Every year, I produce a big presentation digging into macro and strategic trends in the tech industry. This year, ‘The Great Unbundling’.

David Adams Nov 5, 2019 · 5 min read

Professionals supposedly come in two shapes: either short and fat, or tall and skinny, meaning their skill set is either broad or deep. They can also be T-shaped —knowing a lot about a little and a little about a lot—but in this metaphor, …

What does it mean to lead when you don’t have coercive power to get your way?

Christina M. Tapper

This is an impressive story of entrepreneurship, and of the acceleration of ecommerce in lockdown, but it’s interesting more generally because it illustrates three pretty important trends in tech and ecommerce.

It’s been two weeks since I left Google and I keep getting asked “why did I leave now”? I think the better question is “why did I stay for so long”? When Waze was acquired by Google, most of the people who know me did not believe I would …

Teams that don’t communicate. Market disruption. Unidentified logjams. Employee burnout. Lost efficiency. As part of a group of data scientists, management consultants, and engineers at Microsoft, we help companies harness behavioral data …

[ Stella Treas

This is a true story about my last trip to Dublin. It happened over two years ago. Some details may have blurred over time. You have my permission to laugh at my discomfort.

Imagine you bought a new phone, but at the end of each day, every day, the operating system crashed. Would you keep using the faulty phone? Of course not. You’d take it back to the store, complain, and get a new one.

Security cameras. License plate readers. Smartphone trackers. Drones. We’re being watched 24/7. What happens when all those data streams fuse into one?

The wisdom of learning from failure is incontrovertible. Yet organizations that do it well are extraordinarily rare. This gap is not due to a lack of commitment to learning. Managers in the vast majority of enterprises that I have studied …

Andy Johns

Piotr Zakrzewski is a sometime-contributor to open source projects. He’s not a regular on any one project, but more of a dabbler — a self-described “outsider contributor” who sometimes submits pull requests to projects he enjoys using.

Maybe it’s a piece of code that we’ve shepherded for many years, or maybe it’s a program or project that has special importance. And, while many times we will have confidence in the person to whom we are delegating, it may still feel …

Process monster (n): a manager for whom the answer is always, always ‘process’. The process monster will add more and more processes to the team until the team collapses under the weight of them. Eventually, the monster will move to another …

This situation was the result of a process failure, and given that process is what I ship as the VP of Engineering, I was also responsible for improving the process so the team doesn’t find itself in these positions. We needed a way to make …

#### Dafna Rosenblum

Looking back on four decades in the software industry, I’m struck by how much has changed. I started my career with punch cards and I am ending in the era of cloud computing. Despite all this change, many principles that have helped me …

The world of remote work is growing more than ever before. This year, we not only surveyed people who were remote by choice, but also people who started working remotely suddenly and during a pandemic. Forty-five percent of respondents to …

Product-Led Growth is defined as a go-to-market strategy that relies on using your product as the main vehicle to acquire, activate, and retain customers. If you’ve used Slack or Dropbox, you’ve witnessed this first-hand-you didn’t read a …

Home > Articles > new codebase, who dis? (How to Join a Team and Learn a Codebase)

Most new things in technology turn out to be fads: patterns of talking and doing that come and go without leaving a permanent mark. Microkernels; EPIC architectures like IA-64; object request brokers; and 1990s’-style neural nets are gone, …

Eric Rabinovich

“How do I feel worthwhile as a manager when my people are doing all the implementing?”

Like many young graduates in computer science today, Cathy’s first job out of school was as a software engineer at a fast growing company — Amazon, in 1999, right before the dotcom crash.

#### Nir Rubinstein

A bridge builder was completing his inspection

Real rockets don’t go straight up. They go up, and then they turn.

1/12/2021

There’s a thing writers call the middle slump. It’s that period in the middle of writing something when the author has lost initial momentum, feels stuck and has difficulty making forward progress.

For most of her career, Caryn Hubbard thought of salaries as a private matter. Then, she joined Buffer as its VP of finance.

No, engineers don’t suck at time estimates – and generally speaking humans are better estimators than what most people believe. This seems rather surprising given all we’ve heard about the problems of bad time estimations, projects going …

Image: World Economic Forum

With the recent launch of two new satellite messengers, the Garmin inReach Mini and the SPOT X, backcountry enthusiasts have more options than ever for staying connected when venturing off the grid. You might be wondering, “Which satellite …

Where are tech companies going to go once the pandemic subsides as vaccines reach more and more Americans?

#### Nir Eyal

The future of the skies is in development today, as next-generation aviation technologies are tested, certified and piloted for commercial operations in coming years. A different type of aircraft – one better suited to urban transport – is …

San Francisco doesn’t have the same hold on the tech world, now that remote work is here to stay.Credit…Lucas Foglia for The New York Times

Srivatsan Sridharan Dec 14, 2020 · 9 min read

2020 was a rough year for everyone, even for those of us blessed to be able to work from home. Psychologically and emotionally, it’s easy to feel disconnected and lonely when you don’t see people outside your household for weeks and months …

The other day I made an advice thread based on Putanumonit’s from last year! If you know a source for one of these, shout and I’ll edit it in.

Creatives have two ways of working: open mode and closed mode.

August 17, 2018

How do you build trust as a leader? The answer seems intuitive enough.

In 1995, a WIRED cofounder challenged a Luddite-loving doomsayer to a prescient wager on tech and civilization’s fate. Now their judge weighs in.

Welcome! In this post, we’ll be taking a character-by-character look at the

Career moves like starting a new role are challenging, can often be unnerving, and for sure requires leveling up.

To run faster, you either need to take longer strides or quicker strides. While both stride length and rate will increase as you become a fitter, stronger, more experienced runner, focusing on increasing your running cadence, or stride …

This is a theme I have come back to many times over the last decade but in the wake of all of the headlines about high profile founders, VCs, and companies leaving the bay area, I thought I would return to it.

New technologies enable activities that fall into one of two categories: 1) doing things you could already do but can now do better because they are faster, cheaper, easier, higher quality, etc. 2) doing brand new things that you simply …

#### Hunter Walk

Dennis Nerush Dec 31, 2020 · 5 min read

December 22, 2020

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Today Stripe is announcing Stripe Treasury ; from the company’s press release :

Last May, Stripe launched our remote engineering hub, a virtual office coequal with our physical engineering offices in San Francisco, Seattle, Dublin, and Singapore. We set out to hire 100 new remote engineers over the year—and did. They …

The reason you’re giving feedback is that you want something to be different, in the first place. You want a direct report to make sure he’s not rubbing the rest of the team the wrong way. You want a new hire to improve how she interacts …

We have learned something really important from the way that the press sometimes covers Radical Candor. And we want your advice on how to communicate this idea more clearly. We want to learn to describe Radical Candor in a way that is not …

Can you list the key points of the last meeting you attended? No? You’re not alone.

Checking items off your to-do list is a beautiful thing—but it’s also easier said than done. The best way I’ve found to make sure you complete your tasks is through ruthless prioritization. That means deciding not to do things you’d really …

#### Jen Doll

from the book “Hell Yeah or No ”:

Contrary to popular belief, distributed work isn’t a modern invention. The Roman Catholic Church, for example, has been working at a distance for centuries; so have organizations like the Hudson’s Bay Company.1 Distributed work is the …

A reader asks a question that comes up at some point in every engineer’s and engineering manager’s career, where their manager, or the one above will pop the question. Can you measure engineering productivity? And if so, how can we measure …

Guest Author & Illustrator: Andrew Yu Text adapted from Eric Jorgensen and The Almanack of Naval Ravikant

Kyle Evans Follow

Breathing slowly and deeply through the nose is associated with a relaxation response, says James Nestor, author of Breath.As the diaphragm lowers, you’re allowing more air into your lungs and your body switches to a more relaxed state.

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When you join a new team as a manager, it may seem like complete chaos to you. Everything and everyone is unfamiliar. The amount of information you need to absorb is immense. It feels overwhelming and confusing. You’re trying to understand …