broadband we got all sorts of tools that could do it, but it never really became a mass-market consumer behaviour. Now, suddenly, we’re all locked down, and we’re all on video calls all the time, doing team stand-ups, play dates and family birthday parties, and suddenly Zoom is a big deal. At some point many of those meetings will turn back into coffees, we hope, but video will remain.

Time Management as an Engineering Leader — enrich

Many engineering leaders are finding that remote work in today’s circumstances is causing fatigue. Kids and roommates are home, you may not have a proper desk setup, there’s no commute time to zone out and collect your thoughts, and you have to call or type questions to your coworkers and wait for answers instead of looking over your shoulder and quickly asking them. If you’re not able to properly manage your time you’re liable to burn out real quick, and so will your team.

How to never lose another memory again

Editor’s note: We’ve anonymized the interview subject’s identity at his request.

Seven years ago on July 4th, MC bought his mom a Mother’s Day gift.

We don’t know why MC bought his mom a gift on that date, two months after Mother’s Day. All we know is that it happened on a day when he did laundry, went for a light jog, and finally finished the sixth season of 30 Rock.

How to Run Engineering Team Meetings (and not waste anyone’s time) | Hacker Noon

February 3rd 2017

@cat.the.redCatherine Miller

Growing pains: the affliction of all mid-size startups, Flatiron included. It used to be that everyone fit in a single room and overheard everything that was going on; now we barely fit in an auditorium. While there are many struggles in this process (office space, not knowing everyone’s name, needing a second overflow volleyball team), communication is by far the biggest. We want everyone to to be empowered with information, and we want input from as many people as possible; before you know it, our calendars are covered with meetings of all shapes and sizes with tiny “BLOCK: Work” rectangles few and far between.

Betting on Things That Never Change

Amazon launched 22 years ago this week.

Its first web page shows its early days:

What’s neat about this isn’t what’s changed. It’s what’s stayed the same.

The line, “One million titles, consistently low prices” seems like marketing guff. But it helps explain why Amazon has dominated where others have failed.

The allure of the Internet in 1995 was betting on change. New paradigms born. Old strategies discarded. Something requiring radically different thinking.

Avoiding Employee Burnout: How to Help You & Your Team Thrive in Quarantine

How are you feeling right now?

Like really…how are you doing?

If you’re like most people I’ve spoken to, things are pretty rough with quarantine continuing. You may be feeling it, and there is likely some employee burnout on your team.

An informal poll of my followers on Twitter showed that over 2/3rds of respondents are already feeling burnout symptoms, or feel fully burned out now.

Our grimdark meathook cyberpunk now – TechCrunch

Our grimdark meathook cyberpunk now

@rezendi /

6:00 am PDT • May 31, 2020

Image Credits: Ethan Zhan / Pixabay under a Pixabay License license.

Jon Evans

Contributor

Jon Evans is the CTO of the engineering consultancy HappyFunCorp; the award-winning author of six novels, one graphic novel, and a book of travel writing; and TechCrunch’s weekend columnist since 2010. More posts by this contributor

• Our grimdark meathook cyberpunk now
• Why are people who cite videos always wrong?

Ten years ago, the joke was: “It’s weird how, once everyone started carrying phones with cameras all the time, UFOs stopped visiting, and the cops started beating everyone up.” It was darkly funny, then. Now it feels something more like despairing.

Why Everyone Always Hates Redesigns, Even When They’re Good

The strange psychology that shapes your reactions

Angela Lashbrook May 19 · 6 min read

Photo illustration: Angela Lashbrook

In Microprocessing, columnist Angela Lashbrook aims to improve your relationship with technology every week. Microprocessing goes deep on the little things that define your online life today to give you a better tomorrow.

Whenever a popular web interface gets any kind of significant visual change, a lot of people react with confusion, dismay, and even anger. This month, it’s the new Google Docs sharing interface: The Next Web wrote an entire piece detailing complaints about the new sharing menu. One podcaster says she “just doesn’t like it,” and others are “completely baffled.”

The Work of Byron Katie

By Tom Moon, MFT–

Corey came to see me, consumed with hurt and rage. Two years ago, his partner Lyle, whom Corey said “was the love of my life,” abruptly moved out of their apartment and disappeared while Corey was at work. In the following days, Corey discovered that Lyle had been involved with Lyle’s “best friend” for more than a year, and that the two had left the state together. Corey subsequently spent most of his waking hours so preoccupied with angry and vengeful thoughts that his life came to a standstill. He wanted to let go, but he felt completely stuck.

Scrum Made Zero Sense for My Young Startup. So I Designed an Alternative.

Nowadays there are more opinions on how to develop software than there are firms actually doing the development. Some people call programming a science. Others call it engineering, a craft, or even art. Just as coding’s 70-year history has produced hundreds (if not thousands) of languages, it’s also spawned countless processes and frameworks purporting to have the best model for guiding a team to build software.

Product for Internal Platforms

For the past 3 years, I have been running a platform engineering organization. Since that term is vague, where I work it means the software side of infrastructure. Compute platforms like kubernetes, storage systems, software development tools, and frameworks for services are part of the mandate. Our customers are other engineers at the company.

I also oversee the product team for this area. Now, I’m not a product manager (which I’ll shorten to PM for the rest of this post, not to be confused with project manager), and I rely on my PM team heavily for their expertise. But that doesn’t mean that I can personally neglect the product side, and indeed I spend a lot of time thinking about the products and strategy for my org as part of my day-to-day work.

In defense of the modern web – DEV

I expect I’ll annoy everyone with this post: the anti-JavaScript crusaders, justly aghast at how much of the stuff we slather onto modern websites; the people arguing the web is a broken platform for interactive applications anyway and we should start over; React users; the old guard with their artisanal JS and hand authored HTML; and Tom MacWright, someone I’ve admired from afar since I first became aware of his work on Mapbox many years ago. But I guess that’s the price of having opinions.

50 Ideas That Changed My Life — David Perell

Here are the 50 ideas that changed my life.

These are my guiding principles and the light of my intellectual life. All of them will help you think better, and I hope they inspire curiosity.

1. 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.

   (more…)

Spotify vs. Fitbit and the Model of Agile at Scale

I thought I was done with the series of articles on the importance of empowered engineers, but then an article came out a few days ago criticizing the Spotify model of Agile at scale, and I could not pass up the opportunity to try to turn this into a teachable moment.

The author criticizes the Spotify model of scaled Agile, but neglects to mention that Spotify built a company now worth more than $25B, while competing – and often winning – against both Apple and Amazon, two of the very best product companies in the world.

Not even wrong: ways to predict tech — Benedict Evans

“That is not only not right; it is not even wrong”

– Wolfgang Pauli

A lot of really important technologies started out looking like expensive, impractical toys. The engineering wasn’t finished, the building blocks didn’t fit together, the volumes were too low and the manufacturing process was new and imperfect. In parallel, many or even most important things propose some new way of doing things, or even an entirely new thing to do. So it doesn’t work, it’s expensive, and it’s silly. It’s a toy.

Three signs of a poor hiring process—and four ways to fix it

When given the opportunity to establish a process, we’re all biased to advocate for one in which we would be successful ourselves. In hiring, this plays out in two main ways: “A” players build monocultures, hiring people just like them, and “B” players hire “C” players, hiring people who won’t threaten them.

In other words, top performers too narrowly define what top performance is, and okay performers hire mediocre people; in both cases, they’re making selections that bolster their own position.

Seniorless — 4 Tips for Effectively Onboarding Juniors

Seniorless — 4 Tips for Effectively Onboarding Juniors

Gabriel Grinberg Mar 30 · 8 min read

The previous post — “Seniorless — 5 Reasons You Should Hire More Juniors” was about why juniors are a great, and even essential, assets to your engineering group.

Of course, hiring non-experienced members comes with risks/costs. The main reasons I get from other team leaders for not doing so are:

Second-guessing the modern web – macwright.org

The emerging norm for web development is to build a React single-page application, with server rendering. The two key elements of this architecture are something like:

1. The main UI is built & updated in JavaScript using React or something similar.
2. The backend is an API that that application makes requests against.

This idea has really swept the internet. It started with a few major popular websites and has crept into corners like marketing sites and blogs.

The Berkshire Hathaway of the Internet

Andrew Wilkinson Mar 19, 2017 · 8 min read

Warren Buffett is famous for handshake deals and one-page contracts. He often buys multi-billion-dollar companies after a few phone calls, usually without ever meeting the management team in person or visiting their facilities. Not only that, but he typically pays below market prices and avoids dealing with investment bankers. Despite all this, he has amassed a collection of over 65 wholly owned companies, ranging from See’s Candies, to Dairy Queen, to Fruit of The Loom.

The Most Terrifying Thought Experiment of All Time

Before you die, you see Roko’s Basilisk. It’s like the videotape in The Ring. Dreamworks LLC

WARNING: Reading this article may commit you to an eternity of suffering and torment.

Slender Man. Smile Dog. Goatse. These are some of the urban legends spawned by the Internet. Yet none is as all-powerful and threatening as Roko’s Basilisk. For Roko’s Basilisk is an evil, godlike form of artificial intelligence, so dangerous that if you see it, or even think about it too hard, you will spend the rest of eternity screaming in its torture chamber. It’s like the videotape in The Ring. Even death is no escape, for if you die, Roko’s Basilisk will resurrect you and begin the torture again.

Engineering OKR examples for different levels in the organisation

3. Engineering

Team Level OKRs

Objective 1: Create a high performing engineering team

Key results:

1. Hire 10 new engineers by end of Q2 FY 2017-18
2. Agree & document performance measurement metrics for individual contributions
3. Increase knowledge & enhance skill sets of team members by ensuring each one participates in at least one of the industry-wide hackathons

Discussion:

Look at the objective & it will become crystal clear that the same objective can be equally applicable to any company. The actual difference is made by the key results, how are you measuring your success. These key results will definitely be different for different teams, although they may have the same objective.

The Anti-Amazon Alliance

Manage your Stratechery subscription.

The nonsensical tie-in has long been one of my favorite PR genres, and the coronavirus crisis has created a whole host of examples; Casey Newton posted a particularly egregious one:

Using a current news event as cover is hardly limited to bad PR pitches;

1 look no further than this announcement from Google, which used the coronavirus crisis to frame a major change in Google Shopping:

Plot Economics

For the fourth time in my adult memory, humanity has collectively, visibly lost the plot at a global level. My criteria are fairly restrictive: The dotcom bust and the 2007 crash don’t make my list for instance, and neither do previous recent epidemics like SARS or Ebola. Global narrative collapse is a fairly severe condition, but apparently no longer as rare as it once was. Here’s my shortlist: