Finding the point of human leverage

One of the paradoxes of today’s internet platforms is they are vastly automated, and have no human control or interaction over what any given person sees, and yet they are also totally dependent on human behavior, because what they’re really doing is observing, extracting and inferring things from what hundreds of millions or billions of people do.

The genesis of this was PageRank. Instead of relying on hand-crafted rules to understand what each page might be about, or indexing the raw text, PageRank looks at what people have done or have said about that page. Who linked to it, what text did they use, and who linked to the people who linked to it? And at the other end of the pipe, Google gets every user to curate every set of search results by hand: it gives you 10 blue links and you tell Google which one was right. The same thing for Facebook: Facebook doesn’t know really know who you are, or what you’re interested in, or what that piece of content is. It knows who you follow, what you press ‘like’ on, who else liked that and what else they liked and followed. Facebook is PageRank for people. The same applies, by extension, to YouTube: it never knew what the video was, only what people typed next to it and what else they watched and liked.

Carta 101: How We Work

Note: Since this was published in 2015, some of our ideas have evolved, our revenue and burn rate have both increased, and our orientation has changed. But, as you’ll read later in the post, we still hope that people stay at Carta for a decade or more.

All Carta employees (new and old) take a full-day course called Carta 101. It is an introduction to our company, our values, and our execution strategy. The class size is kept small (8–10 people) so everyone can participate in the group discussions. I give this class on Fridays once a month.

The platform play: How to operate like a tech company

“The question is not how fast tech companies will become car companies, but how fast we will become a tech company.” This is how the board member of a global car company recently articulated the central issue facing most incumbents today: how to operate and innovate like a tech company.

The tech giants of today have been some of the most innovative companies in the past generation. A handful of industry leaders, such as Ping An and BMW, are fast joining their ranks by reinventing their core business around data and digital. What distinguishes these tech companies is that their technology allows them to move faster, more flexibly, and at greater scale than their competitors. IT is not a cumbersome estate “that gets in the way,” but an enabler and driver of continuous innovation and adaptation.

Coach Bill Campbell

I never met Bill Campbell. To be honest, I had never even heard about him until I heard Eric Schmidt speak his praises on the the Tim Ferris Podcast.

I picked up a copy of Trillion Dollar Coach and I’m so very glad I did. This book is easily in the top 5 books I’ve ever read. It’s right up there with Creativity Inc.

I don’t share book reports very often. Probably only 1 out of every 100-150 books I read. But this is one book that I felt compelled to share.

Does your team need to rebrand?

Some leaders are fantastic at “team branding”—communicating about their group in ways that give the rest of the organization a good understanding of what the team is all about. Others are squarely focused on “team public relations”—telling a great story about a team that, if we looked more closely, we might find is not delivering or functioning very well (it always comes out in the end).

75% of staff at this successful IT company are on the autism spectrum

Things started to click into place for Jamie Davila after she discovered she was on the autism spectrum five years ago this summer.

She had already worked in accounting for more than a decade before starting her own website development business but struggled in traditional workplace settings. Davila had long felt a disconnect with more emotionally driven clients and colleagues and had always preferred working in more isolated, quiet, and dimly lit settings.

Negative Splits

“Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional. Say you’re running and you think, ‘Man, this hurts, I can’t take it anymore. The ‘hurt’ part is an unavoidable reality, but whether or not you can stand anymore is up to the runner himself.”

– Haruki Murakami (What I Talk About When I Talk About Running)

At the start of your journey, you have passion, excitement and adrenaline. But can it last?

The CTO Role

The CTO Role

Defining the role of CTO can be tricky. Each company has a different

experience with their CTO, and so the role can be murky at times.

The CTO is often viewed as at least the spiritual leader for the technology

organization. That person defines technical strategy and direction, and

delivers the the tools and products the organization needs to be successful.

But how?

Some industry CTOs are the most technical person in the organization. Some are

Why Are Companies Ending Remote Work?

​With research suggesting that companies can save money, boost morale and attract top candidates by offering work-at-home options, why are some employers calling their telecommuters back into the main office?

The Bank of New York Mellon Corp. was the latest organization to make headlines when it told staff in November that it might reduce their ability to work from home. After the bank’s employees expressed outrage, however, the company hit pause on its plan.

The rise of fear-based social media like Nextdoor, Citizen, and now Amazon’s Neighbors

Violent crime in the US is at its lowest rate in decades. But you wouldn’t know that from a crop of increasingly popular social media apps that are forming around crime.

Apps like Nextdoor, Citizen, and Amazon Ring’s Neighbors — all of which allow users to view local crime in real time and discuss it with people nearby — are some of the most downloaded social and news apps in the US, according to rankings from the App Store and Google Play.

Daniel Pink: The New ABCs of Selling

“To sell well is to convince someone else to part with resources—not to deprive that person, but to leave him better off in the end. That is also what, say, a good algebra teacher does.”

“The only thing you got in this world is what you can sell. And the funny thing is, you’re a salesman, and you don’t know that.” — Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman

Stripe’s fifth engineering hub is Remote

Stripe has engineering hubs in San Francisco, Seattle, Dublin, and Singapore. We are establishing a fifth hub that is less traditional but no less important: Remote. We are doing this to situate product development closer to our customers, improve our ability to tap the 99.74% of talented engineers living outside the metro areas of our first four hubs, and further our mission of increasing the GDP of the internet.

Resilience engineering: Where do I start?

This an introductory guide to readings in resilience engineering, aimed at software engineers. Key

papers are organized into themes:

• What is resilience?
• Changing perspectives on accidents and safety
• Complex systems
• Coordination
• Automation
• Boundary as a model (Rasmussen)
• David Woods

The papers linked here should all be accessible to casual readers.

What is resilience?

A resilient organization adapts effectively to surprise.

Here I’m using the definition proposed by David Woods.

Working remotely, 4 years in

I live in Montreal. 4 years ago, I decided to take a job working remotely for a company based in San

Francisco. At the time, I was worried that it wouldn’t work out – I’d never worked remotely before,

so it was a pretty big unknown for me. You can see me struggling with it on this blog after 3 months and 8 months. But

Avi (one of the people who interviewed me, who works remotely)

The 5 Whys of Organizational Design

Recently I wrote about sizing engineering organizations, and how you can think about it as an exercise in managing concurrency. In understanding org size I talk about the mental exercise of thinking about how the number of concurrent work streams you’re taking on as a team applies upward pressure on the needs of your organization (e.g. you need more managers, who need more directors, who need a more senior CTO, etc) The inverse exercise is also useful.

Creative tools in the post-”deep fakes” world – Facet.ai – Medium

“Vertical Change”, Bjorn Copeland.

joseph reisinger Feb 18

Even if all research progress on AI stalled tomorrow, we would still have more than enough kinetic energy locked up in existing models, approaches and data to power a second renaissance in the visual arts. The power of visual creation for humans assisted by AI will be vast, porous and accessible.

How to evolve an engineering organization

Recently, I had the opportunity to present to a group of early-stage

founders about evolving their engineering organizations.

While preparing, I realized that despite my excitement for this topic,

I’ve only written about it indirectly.

The most comprehensive, related piece I’ve written is about running reorganizations.

Reorgs do involve quite a bit of organizational design, but

they’re a difficult environment to demonstrate best practice.

Mission command – Wikipedia

Mission command, also referred to as mission-type tactics, is a style of military command, derived from the Prussian-pioneered mission-type tactics doctrine, which combines centralized intent with decentralized execution subsidiarity and promotes freedom and speed of action, and initiative, within defined constraints. Subordinates, understanding the commander’s intentions, their own missions and the context of those missions, are told what effect they are to achieve and the reason why it needs to be achieved. They then decide within their delegated freedom of action how best to achieve their missions. Orders focus on providing intent, control measures, and objectives, allowing for greater freedom of action by subordinate commanders.[1] Mission command is closely related to civilian management concept of workplace empowerment and its use in business has been explored by writers such as Bungay (2011) and Tozer (1995, 2012). It is advocated, but not always used,[2] by the militaries of the United States,[3][4] Canada,[5] Netherlands, Australia and the United Kingdom.[6] Mission command is compatible with modern military net-centric concepts,[7] and less centralized approaches to command and control (C2) in general.[8]

Introducing Boosts: an all-new way to show your support in Basecamp

We gave up on Likes and invented a totally new form of tiny communication.

If there’s one thing you can’t avoid on the Internet, it’s Likes. They’re in nearly every software platform where people post photos or write text messages.

Sometimes Likes are called Faves, Hearts, Reactions, Claps, or something else, but the basic idea is the same: they’re a small, quick way to express your feelings about something, usually accompanied by a count of other people who had that same feeling.

The Anatomy of a Great Decision

Making better decisions is one of the best skills we can develop. Good decisions save time, money, and stress. Here, we break down what makes a good decision and what we can do to improve our decision-making processes.

***

Improving our decision-making abilities is a central goal at Farnam Street. Better decisions save time, money, and stress. While it’s an investment now, in the long run, learning principles and developing a multidisciplinary lens that we can apply throughout life is a worthy investment.

Manage Uncertainty with Commander’s Intent

This post is part of an HBR Spotlight examining leadership lessons from the military.

How does your team respond when a plan changes? Does everyone seem to know what to do or is there confusion, a lack of meaningful activity, or people standing around waiting to be told what to do next? Planning is difficult whether in business or the military. Military planners use Commander’s Intent, a key element to help a plan maintain relevancy and applicability in a chaotic, dynamic, and resource-constrained environment.

My Billion Dollar Mistake

My Billion Dollar Mistake

Back in 2008, I co-founded KISSmetrics, an analytics company.

There were so many times when I thought about giving up during the early days. Over and over again, I felt like we were doing it all wrong. Making guesses about the problems people had. Building to solve problems we had imagined.

We were searching in the dark to solve painful problems. We had a clear vision, but our execution was flawed.

The Huawei controversy: Everything you need to know – CNET

Huawei’s been a fixture in the news cycle for a while now. Here’s why.

Jaap Arriens/NurPhoto via Getty Images

Huawei is one of the biggest mysteries in the wireless industry right now.

It’s the world’s No. 1 telecom supplier and No. 2 smartphone maker. Yet it’s a pariah in several countries, including the US, to the point that the FBI reportedly set up a sting at CES 2019.

On Going Feral

Yesterday, a colleague looked at me and deadpanned, “aren’t you supposed to have a long beard?” When you remote-work for an extended period (it’s been six months since my last visit to the mother ship), you can expect to hear your share of jokes and odd remarks when you do show up. Once you become a true cloudworker, a ghost in the corporate machine who only exists as a tinny voice on conference calls, perceptions change. So when you do show up, you find that people react to you with some confusion. You’re not a visitor or guest, but you don’t seem to truly belong either.

NASA Twins Study results show how a year in space affects an astronaut’s DNA

For almost one year, NASA astronaut Scott Kelly circled the planet on the International Space Station, completing three spacewalks, conducting experiments on plants and playing ping-pong with a ball of water. His earthbound twin, Mark, lobbied for stronger gun laws, played golf and drank an occasional beer. Together, the genetically identical subjects constituted the starkest nature-versus-nurture study in history.

Complexity Bias: Why We Prefer Complicated to Simple

Complexity bias is a logical fallacy that leads us to give undue credence to complex concepts.

Faced with two competing hypotheses, we are likely to choose the most complex one. That’s usually the option with the most assumptions and regressions. As a result, when we need to solve a problem, we may ignore simple solutions — thinking “that will never work” — and instead favor complex ones.

Ecosystem Plugins: The Next Big Opportunities in WordPress

The Next Big Opportunities in WordPress

Summary

• WordPress is the Operating System of the Open Web. At 33% of the web and growing, organizations choose WordPress because it’s free, ubiquitous, focused on the end user, and it’s theirs.
• WordPress faces three key obstacles to reaching the next 20%: limited resources, too many decisions, and missing integrations.
• I introduce a new concept that I’m calling an Ecosystem Plugin. Ecosystem Plugins, like WooCommerce, offer a suite of functionality for a specific audience that simplifies decision making and streamlines integrations with the products and services that audience uses.
• There are big opportunities for those who build Ecosystem Plugins, the tech products that integrate with them, and site owners that use them. Specific examples I recommend include CRM, Ecommerce, ERP, Insights, and Automation.

Report Overview

At the end of February, 2019 I left my employer and began working independently. One of my first initiatives was a research project.

Exclusive: Google asked 5,600 employees about remote work. This is what they learned

Working remotely can be really tough. To get some insight into how to do it better, Google conducted a two-year study involving data from 5,600 employees across the US, Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. Approximately 30% of the company’s meetings involve staff in more than two time zones, and 39% involve more than two cities. Veronica Gilrane, manager of Google’s People Innovation Lab, oversaw the study and has written a guide for how to make the most of distributed teams. Today, she is releasing a report of her findings.

How to Feel Less Overwhelmed as a Developer

Everything’s ok.

Julia Haigh Jan 30

There’s a lot going on in the developer world. No matter whether you’re a complete beginner or a seasoned expert, it just never seems to stop. Here are some ideas on how to handle it all.

I’ve done my best to make this article concise & skimmable, in the hope that it may be helpful without adding too much to the chaos. It’s divided up into 4 sections: Mindset, Learning, Social Pressure, and Toolset. Let’s go.

The one-salary experiment, ten years in

Five years ago, Lenz (one of our co-founders) wrote:

At iwantmyname everyone earns the same. This sounds strange to many and I get asked a lot of questions how this may work once we grow bigger and the honest answer is: “I don’t know, but so far it works” and I give that same answer since we started 5 years ago.

The underlying idea has two main roots. First, we really think that everyone is as important to the success of our team as anyone else in the team. We don’t believe in a hierarchy or in more important people. If we hire you, we think you are valuable and want you to be part of our team as a level peer, not an underlying that does the stuff no one else wants to do.

(more…)

Designing a Usable Dashboard – /rg/

Rahul Gulati Nov 5, 2016

A Product Manager’s Guide to Quick and Effective Design.

Bootstrap Dashboard

A dashboard, in many ways, is like the screen of a digital device — there are numerous activities that happen underneath the surface, but as users we are unaware of such activities and simply believe what we see.

Who knows or even cares how many system calls does it take to show the battery status on a screen? But the moment battery sign turns red, we quickly understand that if ignored for too long, the device will soon be unusable. Over time we start relying on system design.

Name It, and They Will Come

You’ve discovered something new.

You haven’t seen solutions quite like this before. You try to keep your ego in check and be skeptical. But the butterflies in your stomach won’t listen.

You don’t want to get carried away, but deep down you already know it:

You’re onto something.

This idea turns into a project. The first commit is just 500 lines. But in a few days, you build it up just enough to start using it in real code. A few like-minded people join you in improving it. You learn something new about it every day.