It may be ingrained in American culture to work long hours but some Swedish companies are voluntarily switching to six-hour workdays. Benefits they list include more focus during work hours, productivity on par with eight-hour days, and the …

Resignations happen in a moment, and it’s not when you declare, “I’m resigning.” The moment happened a long time ago when you received a random email from a good friend who asked, “I know you’re really happy with your current gig because …

Many children are rightly attracted to superhero stories, and the idea of superpowers. It seems that humans in most if not all societies dreamed of surpassing problems with extraordinary abilities— flying, seeing the future, incredible …

In the January issue of HBR, Roger Martin sets out some rules for avoiding common mistakes in strategy making. As he writes in “The Big Lie of Strategic Planning “, the first rule is “keep the strategy statement simple.” Rather than a long, …

Picture a startup in the middle of hyper-growth. It’s adding engineers to keep up, but because its team is outgrowing the limited process it has in place, its product release cadence starts to slow. It’s taking longer to check-in and deploy …

I noticed this post today from Ezra Galston titled “Dear Brad, Fred & Mark: How The Hell Do You Do It? ”

People walk on the road from Seguin in the commune of Kenscoff, Haiti. The country has lost 98% of its vegetation due to illegal logging for wood and charcoal.

“The best boss I ever had.” That’s a phrase most of us have said or heard at some point, but what does it mean? What sets the great boss apart from the average boss? The literature is rife with provocative writing about the qualities of …

Thursday 29 October 2015

One of the biggest achievements of my career to date, one of the biggest impacts that I have made so far, happened almost as an after-thought. On March 26th of 2015, I released publicly the engineering ladder that the team created for Rent …

New research suggests that the secret to developing effective leaders is to encourage four types of behavior.

I wrote this in March 2014 when I was managing the User Lookup Service team at Twitter, to codify our theory of and approach to code review, and to try to establish some basic best practices. It’s not intended to tell you or your team how …

Lisa Nielsen wrote this post on August 05, 2015

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

By Marc Hedlund

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 — …

I was the best programmer in the world

Thanks to Wagon for providing a desk and copyediting.

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 …

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 …

by Cory Doctorow

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.

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

Terminator Salvation

Outside of the comic book world of Wolverine, Sabretooth and the Incredible Hulk, there’s no such thing as magic healing. If you get sliced, bruised or generally wounded, it takes us far longer to get back into fighting condition than our …

Five simple steps product designers can use to build better web apps.

Joel Gascoigne: “A product manager must understand the customer’s situation better than the customer does” http://t.co/FS9WbE1n78 by @sjohnson717

When we look at an Apple Watch or some other Wearable device, we see an object of lust, a cool gadget. When the internet looks at that smartwatch or fitness tracker on your wrist, it sees another endpoint — an extension of itself. The …

In early September, in a clapboard house situated on 43 acres just outside a small town in northern Vermont, two boys awaken. They are brothers; the older is 12, the younger 9, and they rise to a day that has barely emerged from the …

In case you haven’t heard, doomsday is coming—more droughts, floods, famine, class warfare, entitled children, and, brace yourself: a bourbon shortage! Yes, traditional Kentucky distillers didn’t predict or prepare for this Mad Men-inspired …

You arrive at work. You sit down at your desk and you scan your inbox for potential disasters. Two mails pique your interest. You write brief responses to nudge the engineers in the right direction. Nothing else is urgent so you walk to the …

If you’re a late riser, there’s a good chance that you have, at one point, been made to feel inferior to the seeming moral superiority of your early riser friends and colleagues.

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Photo by jnj (www.flickr.com/photos/melibeo )