Why It’s Difficult to Build Teams in High Growth Organisations
May 31·4 min read
By “high growth”, I mean in terms of employee count and roughly doubling or more every year. Even at slower growth rates, some of the phenomena I’ll describe may be relevant.
There are several options to accommodate new people:
(more…)Product Management in Infrastructure Engineering
Recently a bunch of teams I work with have turned the corner, having paid down technical debt to a long-term sustainable level. The future unfurls with possibility. We can do anything. That’s exciting! It can also be pretty disorienting. For me, this is the most inspiring moment of management, and one of the hardest.
When we were completely focused on system reliability or churning tasks, most teams pulled their roadmaps down to a month or two, and we got so focused that we disconnected from our internal users. With less time soaked by maintenance, we’ve scurried to understand our users’ needs and define an optimistic, future-facing roadmap to support them.
(more…)Incident Writeup as Sociological Storytelling
Back when Game of Thrones was ending, the sociology professor Zeynep Tufekci wrote an essay titled The Real Reason Fans Hate the Last Season of Game of Thrones. Up until the last season, Game of Thrones was told as a sociological story. Even though the show followed individual characters, the story wasn’t about those characters as individuals. Rather, it was a story about larger systems, such as society, norms, external events, and institutions, told through these characters. The sociological nature of the story was how the series maintained cohesion even though major characters died so often. In the last season, the showrunners switched to telling psychological stories, about the individual characters.
(more…)In many design, product management, engineering, or even venture capital interviews and pitches, you’ll be assessed on a dimension called “product thinking,” sometimes also called “product sense.” If you’re a builder aspiring to create something new and valuable (or someone who invests in such builders), having well-honed product thinking will help you — and the products you work on — stand out from the crowd.
(more…)
Checked in at On The Border Mexican Grill & Cantina.
We’re all about that mall life — with erika
39.7349123-105.1608467
Checked in at River North Brewery.
Coffee/beer launch with Bivouac! — with erika
39.8067557-104.978612
Checked in at Einstein Bros Bagels.
39.7338355-105.1631344
Checked in at Costco Gasoline.
39.78785-105.0831161
Humans Were Born to Carry Weight on Our Backs
May 17·7 min read
Photo: Sicmanta
Last fall I found myself standing on the Arctic Tundra, about 120 miles from civilization. One hundred pounds of caribou filled my pack. I had to hoof the weight back to camp, which was five miles away. All uphill and across the tundra. And the tundra is a savage landscape comprised of dirt that exists in an ice-cream-like state: spongy layers of dense moss, mucky swamp, and basketball-sized tufts of grass called tundra tussocks. A mile out there is like five on a regular trail.
(more…)The future of war is bizarre and terrifying
On December 11, 1941, Winston Churchill received a phone call informing him that the Prince of Wales and the Repulse, a British battleship and battlecruiser in the South China Sea, had both been sunk by Japanese aircraft. At first he couldn’t believe it; no capital ships, moving under their own power and actively defending themselves, had been sunk by airplanes ever before. These were the first. But they would not be the last.
(more…)Why Your Huge Tech Team Isn’t Delivering
Sep 10, 2018 · 10 min read
“Our team used to go fast when it was small. Now we have ten times as many people and less work gets done. What happened?!”
Short answer:
Your workstream is controlled by people whose job it is to ship more features, and your software engineers think their job is to write code.
Long answer:
(more…)
Over the last few years, companies put a lot of effort and money into developing their engineering management teams: one-on-ones, yearly goal setting, feedback, coaching, and whatnot. I believe there are two primary reasons for such investments:
In my journey of becoming an engineering manager, some start-up CTOs and good friends asked me:
(more…)The Cost of Cloud, a Trillion Dollar Paradox – Andreessen Horowitz
There is no doubt that the cloud is one of the most significant platform shifts in the history of computing. Not only has cloud already impacted hundreds of billions of dollars of IT spend, it’s still in early innings and growing rapidly on a base of over $100B of annual public cloud spend. This shift is driven by an incredibly powerful value proposition — infrastructure available immediately, at exactly the scale needed by the business — driving efficiencies both in operations and economics. The cloud also helps cultivate innovation as company resources are freed up to focus on new products and growth.
(more…)True Product Market Fit is a Minimum Viable Company | by Ann Miura-Ko | The Startup | Medium
Ann Miura-Ko
Feb 15, 2020 · 11 min read
Hi, I’m Ann. I was one of the first investors in Lyft, Refinery29, and Xamarin. I have been on the Midas List for the past 3 years and was recently named on The New York Times’ list of The Top 20 Venture Capitalists worldwide. In 2008, I co-founded Floodgate, one of the first seed-stage VC funds in Silicon Valley.
(more…)Building Products at Stripe: Go Deep, Move Fast, and Build Multi-Decade Abstractions
This is the next part of my ongoing series about product culture. If you missed it, check out my previous piece about Airbnb and my article on strong product cultures that kicked everything off.
Stripe co-founders Patrick and John Collison
This month we’re going deep on Stripe. As you’re about to learn, “going deep” is a core product principle at Stripe. The company is now the most valuable startup in the United States, raising a round in March at a breathtaking $95 billion valuation. (Disclosure: I am an investor in Stripe and have a relationship with the company dating back to 2015.)1
(more…)Checked in at Costco Gasoline.
39.78785-105.0831161
Checked in at Palisade Rim Trailhead.
39.1179558-108.320466
Whether you’ve just moved to the Mile-High City or you’ve lived here your whole life, decoding Denver’s street can be a real challenge. But the mystery of how the Denver street grid is laid out can be somewhat easily solved once you understand the importance of the intersection of Broadway and Ellsworth to the streets off the downtown grid.
(more…)There’s a good chance most of the problems in your life and work come down to insufficient slack. Here’s how slack works and why you need more of it.
Imagine if you, as a budding productivity enthusiast, one day gained access to a time machine and decided to take a trip back several decades to the office of one of your old-timey business heroes. Let’s call him Tony.
(more…)Checked in at Terminal East.
39.8489391-104.6732391
Top highlight
4 days ago·9 min read
I’ve been a blogger for a little more than 20 years and in that time I’ve written a little more than 20 books: novels for adults; novels for teens; short story collections; essay collections; graphic novels for adults, highschoolers and middle-schoolers; a picture-book for small children, and book-length nonfiction on various subjects. I’ve written and delivered some hundreds of speeches as well, for several kinds of technical and non-technical audience, as well as for young kids and teens.
(more…)Checked in at Green Mountain.
39.6965627-105.1922167
Why Your New Strategy Will Fail
As organizational transformation consultants, we’re often invited to help functions, departments, and teams of all kinds within massive enterprises recover from failed strategy implementations. Regardless of the industry or organization, the narrative of each failure follows a familiar arc. A “new strategy” is developed over several months of backbreaking creative and consensus-building efforts. It ultimately results in a key artifact (usually an exceedingly beautiful deck of slides) that clearly articulates a smart and cogent shift in priority. There is (seemingly) buy-in from all the key players and generally a sense of, “Okay, this makes sense. Now we just have to implement it.” Inevitably, the strategy fails to manifest in any major positive changes and after 18–36 months of middling returns, it’s decided that a shift in strategy is needed and the cycle begins anew.
(more…)Why Your One-On-One’s Should Probably Be Longer
Don Neufeld
Mar 25 · 5 min read
As an Engineering Manager, one-on-ones with your team members are a core responsibility of your role, and often one of the largest consumers of your time.
As a leadership coach, I often work with individuals who are struggling with their calendars. One of the most effective ways to improve their effectiveness is to re-evaluate how they are scheduling their one-on-ones.
(more…)Why “Standups” are Useless and How to Run Great Product Team Meetings
Andy Johns
Oct 14, 2019 · 11 min read
The majority of meetings are a waste of time. And in my opinion, one flavor of meeting that tops the charts in uselessness is the “status update” meeting. You know this meeting — the meeting where everyone gets together to share what they’ve been doing. It’s ironic that meetings like this exist because it gets in the way of people actually doing something productive. A cross-functional group of people (product, design, engineering, marketing and so on) working on a new product doesn’t greatly benefit from status updates.
(more…)Career Development: What It Really Means to Be a Manager, Director, or VP
It’s no secret that I’m not a fan of big-company HR practices. I’m more of the First Break all the Rules type. Despite my general skepticism of many standard practices, we still do annual performance reviews at my company, though I’m thinking seriously of dropping them. (See Get Rid of the Performance Review.)
Another practice I’m not hugely fond of is “leveling” — the creation of a set of granular levels to classify jobs across the organization. Leveling typically results in something that looks like this:
(more…)The number of “good jobs” in the United States and other countries is declining despite sustained government and policy efforts.
There is a widespread assumption that low-wage jobs are filled with minimally capable people—a prejudice that has denied millions of employees the opportunity to enhance their skills and use their brains.
Companies like Michelin have challenged that mindset and dramatically increased the authority and accountability of workers on the front lines. Michelin kick-started this change through a bottom-up process involving targeted experiments in select plants and eventually scaled up the most successful approaches across the organization.
(more…)Thinking Subtractively – Simple Thread
Worried you’ll miss us?
Subscribe to get our articles and updates in your inbox.
In some news from my backyard, UVA researchers at the Batten School and the school of Engineering recently published an interesting paper in Nature: People systematically overlook subtractive changes.
The gist is that when people are looking at a problem and thinking about solutions, we typically think of adding something to solve the problem – even when removing something is an easier, simpler solution.
(more…)The Art of Self-Organizing Engineering Teams
So, it is no wonder that we want to know what makes those teams special. A few ideas that come to mind right away are:
All of the above scenarios might help, but none of them guarantee high performance. More important for the success of the team is how well people work together. It is the collective intelligence that counts.
(more…)I turn 35 today. Here are 35 principles I have accumulated and try to live by (you can listen to the narrated version here):
The full thread and discussions are here:
(more…)The Paradox of Genius: Why Long-Term Thinking Wins
by James Currier (@JamesCurrier). James is a General Partner at NFX, a seed-stage venture firm headquartered in San Francisco.
By necessity, Founders are rooted in the “here and now” mental framework required for launching a new startup.
But *great* Founders do something different at the same time: They are obsessed with what will endure 10 or 50 years from now.
Kevin Kelly helps you rise to that level. He is the legendary tech thinker who lives in the future — he co-founded Wired back in 1994 when only a few saw the digital revolution coming. In his best-selling books he told us all our future before it happened (The Inevitable, What Technology Wants, and New Rules For The New Economy).
(more…)I Could Build This During the Weekend
Every time people buy a new house, car, or TV, they say lovely things first. It’s the honeymoon phase. Then, they realize their expensive, fancy stuff has flaws too. Engineers tend to take it one step further. We enter solution mode and start thinking about solutions for those flaws and how we’d design those items. We are so intelligent. We’d make it better, wouldn’t we?
However, when we do this kind of analysis, we may miss the context. Maybe the folks responsible for the design had constraints. It can be a tight timeline, low-quality, or too-expensive materials. Sometimes, it’s a waterfall process, and it’s too late or too expensive to fix it. We often ignore how most people prefer to have something that works rather than something perfect. There are plenty of reasons why some things are flawed or, at least, they look one order of magnitude more complicated than they should be. I still remember when Andrew Houston submitted Dropbox on Hackernews. The first and most infamous comment read like this:
May 2021
There’s one kind of opinion I’d be very afraid to express publicly.
If someone I knew to be both a domain expert and a reasonable person
proposed an idea that sounded preposterous, I’d be very reluctant
to say “That will never work.”
Anyone who has studied the history of ideas, and especially the
history of science, knows that’s how big things start. Someone
proposes an idea that sounds crazy, most people dismiss it, then
(more…)The Other Side of Languishing Is Flourishing. Here’s How to Get There.
3 days ago·7 min read
Dec 6, 2018·6 min read
Do you also hear that all the time? But stepping back, that’s like saying “screwdrivers are bad”. Meetings are a tool, and they are indispensable for effective, transparent communication.
Transparency is critical if you want to build trust in your organization. I have been in situations where “coffee walks” were the norm. As a result, information was delivered to each individual slightly differently. This information asymmetry generates distrust in the organization and its leadership. As the saying goes “Trust takes years to build, seconds to break, and forever to repair”. Transparent communication is a cornerstone of building trust. Distributing information in meetings that involve all relevant stakeholders is essential if you want to build trust. A friend who works at a successful analytics company even told me that “we don’t do meetings, everything is communicated in one-on-ones”. This is a sure way to inject unnecessary politics into an organization. Meetings are a tool to direct verbal and non-verbal information flow between stakeholders.
(more…)Remote work culture: Lessons from top companies – NoHQ Remote Work Guides
Are you looking to understand — and improve — your remote work culture?
While useful, digital tools are not stand-ins for remote work culture. Many remote work employers start with tools and leave culture for last, mistaking Slack, Zoom, and Calendly as their company “culture.”
Factors such as different employee cultural backgrounds, nationalities, life experiences, and more can make constructing and supporting a digital-first team difficult. This is where the importance of your remote culture comes in: a thriving company culture is what allows remote work companies to develop a well-oiled team that runs on its own.
(more…)The tragedy of the commons is a false and dangerous myth – Michelle Nijhuis | Aeon Essays
Locals at the Marienfluss Conservancy in Namibia meet to discuss conservation. Photo courtesy of NACSO/WWF Namibia
In December 1968, the ecologist and biologist Garrett Hardin had an essay published in the journal Science called ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’. His proposition was simple and unsparing: humans, when left to their own devices, compete with one another for resources until the resources run out. ‘Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest,’ he wrote. ‘Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all.’ Hardin’s argument made intuitive sense, and provided a temptingly simple explanation for catastrophes of all kinds – traffic jams, dirty public toilets, species extinction. His essay, widely read and accepted, would become one of the most-cited scientific papers of all time.
(more…)Inside Elon Musk’s plan to build one Starship a week—and settle Mars | Ars Technica
Enlarge / Three barrels welded together are lowered onto a pressure dome for SN2 at the South Texas Launch Site this week.
BOCA CHICA BEACH, Texas—How badly does Elon Musk want to get to Mars? Let me tell you a story. On Sunday, February 23, Musk called an all-hands meeting at the South Texas site where SpaceX is building his Starship spacecraft.
(more…)The Emerging Architectures for Modern Data Infrastructure
As an industry, we’ve gotten exceptionally good at building large, complex software systems. We’re now starting to see the rise of massive, complex systems built around data – where the primary business value of the system comes from the analysis of data, rather than the software directly. We’re seeing quick-moving impacts of this trend across the industry, including the emergence of new roles, shifts in customer spending, and the emergence of new startups providing infrastructure and tooling around data.
(more…)Your brain on progress – Increment: Reliability
My favorite engineering role was working on web page performance at Etsy. My team and I made tweaks, found small opportunities for page load time improvement, and shipped incremental updates that made the site—often imperceptibly—faster.
Management work often consists of building up your team’s resilience to organizational storms.
But no matter how small the improvement we made to site speed, you could see it on our dashboards. The graphs, they were glorious. We celebrated changes in milliseconds! We even created an internal site to acknowledge “performance heroes” on other teams, complete with graphs that illustrated our coworkers’ site performance improvements and descriptions of their implemented solutions. We’d email every designer and developer at Etsy when we updated the dashboard with a new hero so everyone could chime in and high five the person who’d improved the site.
(more…)The Process Is Not the Product — The Software Methodology Anti-Manifesto.
Feb 20·3 min read
TLDR;
TheSoftware Methodology Anti-Manifesto – The Process is not the Product
– Leading not Managing
– Dialog not Dictation
That’s it, you can work out the rest for youselves, but for those of you who want to, read on.
The Process is not the ProductIn a (very) long technical career, I must have been exposed to the majority of software methodologies, and experience has shown that they are, by and large, more of a liability than a help. In fact, I’ll go further and say that I think that too much methodology is much more dangerous that too little. However, the cult of the One True Methodology continues to thrive, and it worth taking a few moments to consider why.
(more…)Engineering Productivity Can Be Measured – Just Not How You’d Expect
From each of our two experiences starting out as introductory-level engineers at Box, to becoming first-time managers overseeing five-person teams, then directors overseeing 30-50, and ultimately VPs managing hundreds, we’ve experienced software engineering from every angle.
At every step of the way, we asked ourselves: “how do we know if we are bringing value as engineering leaders?” Effective leadership uniquely blends human qualities – influence, empathy, courage, and results. This latter quality always brings the question of productivity – how effective are you at producing results through enabling others?
(more…)Execute Like a Rookie, Lead Like a Multiplier | First Round Review
In 1989, Liz Wiseman took her first job out of business school at a mid-size startup called Oracle. With no previous experience, she was recruited as a technical trainer, charged with teaching programming to all of the company’s new engineering recruits. She admits she barely knew what the company did, much less how to teach engineers. A year later, she was promoted to manage the training department and make CEO Larry Ellison‘s vision for what he called ‘Oracle University’ a reality. She was 24.
(more…)How to Prepare for a “Megadisaster” | Columbia Magazine
Jeffrey Schlegelmilch, the director of Columbia’s National Center for Disaster Preparedness, discusses the cataclysmic events that may threaten our future and how planning and research can help save us.
What does your work entail?
The center’s mission is to conduct research that helps the US prevent, prepare for, and respond to natural and human-driven disasters. Our faculty and staff investigate nearly all aspects of the country’s capacity for dealing with disasters, from the readiness of governmental and nongovernmental organizations to the effectiveness of on-the-ground emergency-response strategies to public awareness of disaster risk.
(more…),_participate_in_a_tug-of-war.jpg)
A tug of war is often used as an illustration of the Ringelmann effect. As more people are involved in a task, their average performance decreases, each participant tending to feel that their own effort is not critical.
The Ringelmann effect is the tendency for individual members of a group to become increasingly less productive as the size of their group increases. This effect, discovered by French agricultural engineer Maximilien Ringelmann (1861–1931), illustrates the inverse relationship that exists between the size of a group and the magnitude of group members’ individual contribution to the completion of a task. While studying the relationship between process loss (i.e., reductions in performance effectiveness or efficiency) and group productivity, Ringelmann (1913) found that having group members work together on a task (e.g., pulling a rope) actually results in significantly less effort than when individual members are acting alone. Ringelmann discovered that as more and more people are added to a group, the group often becomes increasingly inefficient, ultimately violating the notion that group effort and team participation reliably leads to increased effort on behalf of the members.
(more…)How to Hire an Engineering Manager: From Within or Without?
Hiring, onboarding & retention
Membership is free and gives you access to videos, downloads, live digital events and more, as well as a chance to subscribe to our weekly newsletter: LeadDev Originals.
or
Enter email address
We have linked your account and just need a few more details to complete your registration:
(more…)
Checked in at Hop Alley.
Dining in an ice fishing tent. Because these are weird times. — with erika
39.7669586-104.9742803
Who were we and what were we thinking? A return to offices frozen in time.
Ellery Frahm is an archaeologist who unearths artifacts spanning half a million years of human history, all around the globe. But he recently unearthed a perplexing ancient artifact close to home. It was a Post-it note from last March, recovered from the debris of his Yale University office.
Written on it? A phone number. Whose number? A mystery.
(more…)Director to VP Engineering: What Is Expected and How to Prepare?
Director to VP Engineering: what is expected and how to prepare?
Director to VP of Engineering
A lot of engineering leaders made it to the director level and now wonder what it looks like at a VP level, and even more importantly, how to prepare for that level in day to day job as a director.
I was there and shared the same curiosity. Now that I took both a senior director role in a $1.5B unicorn startup and a VP role in a seed stage company, I am glad to share thoughts on this topic.
(more…)7 Reasons to Get Serious About Your Open-Source Strategy
Does your company help steer the open-source projects it relies on? Would in-house software projects benefit from outside contributors? Is there somebody in the organization responsible for answering those questions?
These days, admitting that open source is a viable software-development model isn’t enough. Companies also have to set open-source strategies that make sense for their technical and business goals.
Cheryl Hung, VP of ecosystem at Cloud Native Computing Foundation, heads up the foundation’s community of users and advises startups about their open-source strategies. Often, she told me, companies’ open-source programs are entirely bottom up, with individual developers taking the reins. That’s not a bad thing, but more organized programs can help companies make the most of developers’ time — and the available open-source tools.
(more…)Solve the Product Maze Backwards | Psychohistory
As the father of young children, I can tell you that there is a special place in my heart for restaurants that provide puzzles and crayons for small children to pass the time.
On a recent trip out to The Counter in Mountain View, Jordan (who is 8) was really struggling with a large maze puzzle on one of these activity sheets. It was a fairly large maze, and he was frustrated by his inability to see the dead ends ahead, forcing him to retrace his somewhat tortured crayon path.
(more…)Checked in at Denver Botanic Garden Sculpture Garden.
39.7322222-104.9608208
Robin Rendle ∙ January 2021
My friend Lucy once told me that she falls in love with the way that someone thinks…
…and that’s what newsletters make possible for me; they’re a record of how strangers see the world.
Newsletters give me permission to fall in love with someone I’ll never meet…
(more…)Adding is favoured over subtracting in problem solving
Consider the Lego structure depicted in Figure 1, in which a figurine is placed under a roof supported by a single pillar at one corner. How would you change this structure so that you could put a masonry brick on top of it without crushing the figurine, bearing in mind that each block added costs 10 cents? If you are like most participants in a study reported by Adams et al. in Nature, you would add pillars to better support the roof. But a simpler (and cheaper) solution would be to remove the existing pillar, and let the roof simply rest on the base. Across a series of similar experiments, the authors observe that people consistently consider changes that add components over those that subtract them — a tendency that has broad implications for everyday decision-making.
(more…)We mentor early-career developers. Here’s what they need to succeed.
Note: This article first appeared on LinkedIn.
Knowing how to code is just one aspect of being a professional web developer. Another super important skill is knowing how to collaborate effectively on a software team. Most coding bootcamps don’t teach this skill or don’t teach it effectively. This leads early-career developers to stumble in interviews and require a lot of ramp up time in their first tech jobs. The Collab Lab is a program Stacie Taylor and I created to help solve this problem.
(more…)Blogumentation – Writing Blog Posts as a Method of Documentation
Written by
Jamie Tanna
on June 25, 2017
CC-BY-NC-SA-4.0
Apache-2.0
4 mins
Table of Contents
You may have noticed that recently I’ve been writing more articles, often tagged under blogumentation. These short articles are concerned with documenting a piece of information about certain workflow-enhancing tips, and I find they fit under a term I have coined blogumentation, that is, blog posts as a form of documentation.
“Asynchronous” Working in 2021
“…the mere consciousness of an engagement will sometimes worry a whole day.” — Charles Dickens
Inspired by a friend, Sahil Lavingia, and his stance over the last year to work “asynchronously” (aka, instead of having to line up “synchronous” meetings with multiple people, choose somewhat arbitrary time blocks of 30 minutes or 60 minutes, and waiting days for relevant communication to take place when calendars align), I am going to adopt an asynchronous working style in 2021.
(more…)The Feynman Technique Can Help You Remember Everything You Read
Books give you access to the smartest brains on our planet. And learning from the greatest thinkers and doers is your fast track to health, wealth, and wisdom.
Yet, reading per se doesn’t elevate your life. You can read 52 books a year without changing at all.
Member Brief: It’s Not Us, It’s Them
This report is supported by 2PM’s Executive Membership and is temporarily unlocked for the Monday letter. To be a part of what we’re building, you can join here: The Executive Membership.
The concept of opportunity is deeply personal to me. Opportunity is earned through hard work, proximity, favor, and luck. For many, luck is the variable that wavers. But for others, it is often proximity. One of the last obstacles in eCommerce is the democratization of access and proximity to opportunity.
(more…)
Matt Eccleston
Jun 25, 2020 · 13 min read
Matt Eccleston formerly served as VP of Engineering and Growth at Dropbox, and from 2013–2019 helped the company scale from hundreds to thousands of employees. Prior to that, Matt spent 13 years in various Engineering leadership positions at VMware, helping it scale from tens to tens of thousands. Matt now advises late stage startups as part of ICONIQ Growth’s Technical Advisory Board. Balancing and budgeting engineering resourcing as a company scales is one of the most frequent topics that comes up.
(more…)
American Idle — Remains of the Day
I promised one final piece on TikTok, focused primarily on the network effects of creativity. And this is that, in part. But it discusses a bunch of other topics, some only tangentially related to TikTok.
All the points I wanted to cover seem hyperlinked in a sprawling loose tangle. This could easily have been several standalone posts. I’ve been stuck on how to structure it.
(more…)People are spending millions on NFTs. What? Why?
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/68904499/Screen_Shot_2021_03_02_at_3.21.50_PM.0.png)
Image: Cryptokitties.co
There’s nothing like an explosion of blockchain news to leave you thinking, “Um… what’s going on here?” That’s the feeling I’ve experienced while reading about Grimes getting millions of dollars for NFTs or about Nyan Cat being sold as one. And by the time we all thought we sort of knew what the deal was, the founder of Twitter put an autographed tweet up for sale as an NFT.
(more…)Open Source: From Community to Commercialization
Editor’s Note: The open source software (OSS) movement has created some of our most important and widely used technologies, including operating systems, web browsers, and databases. Our world would not function, or at least not function as well, without open source software.
While open source has delivered amazing technological innovation, commercial innovation – most recently and notably the rise of software-as-a-service – has been just as vital to the success of the movement. And since open source is by definition software that is free for anyone to use, modify, and distribute, open source businesses have required different models and a different go to market than other kinds of software companies.
(more…)Google Aims to Be the Anti-Amazon of E-Commerce. It Has a Long Way to Go. – The New York Times
Google presents itself to independent sellers as cheaper and less restrictive. But it is not clear whether it can change people’s habits of going straight to Amazon.
When Fritzy’s Roller Skate Shop in San Diego set up a storefront on Shopify, the owner linked her Shopify account to Google’s retail software.Credit…John Francis Peters for The New York Times
(more…)Companies are about to get pelted by employee turnover as the pandemic ends – Axios
Millions of workers are planning to jump to new jobs or new lines of work after the pandemic eases up.
Why it matters: High-skilled workers with plenty of opportunities are the hardest to replace. This massive reshuffling also will create major headaches for employers, and will likely expand the gaps between men and women in the workplace.
(more…)You Might Not Realize How Much You Miss the Office
Switching to Zoom forever might be convenient, but it’s a recipe for loneliness.
April 1, 2021
JAN BUCHCZIK
” is a weekly column by Arthur Brooks, tackling questions of meaning and happiness.
Arthur C. Brooks will discuss the science of happiness live at 11 a.m. ET on May 20. Register for In Pursuit of Happiness here.
(more…)In today’s episode, I want to talk about an idea I call fifth-generation management.
1/ Fifth-generation management is an emerging style of management we don’t know much about because it doesn’t actually exist yet. But it is guaranteed to emerge post-Covid because historically, big sharp disruptions have reliably triggered discontinuous changes in management culture, and it is already clear that this one is doing that.
2/ The idea of generations in management, in the form I’m going to lay it out, is causally related to the idea of generations of warfare, and in particular the idea that contemporary styles of warfare strongly shape future styles of management. So if there are generations in warfare, they are going to cause generations in management. Military ideas are not the only cause of course, but I’m going to argue that historically they’ve been the strongest one. Strong enough to almost be determinative. During WW2 for instance, business and military culture became almost the same thing for a few years.
(more…)Things Your Manager Might Not Know
When people talk about “managing up”, sometimes it’s framed as a bad thing –
massaging the ego of people in charge so that they treat you well.
In my experience, managing up is usually a lot more practical. Your manager
doesn’t (and can’t!) know every single detail about what you do in your job,
and being aware of what they might not know and giving them the information
(more…)What I wish I knew before building a Shopify App
I spent the last week building an App for the Shopify Marketplace. It was unlike anything I’ve done before on the Web. Knowing some of the things I’m going to share, before you start building, could save you some headache.
Here is the summary of my experience, more details below.
Key insights
- They expect you to make a onepage application (SPA)
- The polaris design system officially only supports react
- Integration with the shop frontend is difficult if you’re not making a theme
- Integrating functionality via webhooks is more tedious than it needs to be
- Payments are simple to implement, once you understand how
- The API is constantly changing in big ways
- The API is surprisingly unreliable
- Backend reliability isn’t great
- Local development of integrated apps is hard
- Modifying the checkout is not possible
Once you start studying the documentation and examples you’ll quickly notice all the examples use NodeJS and React. No big deal, right? That’s what’s all the rage these days, so it makes sense to build the docs to match that.
(more…)The Passion Economy and the Future of Work – Li Jin
Also published on a16z.com
The top-earning writer on the paid newsletter platform Substack earns more than $500,000 a year from reader subscriptions. The top content creator on Podia, a platform for video courses and digital memberships, makes more than $100,000 a month. And teachers across the US are bringing in thousands of dollars a month teaching live, virtual classes on Outschool and Juni Learning.
(more…)Those Pesky Pull Request Reviews
They’re everywhere. In Slack: “hey, can I get a review on this?” In email: “Your review is requested!” In JIRA: “8 user stories In-Progress” (but code-complete). In your repository: 5 open pull requests. They’re slowing your delivery. They’re interrupting your developers.
We could blame the people. We could nag them more. We could even automate the nagging!
(more…)
“Snow White Storyboards” at Airbnb
I asked Bring the Donuts readers to tell me more about the product culture at their own companies. I figured I’d get a handful of volunteers that I could interview. Instead, more than 150 of you offered up detailed thoughts and observations from a diverse set of companies. There are familiar big tech names, of course, but also startups, non-tech companies, and even government agencies. I’m overwhelmed by your response and grateful.
(more…)Making the case to decision makers: the presentation format to follow
I wrote before about the five questions you should be asking yourself before putting together a presentation. These questions should offer guidance on what you need to think about as you prepare your content, but they don’t offer a simple format to articulate that content well.
Over the last few years, I’ve spent a good amount of time presenting to our executive leadership team. A couple of years ago, one of these presentations was directly to our CEO. As I prepared for it, I spent dozens of hours, 50 different presentation styles and outlines, and many different pre-meetings to test out my template until I came around to this one. Since then, I’ve been using this as my guiding format to build the case for decisions makers. It’s also the format that runs in my head as I get a presentation where I need to make a call.
(more…)“When the formula stops working, you change the formula.” — Arin Hanson
“The era of ‘big government is over’ is over.” — James Medlock
I know this post has a very Vox-like title, but in fact I’m not going to go through Biden’s new infrastructure plan point by point and tell you what’s in it. if you want that, you can check out the actual Vox explainer, or the always-excellent writeup by the WaPo’s Jeff Stein et al. You can also check out Brad DeLong’s thoughts and David Roberts’ deep dive into the climate aspects. I’m sure there will be more in the days to come, and I’ll have plenty of thoughts on the specific provisions as well.
(more…)Checked in at Rocky Mountain Arsenal National Wildlife Refuge.
39.8198151-104.8611075
Checked in at Waterton Canyon.
39.491323-105.0936893
Checked in at Chase Bank.
Trying to close on our house. Starting to hate Chase — with erika
39.752-105.001559
Checked in at Slohi City Park.
39.74032-104.94953
How to Successfully Join a Company as Engineering Manager
Before joining the company, a friend, who’s also kind of a mentor, gave me invaluable advice: “Use the first three months to learn as much as you can about the organization and its culture, decision-making methodologies, processes, ownership, development cycle, and more. Observe, ask many questions, document, but keep feedback and suggestions for changes to yourself.”
If you knew me, you’d know that this isn’t my nature, yet I followed his advice. I resisted the urge of pointing out problems that seemed crucial because I knew I didn’t have the full picture. It’s a good thing I did, because many times, these problems turned out to be marginal when I became aware of the greater context. I kept reminding myself not to try to fix things that are not broken, simply because I’m used to doing them differently.
(more…)A concept from physics called negentropy could help your life run smoother
Energy loss in your daily life is just like heat leaking out of a badly sealed house. Credit: Passivhaus Institut, CC BY-SA
Life is full of small decisions: Should I pick up that sock on the floor? Should I do the dishes before bed? What about fixing the leaky faucet in the bathroom?
Leaving a sock on the ground is a manifestation of a concept from physics you may have heard of: entropy. Entropy is a measure of how much energy is lost in a system. If a system loses too much energy, it will disintegrate into chaos. It takes only a little bit of energy to pick up one sock. But if you don’t take care of your yard, let pipes stay clogged and never fix electrical problems, it all adds up to a chaotic home that would take a lot of energy to fix. And that chaos will leach away your time and ability to accomplish other things.
(more…)Checked in at GREEN MOUNTAIN PARK.
39.6904016-105.1522934
The Elusive Pursuit of Getting It (all) Done
Posted at 12:37h in Blog by
Growing up, my French-speaking parents always warned me about having “plus de gueule que de sac.”
While the Google translation is entertaining, English has its own version: “Having eyes bigger than your stomach.” Growing up, this idiom always stayed with me, whether it was at the all-you-can-eat hotel buffet or a post-soccer practice McDonalds run.
(more…)
Goal Setting by Julian Cutler
I worked with a manager once who explained his rationale behind goal-setting:
Without goals, no one will do anything! There’s no accountability on the team. People don’t take their commitments seriously. They give me silly excuses. Whenever I turn around, they are chatting on Slack or on Reddit. I’m not sure what they do all day. It feels like we are going in circles. Without goals, it will be impossible to keep score, and if I need to manage someone out, it will be hard! So yes, goals are important!
(more…)
Outgrowing software — Benedict Evans
Ten years ago Marc Andreessen wrote an article in the WSJ called ‘Software is eating the world’, arguing that there was a fundamental shift in the role that software plays in the economy. In the past, IBM, Oracle or Microsoft sold technology to other companies, as a tool. They sold computers and software to GE, P&G and Citibank. Now there’s a generation of companies that both create software and use it themselves to enter another industry, and often to change it. Uber and Airbnb don’t sell software to taxi companies and hotel companies, Instacart doesn’t sell software to grocery companies, and Transferwise doesn’t sell software to banks.
(more…)Terror in a Boulder supermarket: How the King Soopers shooting unfolded
BOULDER, Colo. — Dean Schiller was nearby shopping when he heard the shots. So Schiller, who regularly live-streams crime scenes on YouTube, hustled over to the entrance of the King Soopers supermarket.
Immediately, he came upon two bodies, sprawled on the pavement.
“Whoa, someone’s down right here,” he narrated. At the store entrance, he asked a man, “Did you see which way the shooter went?”
(more…)Checked in at Birdcall.
39.7544788-104.9766835
