How to give and receive effective feedback

Lisa Nielsen wrote this post on August 05, 2015

The most valuable lesson I learned in grad school was not a theory, problem-solving technique, or research method. It was learning how others perceived me.

For most of my life I’d had a fear of taking up too much space. In the classroom or workplace I was careful not to speak up too often, lest I be perceived as attention-seeking, egocentric, or dominating. My reticence to speak was built on a series of assumptions I thought of as simple truths.

Assessing Employee Performance — JavaScript Scene

Assessing Employee Performance

You’re Doing it Rong

Code Monkey — YJ Soon (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

I’m gonna give it to you straight. If you’re not listening closely to the employee you’re evaluating, & interviewing their peers about how helpful and knowledgable that employee is…

And if the sum of that feedback is anything less than your primary gauge of performance…

You SUCK at judging
employee performance.

(more…)

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Managing Development – 5 Things I Learned

What do you make as a manager? — This Happened to Me — Medium

By Marc Hedlund

What do you make as a manager?

When developers consider moving into a management role, I often encourage them — very strongly — to stop coding at work. You’ll be a better manager if you’re not immersed in the machine, I tell them; if you’re noticing the interactions between people on your team, if you’re more obviously available to be interrupted.

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I don’t have enough time to develop but that’s alright

Way We Work — Medium Engineering — Medium

Holacracy is a toolset for an organization and its employees. The roles in the organization are all defined, and each role has certain accountabilities and authority. This means that the people at the “top” do not have all the authority — it’s distributed even though it’s hierarchical. People can also hold multiple roles, and everyone has access to view the roles of any employee. To learn more about the system’s general principles, check out the Holacracy publication on Medium.

Doing Terrible Things To Your Code

I was the best programmer in the world

In 1992, I thought I was the best programmer in the world. In my defense, I had just graduated from college, this was pre-Internet, and I lived in Boulder, Colorado working in small business jobs where I was lucky to even hear about other programmers much less meet them.

I eventually fell in with a guy named Bill O’Neil, who hired me to do contract programming. He formed a company with the regrettably generic name of Computer Research & Technologies, and we proceeded to work on various gigs together, building line of business CRUD apps in Visual Basic or FoxPro running on Windows 3.1 (and sometimes DOS, though we had a sense by then that this new-fangled GUI thing was here to stay).

21 management things I learned at Imgur

21 management things I learned at Imgur

1. It’s terribly difficult to manage unmotivated people. Make your job easier and don’t.
2. Different people need different kinds of management. Be adaptable to figure out what drives each person’s best performance.
3. Give feedback frequently and directly. As a manager, it’s easier to wait and then hedge critical feedback in soft wrappers, but that’s selfish. I’d try to give feedback as soon as I could grab a conference room with the person, and not wait until the formal 1:1 days later.
4. A-players love hearing critical feedback about how they’re performing, and they hate when B-players don’t hear feedback of their own. Keep your A-players happy by providing actionable feedback to everyone and recognizing superior performance.
5. Communication is the most difficult thing you’ll do. Spend a lot of time on it, both on your own communication and improving the communication of the folks on your team.
6. Fire quickly. If you don’t fire bad performers fast, you’re at risk of losing your good performers. Don’t underestimate the effect bad performers have on good performers. Your team will likely move faster even with fewer bodies. Finally, firing for bad performance is easier than having to fire good people because you’ve run out of money, so fire the bad people before you have to fire the good people too.
7. People need to feel like they’ve been listened to, not to make the final call. Take the time to listen (you might be wrong), make a decision and then explain the decision. Don’t offer commentary on others’ decisions until you understand why the decisions were made.
8. Providing context for why you made a decision is a way to scale your decision-making process. The goal is for the manager to make as few decisions aspossible, and to do this, your team needs to understand how to make good decisions.
9. Define success clearly and don’t flip-flop on the definition without new information. On the other hand, when the facts change, re-evaluate your goals. Set achievable but difficult targets.
10. Hiring friends can be very useful because communication will be easier, and your friends are probably smart and talented. But you might do so at the cost of hiring for things like experience or domain-expertise. If you can’t fire friends, don’t hire them.
11. Mission-oriented teams are a competitive advantage because they make it easier to 1) hire and 2) motivate.
12. Any action taken between a manager and an individual (a promotion, more frequent 1:1’s, a call out in a meeting) is not just between the manager and the individual, but affects every person on the team. For example, if you promote one person, make sure the rest of the team understands why that person was promoted and what needs to be done to achieve the same.
13. You’re more likely to lose by not recognizing your weaknesses than from the presence of weakness, so aim for self-awareness.
14. Sometimes you’ll have to bet on big, resource intensive projects that won’t work. Be careful of the morale toll on your team. Not everyone has great tolerance for repeated failure. If you’re a founder, you probably are more used to this than your team. One technique is to mix iterative work with riskier bigger bets to rebuild this energy. But you should also try to not paint any feature as a silver bullet, and individual failure in good faith as a necessary cost of trying new things. Your company is a portfolio bet.
15. How you spend money is one of the biggest cultural signals you can send and is very hard to change. Where you spend money (and where you don’t) communicates what you think is important.
16. The best way to avoid politics isn’t to ignore politics, but to spend your time on it. Define clear merit-based systems, which reduces confusion about what your team members need to do be recognized.
17. One of the most helpful things you can do is remind the team of the bigger picture. Knowing what’s important will help cut through the bullshit.
18. The best way to manage great people is to provide clarity of purpose and regular feedback (which is different than regular direction).
19. While career development is ultimately the responsibility of each individual (who else?), time spent as a manager to proactively understand and enable growth is time-well spent.
20. Sometimes people talk shit. Sometimes people have bad days. Don’t take either personally.
21. A personal mantra I’ve found useful is “we were lucky but now is the time to be good.” That is to say, let us pretend that all past success was the result of our situation and not our own hard work or good qualities. We now have a unique opportunity to reduce our dependence on luck through superior performance. There is no cost to this belief except your ego, and it can help drive radical self and team improvement.

Thanks to Wagon for providing a desk and copyediting.

The Body Cam Hacker Who Schooled the Police

The Body Cam Hacker Who Schooled the Police

This activist demanded millions of surveillance videos from the Seattle police. They handed him the data — and a job.

Leadership That Gets Results

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Mike Curtis may not have the typical background of someone dedicated to vanquishing bureaucracy. AltaVista, AOL, Yahoo, Facebook — he’s a veteran of some legendary Silicon Valley behemoths. Now VP of Engineering for Airbnb, he’s at the helm of a small but rapidly growing team. With nearly two decades of innovation at tech giants under his belt, he’s become an expert at chopping through red tape.

The Truth About Blogging — Startups, Wanderlust, and Life Hacking — Medium

U.S. Smartphone Use in 2015

Key Themes of This Report

10% of Americans own a smartphone but do not have broadband at home, and 15% own a smartphone but say that they have a limited number of options for going online other than their cell phone. Those with relatively low income and educational attainment levels, younger adults, and non-whites are especially likely to be “smartphone-dependent.”

Smartphones are widely used for navigating numerous important life activities, from researching a health condition to accessing educational resources. Lower-income and “smartphone-dependent” users are especially likely to turn to their phones for navigating job and employment resources.

by Cory Doctorow

Cory Doctorow

Scroogled.

“Give me six lines written by the most honorable of men, and I will find an excuse in them to hang

him.”

Cardinal Richelieu

“We don’t know enough about you.”

Google CEO Eric Schmidt

Greg landed at San Francisco International Airport at 8 p.m., but by the time he’d made it to the

front of the customs line, it was after midnight. He’d emerged from first class, brown as a nut,

Material Design is design science. — Medium

Material Design is design science.

Why Material Design is our best attempt (yet) for a unifying theory of design.

In 2013 Apple launched iOS 7 and the world fell in love with flat design. Apple by no means invented flat design (in fact Microsoft championed flat long before Apple), but they brought it to the massses. And they did it well.

As a designer I set down a very familiar path.

Peacetime CEO/Wartime CEO

You’re lucky that I ain’t the president
Cause I’ll push the f*#king button and get it over with
F&$k all that waiting and procrastinating
And all that goddamn negotiating
—Bushwick Bill, Fuck a War

Geto Boys – Fuck a War | Listen for free at bop.fm

TOM HAGEN Mike, why am I out?
MICHAEL CORLEONE You’re not a wartime consigliere. Things may get tough with the move we’re trying.
—Scene from The Godfather

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Only Insurgents Survive: Preparing for the Robot Apocalypse

Terminator Salvation

The Bad News

You are going to be out of business 10 years from now. And if by then your business is not either bankrupt or being sold for parts, you will wish that it was.

Apple is not remarkable because they are the world’s most valuable company, but because they‘ve spent over 35 years relentlessly fighting a “lost cause.”

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Four Things I Wish I Knew When I Became a Tech Lead