The Eight Archetypes of Leadership

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Although the ghost of the Great Man still haunts leadership studies, most of us have recognized by now that successful organizations are the product of distributive, collective, and complementary leadership. The first step in putting together such a team is to identify each member of the team’s personality makeup and leadership style, so that strengths and competences can be matched to particular roles and challenges. Getting this match wrong can bring misery to all concerned and cause considerable damage.

Employers Want Workers in the Office for the Company Culture, Not Productivity – Bloomberg

Ask executives why they’re desperate to get workers back in offices, and productivity—the corporate north star and initial obsession of pandemic anxiety—suddenly has nothing to do with it. Many sound like Judith Carr-Rodriguez, the chief executive officer of FIG, a New York City-based advertising firm. She was shocked at how well things went when her staff of 80 pivoted to remote work; the firm actually grew. Yet, she’s resisting a fully remote future because of the je ne sais quoi of the office. “I know people are being productive,” she says. “But are they learning, growing, being challenged? I worry we’re creating a culture where people are not exposing themselves in ways they would be in the office.”

Remote Work Should Be (Mostly) Asynchronous

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Digital transformation should be a means to an end, but it often gets mistaken for an end in itself. This is partly why 70% of all digital transformation efforts fail — because they’re done purely for the sake of going digital without full consideration of the bigger picture.

The pandemic accelerated many trends, from streaming, e-commerce, and food delivery platforms to the widespread adoption of remote work. But instead of taking advantage of this opportunity to improve how we work, most organizations simply took their offices online, along with the bad habits that permeated them.

You Can’t Optimize For Rest

Welcome to the Convivial Society, a newsletter about technology and culture. In this installment I write a bit about burnout, exhaustion, and rest. It doesn’t end with any neat solutions, but that’s kind of the point. However, I’ll take up the theme again in the next installment, and will hopefully end on a more promising note.

As many of you know, the newsletter operates on a patronage model. The writing is public, there is no paywall, but I welcome the support of readers who value the work. Not to be too sentimental about it, but thanks to those who have become paying subscribers this newsletter has become a critical part of how I make my living. And for that I’m very grateful. Recently, a friend inquired about one-time gifts as the year draws to a close, however this platform doesn’t allow that option. So for those who would like to support the Convivial Society but for whom the usual subscription rates are a bit too steep, here’s a 30% discounted option that works out to about $31 for the year or about $2.50 a month. The option is good through the end of December. Cheers!

My Smart Home 2021

Hi! It’s me, Joris.

It looks like I’ve linked you here myself. Linking people to a blogpost I wrote is often a bit

akward, especially at work.

I likely shared this blog in an attempt to further a conversation. Usually the post does a better

job at succinctly sharing information

than I could by talking.

In any case, I hope me sharing this post doesn’t come across as

Can Matt Mullenweg save the internet?

In the early days of the pandemic, Matt Mullenweg didn’t move to a compound in Hawaii, bug out to a bunker in New Zealand or head to Miami and start shilling for crypto. No, in the early days of the pandemic, Mullenweg bought an RV. He drove it all over the country, bouncing between Houston and San Francisco and Jackson Hole with plenty of stops in national parks. In between, he started doing some tinkering.

Metrics-Driven Product Development Is Hard

The way that the FAANG companies use metrics to build products is vital to their success. They invest an army of people and homegrown tools to pull it off. My last article, Balancing short-term and long-term product bets, describes Google’s process.

While the very top companies are great at using metrics, after talking to the hundreds of PMs who signed up for DoubleLoop, I’ve learned that almost everyone else is struggling.

Intent Matters in Product Development – by Alex Johnson

My favorite fintech product of all time was a mobile wallet, launched by Square in 2011. Originally called Card Case (and later Square Wallet), the app created a startlingly seamless and enjoyable mobile payments experience.

Here’s how it worked:

• A consumer downloaded the Card Case app to their smartphone and was able to see a map of all the nearby merchants that were using Square’s POS Register.
• In the app, the consumer was able to look up information on these merchants (operating hours, menus, special offers, etc.) and choose to ‘open a tab’ at any merchant that they wanted to shop with.
• When the consumer visited a merchant that they had an open tab with, the merchant’s Square POS Register would automatically detect their smartphone (using geofencing) and would pop up the consumer’s name and face on the screen.
• When the consumer was ready to make a purchase, all they had to do was give the cashier their name to complete the transaction.
• In the background, Square would charge the card on file, send the consumer a digital receipt, and give them the option of adding a tip.

OOPS Writeups

A couple of people have asked me to share how I structure my OOPS write-ups. Here’s what they look like when I write them. This structure in this post is based on the OOPS template that has evolved over time inside of Netflix, with contributions from current and former members of the CORE team.

My personal outline looks like this (the bold sections are the ones that I include in every writeup)

Is Crypto Bullshit?

Planet-wrecking money laundry or the next phase of human evolution? Why not both?

As you may have gathered from my previous post, I’ve become interested in cryptocurrency and blockchain regulation. I’ve honestly been a little hesitant to write about this stuff because opinions on the subject are oddly polarized. I know I’ve got crypto-skeptical readers, followers and friends who would be exasperated if I suddenly started spouting off about it all the time. Last week, Venkatesh Rao noted the hostile reaction after tweeting about minting his first NFT (non-fungible token):

Agility ≠ Speed

Software development benefits from a sense of direction

Kevlin Henney

10 hours ago·9 min read

This article first appeared in Tips From The agile Trenches

I was changing a lightbulb this morning and was struck by a shift that has occurred in recent years. Lightbulbs used to be sold according to their power consumption. People were entrained to buy bulbs according to power rating — what the bulb consumed from the electrical grid — rather than brightness — what they, as consumers, actually benefited from.

Why Trying to Clean Up All the Ocean Plastic Is Pointless

Time Management – Paolo Belcastro

Becoming a CTO – Puppies, Flowers, Rainbows and Kittens

A New Way to Think About Product-Market Fit

I made my team waste two years of their lives building and refining the wrong product. Yes, we had a good time and we learned a few things, but nobody wishes to spend two grueling years on something that doesn’t matter.

What went wrong? I had an oversimplified understanding of product-market fit. And there’s a chance that you do too.

If you’re looking for product-market fit, by the end of this article you’ll have a better chance of finding it.

My Software Estimation Technique – Jacob Kaplan-Moss

My Software Estimation Technique

Last time, I explained that, although estimating software project timelines is hard, you should do it anyway. With that background, I want to go into some detail and share the technique I use when I need to develop a project timeline.

The critical characteristic: capture time and uncertainty

This isn’t an area where I think there’s a “correct” technique; this is one system that works well for me, and I’ve been able to teach others to use it successfully. There are any number of other systems that might work as well; .

How 3D Printing Could Change the Future of Gear

You don’t have to be able to follow the intricately complex plot threads of HBO’s hit sci-fi series Westworld — who can? — to see the hypothetical picture in its fabric: by the early 2050s, theme park robots will be so lifelike that it’ll be impossible to tell the difference between them and us. Though not inherently a problem, their verisimilitude will complicate matters when a few become sentient and decide to take over.

What Would It Look Like If We Treated Climate Change as an Actual Emergency? ❧ Current Affairs

As the dust settles on COP26, the 26th United Nations Climate Change Conference, the results do not look good. Despite a flurry of headline-grabbing pledges, national commitments bring us nowhere near to meeting the Paris Agreement target of 1.5 degrees. According to Climate Action Tracker, 73% of existing “net-zero” pledges are weak and inadequate—“lip service to climate action.” What is more, a yawning gap remains between pledges, which are easy enough to make, and actual policies, which are all that really count. You can pledge all you like, but what we need is action. Right now existing government policies have us hurtling toward 2.7 degrees of heating in the coming decades.

The Worst of Both Worlds: Zooming From the Office – The New York Times

Work life for many is in a mushy middle ground, and what’s at stake isn’t just who is getting talked over in meetings. It’s whether flexibility is sustainable, even with all the benefits it confers.

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Don’t Let Architecture Astronauts Scare You

When great thinkers think about problems, they start to see patterns. They look at the problem of people sending each other word-processor files, and then they look at the problem of people sending each other spreadsheets, and they realize that there’s a general pattern: sending files. That’s one level of abstraction already. Then they go up one more level: people send files, but web browsers also “send” requests for web pages. And when you think about it, calling a method on an object is like sending a message to an object! It’s the same thing again! Those are all sending operations, so our clever thinker invents a new, higher, broader abstraction called messaging, but now it’s getting really vague and nobody really knows what they’re talking about any more. Blah.

Free software maintenance – Adding Features

This was written sometime in 2004, I think

How does the maintainer of a free software project decide which features to

add? The guiding principle is simple: ask “why,” rather than “why not.”

Let’s start with some mails from Linus Torvalds on the subject,

since people are more likely to listen to him than me:

here

and here

(local mirror if the links died).

All code is presumed harmful, because it will have bugs and

How Product Engineering Teams Avoid Dependencies — The Independent Executor Model

What is the Independent Executor model?

It is natural to need things from other teams. It can be tempting to wait for them or depend on them to provide something for you. This happens because they own the area you need to do work in.

For example, you might need a team to add a field into their API. Or you might need them to build a new API for you. Sometimes without these changes, you can’t deliver what you need to.

MTTR Is a Misleading Metric—Now What?

By Courtney Nash | November 4, 2021

12 minute read

Editor’s note: This is the second part of a series that will focus on each one of The VOID Report 2021 key findings. If you haven’t had a chance to download the report, it’s not too late. You can download the report at thevoid.community/report.

Software organizations tend to value measurement, iteration, and improvement based on data. These are great things for an organization to focus on; however, this has led to an industry practice of calculating and tracking Mean Time to Resolve, or MTTR. While it’s understandable to want to have a clear metric for tracking incident resolution, MTTR is problematic for a couple of reasons.

Software Estimation Is Hard. Do It Anyway.

How to Foster Healthy Disagreement in Your Meetings

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We often consider ourselves lucky if we’re on a team with little conflict and minimal office politics. When a team works together for a long time, they find a rhythm of collaborating and fall into regular patterns of behavior, minimizing disagreements. But over time, this habitual way of working can limit the team’s performance. We don’t often step back to assess if the team dynamics that we consider “good” are getting in the way of generating breakthrough ideas and results.

B2B Payments: Unlocking a Multi-Trillion-Dollar Opportunity – by Michael Spiro – The Takeoff

Hiring: Assessing Communication – Essays and stories

We’re hiring for the Data team at Bevy. One of our core values is “communicate like a legend,” and it’s about communicating with respect, candor, clarity, courage, and empathy. We are building for the long term at Bevy, so it’s also about communicating to our future selves and future colleagues.

Of all the attributes we are looking for in Bevy data team members, I’ve been thinking a lot about communication lately. I’m trying to learn a lot about a candidate during relatively few interactions, and the nature of our communication during the hiring process is different from how we’d communicate if the person is hired to the team. An interview is different from a team meeting because the objective is different and there is more at stake. A take-home challenge is different from a team project because there is less discussion and there is more at stake. And there is a lot more talking than writing during the hiring process, with about 6 hours of live interviews. So how do you “get signal” on communication?

9 Ways to “Rewild Your Attention”

How to inject more weirdness and randomness into the stuff you read and see

Clive Thompson

Oct 29·9 min read

“Forest,” by Jennifer C.

Back in August, I wrote about the concept of “rewilding your attention” — why it’s good to step away from the algorithmic feeds of big social media.

I’d originally encountered the idea via a tweet by Tom Critchlow, referencing a post by CJ Eller, riffing off an essay by Ali Montag. You can go read my original essay, but basically the concept was that the algorithms in big-tech feeds have two problems…

Stand-up Meetings Are Dead (and What To Do Instead) – Honeycomb

Stand-up meetings. Is anyone happy with them at this point? They were supposed to help teams work in a more agile manner but they were already controversial in the before times and moving to fully distributed teams hasn’t made things any better. The same old habits, the same tired questions. There must be something better, right?

We began meandering syncs to replace stand-ups as an experiment at Honeycomb, but loved the results so much that we have adopted it across the engineering org. We think you might love it, too! But before I share how that works, let’s first take a look at how we got here.

Why the Status Quo Is So Hard to Change in Engineering Teams

A BigCo Story

Welcome to BigCo Inc!

It’s your first day as a software engineer and you’re excited to start your first commit. As your new co-worker Bill shows you around the codebase, you can’t help but notice how often Bill answers notifications on his phone. “Do you want to continue later?”, you ask. “Nah it’s just that I’m on-call this week. Don’t worry I’m used to it – those are not that important”. You’re a little perplexed but, as the phone vibrations keep rattling your desk, you let Bill show you the innerworkings of BigCo’s codebase.

Cut Out Time Estimates on Roadmaps: Get Into a Product Delivery Rhythm

All of the business of software, but especially the delivery of product capabilities, is inextricably bound up in questions about time. What’s the estimate? If we have N people working on it, how long will it take? When will we ship?

Putting a finer point on it, if you’re building products iteratively, incorporating customer feedback from early prototypes, tacking and jibing your way toward the right solution, there’s no way you’ll be able to accurately estimate the work it will take to get there. Trying to do so is performative and it sets teams up for disappointment or even conflict when the date “slips.”

What is a decentralized autonomous organization, and how does a DAO work?

A decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) is an entity with no central leadership. Decisions get made from the bottom-up, governed by a community organized around a specific set of rules enforced on a blockchain.

DAOs are internet-native organizations collectively owned and managed by their members. They have built-in treasuries that are only accessible with the approval of their members. Decisions are made via proposals the group votes on during a specified period.

Why Do Companies Have So Many Managers? – The Atlantic

Lars Tunbjörk / Agence VU / Redux

America has too many managers.

In a 2016 Harvard Business Review analysis, two writers calculated the annual cost of excess corporate bureaucracy as about $3 trillion, with an average of one manager per every 4.7 workers. Their story mentioned several case studies—a successful GE plant with 300 technicians and a single supervisor, a Swedish bank with 12,000 workers and three levels of hierarchy—that showed that reducing the number of managers usually led to more productivity and profit. And yet, at the time of the story, 17.6 percent of the U.S. workforce (and 30 percent of the workforce’s compensation) was made up of managers and administrators—an alarming statistic that shows how bloated America’s management ranks had become.

Spotify for readers: How tech is inventing better ways to read the internet

Protocol | Fintech

Profiting from a missed fintech opportunity: Renters

Esusu’s co-founders say renters deserve credit.

Esusu, co-founded by Samir Goel and Abbey Wemimo, makes it possible for landlords to report rental payments to credit bureaus, helping tenants boost their credit scores.

Photo: Esusu

November 1, 2021

Benjamin Pimentel

Benjamin Pimentel (

@benpimentel) covers fintech from San Francisco. He has reported on many of the biggest tech stories over the past 20 years for the San Francisco Chronicle, Dow Jones MarketWatch and Business Insider, from the dot-com crash, the rise of cloud computing, social networking and AI to the impact of the Great Recession and the COVID crisis on Silicon Valley and beyond. He can be reached at [email protected] or via Signal at (510)731-8429.

Process People

For many years I’ve subscribed to the idea that in a product organization, there are essentially two types of contributors: makers and managers.

Makers definitely include your designers and your engineers, and supporting roles like user research and data analysts. Makers design and build the products we love, so most people understand the critical contribution of makers.

Managers definitely include the managers of designers, engineers, and product managers. Managers are primarily responsible for the staffing and coaching of the makers, so most people understand their importance, especially if you’re a maker fortunate enough to work for a manager committed to helping you progress in your career.

Agents of Doom: Who is creating the apocalypse and why

There are a handful of actors who are the most likely to cause a global catastrophe, but their power goes unchecked, says Luke Kemp. I

In 1995, a doomsday cult in Japan killed 13 people and injured more than 6,000 others. They were the victims of a Sarin gas attack in the Tokyo subway committed during rush hour by the apocalyptic terrorist group known as Aleph (at the time called Aum Shinrikyo). Afterwards, 13 of the perpetrators were tried and executed.

The Next Big Challenge for Data Is Organizational

In the past few years, much has been written about problems like discoverability, observability, data quality, and the need for data teams to become more “engineering oriented” in their mindset. Movements like analytics engineering and open source tooling like dbt, Dagster, and Great Expectations have done an amazing job arming data practitioners with the tools that they need to start adopting the best practices of software engineering like modularity, testing, and release management. This shift in mindset has resulted in very real and very exciting progress in data as a discipline over the past 3-5 years, and will likely be looked back upon similarly to how React changed the frontend (Laurie Voss does a good job articulating this). It is clear that much has improved in data land, yet many of the core problems outlined at the start of this post remain quite painful. Why is this?

What Is Underneath Productivity?

[

Superorganizers](https://every.to/superorganizers)

🔒 October 22, 2021

♥ 55

I’ve been obsessing about productivity for a long time. I used to spend a lot of time thinking about tools for thought and second brains. But these days, I spend most of my time thinking about metacognitions, the stress response, and interpersonal relationships.

In other words, it looks like I’m going soft. Or, at the very least, my interests are changing. But I’d actually argue that my interests are the same—I’m just approaching the same problems from a new angle. And it’s leading me to be a lot more productive than I have been in the past.

Are Pull Requests Holding Back Your Team?

Pull requests are great for open source. But they can hinder the team performance

David Masters Follow

Apr 1 · 14 min read

Photo by David Ballew on Unsplash

Intro

The rise of Git, GitHub, and Pull Requests (PR) has resulted in some big changes to the practices and workflows within the software industry. In particular, they’ve revolutionised the world of open source, providing a robust…

Working Backwards

This is a summary of a great 🌳 tree book. Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon is the first book that explains how Amazon really works, written by two insiders who were there when the techniques were invented. This is not a comprehensive summary; tree books don’t lend themselves to easy summarisation. You should buy the book and read it — the stories that the authors tell about the origins of each technique are absolutely critical if you want to apply them; do not rely on this summary alone. Read more about book classifications here.

The Most Heated Tech Job Market in History: Advice for Software Engineers

The tech job market is on fire, across the globe, for people with a few years of industry experience under their belt. This is especially true for software engineers, but other tech functions are also following.

I talked with dozens of hiring managers – from engineering managers to CTOs and CEOs – and they all shared the same perspective. Here is a typical quote from an executive at a global tech company:

Being the DRI of Your Career

Credit: Pexels

At DuckDuckGo, there’s an expression: “You are the DRI of your career” (DRI: Directly Responsible Individual). I like this, both as an individual who has always felt like the DRI of my own career, and I like it as a manager because I think it makes the boundaries of what you can and can’t do for people clear.

What does it mean to be the DRI of your career? To me, 5 things:

To Tame Burnout, Microdose Nature

A neuroscientist is discovering that time in nature is one of the best ways to reduce stress and increase happiness and productivity. Here are the specific doses that work the magic.

Michael Easter

Jul 23·3 min read

Photo by Silvestri Matteo on Unsplash

In my new book The Comfort Crisis, which looks at the benefits of engaging with forms of mind-and-body-enhancing discomfort our ancestors faced every day, I spend a section unpacking all the benefits of the outdoors … of which, I found, there are a metric shit-ton.

What We Talk About When We Talk About the Metaverse

In science fiction, the end of the world is a tidy affair. Climate collapse or an alien invasion drives humanity to flee on cosmic arks, or live inside a simulation. Real-life apocalypse is more ambiguous. It happens slowly, and there’s no way of knowing when the Earth is really doomed. To depart our world, under these conditions, is the same as giving up on it.

Who Is the Bad Art Friend?

Credit…Photo illustration by Pablo Delcan

The Great Read

Art often draws inspiration from life — but what happens when it’s your life? Inside the curious case of Dawn Dorland v. Sonya Larson.

Credit…Photo illustration by Pablo Delcan

By

• Published Oct. 5, 2021Updated Oct. 11, 2021

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The case for slacking off at work

The word agile is pretty frustrating. Not because it’s the wrong word, but because it’s been so badly coopted it longer means anything.

At the heart of it, Agile software development is simply the practice of executing work in small batches, measuring the impact quickly, and then starting a new batch with that new information. It is quite simply optimizing for learning.

The Great Resignation Is Accelerating

I first noticed that something weird was happening this past spring.

In April, the number of workers who quit their job in a single month broke an all-time U.S. record. Economists called it the “Great Resignation.” But America’s quittin’ spirit was just getting started. In July, even more people left their job. In August, quitters set yet another record. That Great Resignation? It just keeps getting greater.

Composability Is the Only Game in Town – Roam, Shipping Containers, Lego and Twitter.

Lego Blocks, Shipping Containers, Roam Research, Open Source, and any other unreasonably successful endeavor follows the fractal design of composability.

Epistemic confidence: 3/5. I intend to return to this post in the future.

Shipping containers

The current iteration of global capitalism is built on the backbone of a shipping container. Not the car nor the plane. As much as I do think the washing machine is transformative (and do check out this TED talk by Hans Rosling), it didn’t have an impact as huge as the shipping container.

How to Safely Think in Systems

The second most impactful book I’ve read is George Lakoff’s Don’t Think of an Elephant which lays out his theory of communication. Lakoff explores a fundamental organizational challenge: as you grow, it becomes increasingly difficult to communicate when you’re not in the room where a discussion happens. I once worked with a staff engineer who described their most significant contribution as giving initiatives catchy names and slogans to propel ideas further than any supporting data might.

What Makes a Great Leader?

It’s very difficult question to answer. How do you judge a leader? Is it financial success? The loyalty they engender? Their ability to inspire? There are war-time leaders and peace-time leaders. Leaders may be understated or zealous. I’m not sure we’ll ever be able to say definitively what constitutes a great leader. Regardless, we all want to improve our ability to lead, whether it’s a small team or a Fortune 500. But how?

Why Limiting WIP, Starting Together, Being Less Busy, and Working Together Is SO HARD

(Twitter is great. This week I had some great back and forths with Jacob Singh about normalizing being idle. He cranked out a wonderful post that you should check out called The Case for Slacking Off at Work. I took a different approach.)

Ask an executive “do you think we should optimize for keeping people busy?”