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 …

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.

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Michael Easter

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 …

Credit…Photo illustration by Pablo Delcan

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.

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

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

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 …

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 …

(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.)

There is no doubt that platform corporations are among the most significant economic, political, and cultural actors in contemporary life. Platforms are powerful because they position themselves both beneath and in-between users — that is, …

Hunter Walk

And now, a thread of Ancient Sysadmin Wisdom: an incomplete list of things we have learned from decades of outages.

Over and over again, the tech industry asks ‘what’s the next cycle?’ Smartphones were the locomotive that drove the industry and all the innovation for 15 years, but now 4.5-5bn people have a smartphones and the market is mature, so what’s …

Cloudflare launched on September 27, 2010, and every year since, it has made it a point to celebrate “Birthday Week ” with a raft of launches. By far, the show-stopper this year was the announcement of R2 Storage, an S3-compatible Object …

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Since the coronavirus first appeared, at the end of 2019, four and a half million people have died, countless more have suffered, whole economies have been upended, schools have been shuttered. Why? Did the virus jump from an animal to its …

Let’s say that you’ve devoted your entire adult life to developing a carbon-free way to power a household for a year on the fuel of a single glass of water, and that you’ve had moments, even years, when you were pretty sure you would …

It was the most radical computer dream of the hacker era. Ted Nelson’s Xanadu project was supposed to be the universal, democratic hypertext library that would help human life evolve into an entirely new form.

The first fatal bioterror attack in the US killed five people and caused a national panic—and we’re still short of funding and tech to handle health emergencies.

Is it just me, or does it feel like America is running out of everything?

Marianne Bellotti

The easier it becomes to produce information, the harder that information becomes to consume — and the harder we have to work to separate the spurious from the significant.

I’m the cofounder and CEO of Kapwing, a 30-person company based in San Francisco. In our three years of trying to recruit top engineering talent, we’ve made 36 job offers to engineering candidates, and 16 of them turned us down.

When scientists discovered the energy embedded within atoms, it transformed how we think about the long-term future of humanity, writes the historian Thomas Moynihan. J

Earlier this month, a technology entrepreneur named Chris Herd posted a thread on Twitter. “I spoke to 10 x Billion $ companies who canceled return to the office due to the delta variant,” he began. “A few predictions on what else is going …

Jessica McKellar is now the founder and CTO of Pilot **.

Speed, Nuance and Learning | Flight Levels Academy

Project management is a topic most people have strong opinions on, and I’m no exception. To answer the question of how different companies run engineering projects, I pulled in help from across the industry. In this issue we’ll cover:

Image: Shutterstock

The inadequate initial U.S. response to COVID-19, coupled with new advances in biotechnology, could make biological weapons more appealing for U.S. adversaries. The biological weapons capability achieved by the United States in the 1960s …

Catherine Garland, an astrophysicist, started seeing the problem in 2017. She was teaching an engineering course, and her students were using simulation software to model turbines for jet engines. She’d laid out the assignment clearly, but …

Tenets are mental shortcuts that help an organization make decisions faster. They are a way to bias the decision-making of an organization in a particular direction.

As an organizational leader, you’ll be faced with many situations where the solution will be to improve the way people work together.

I’d like to share the results of one of the most interesting management experiments I’ve been a part of. At a company I worked at recently, we implemented the Single Threaded Owner (STO) model from Amazon, where you have everyone on the …

On the 20th anniversary of 9/11, against the backdrop of the rushed U.S.-allied Afghanistan withdrawal, the grisly reality of armed combat and the challenge posed by asymmetric suicide terror attacks grow harder to ignore.

When I am in a foul mood, I have a surefire way to improve my outlook – I build something. A foul mood is a stubborn beast and it does not give ground easily. It is an effort to simply get past the foulness in order to start building, but …

Nick Hilton

This article is a collaboration between New York Magazine and The Verge. Lea el reportaje en español aquí.

Illustration:

This pandemic will eventually be over, and the Delta surge—in which most of those not yet vaccinated against the coronavirus could become infected—may well be America’s last destructive wave. But just because we’re eager to move past the …

Huge favor to ask. Have you learned a new analytics product in the last year or so? If so, and you have 5 minutes to spare, It would be a big help for my team.

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A food tech startup is partnering with an avant-garde San Francisco chef to serve the company’s cultivated, cell-grown chicken at her restaurant.

Alex Murdaugh, the descendant of a prominent family of lawyers in rural South Carolina, was shot on Saturday, nearly three months after his wife and son were killed at their home.

Guest Essay

The heat has come.

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As Congress argues over the size of the infrastructure bill and how to pay for it, very little attention is being devoted to one of the most perplexing problems: Why does it cost so much more to build transportation networks in the US than …

Photo enhancing in movies and TV shows is often ridiculed for being unbelievable, but research in real photo enhancing is actually creeping more and more into the realm of science fiction. Just take a look at Google’s latest AI photo …

Again and again, I run into situations in which change agents in organizations that I work with run into organizational boundaries that stop them from moving forward in a way that makes perfect sense from a business and innovation …

Dave Bailey Follow

Just because your work doesn’t always look like work, doesn’t mean you don’t get to take a real vacation.

TL;DR: When different parts of an organization need to coordinate, it seems like a good idea to help them coordinate smoothly and frequently. Don’t. Help them coordinate less — more explicitly, less often.

Dave Bailey

Tim Denning Jun 23 · 5 min read

BY ALEX KONRAD

Normally the question I focus on in my work and in my writing is “How can we leverage the best practices of the very best companies in order to give ourselves the very best chance for continuous innovation?”

The Maersk Triple-E Class container ship is 1,300 feet long, carries over 18,000 containers across 11,000 miles between Europe and Asia, and… Its entire crew can fit inside a passenger van.

To most software organizations,Covid-19 represents a fundamental surprise- a dramatic surprise that challenges basic assumptions and forces a revising of one’s beliefs (Lanir, 1986).

In 1994 — before most Americans had an email address or Internet access or even a personal computer — Philip Agre foresaw that computers would one day facilitate the mass collection of data on everything in society.

Satya Nadella, for the record, was first: on May 25, 2021, during the keynote for Microsoft’s Build developer conference, he characterized a collection of Azure offerings as a metaverse:

Meetings are important — and they suck.

I originally wrote this piece internally at Eventbrite and thought it might be valuable to folks who do not work at Eventbrite as well. Slightly edited to remove Eventbrite jargon.

Leaders of software development organisations are under great pressure to

Why prioritization frameworks have little value for empowered product teams

Mathilde Collin

As June came to an end, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told his employees about an ambitious new initiative. The future of the company would go far beyond its current project of building a set of connected social apps and some hardware to …

A big shift is apparently underway in Silicon Valley.

Camille Fournier

I’ve been delving deeper into the vast and strange world of knowledge organizing tools (notes apps, contact organizers, personal search engines). During this rather abstract expedition, one of my goals has been to emerge with some …

A remarkable new study by a director at one of the largest accounting firms in the world has found that a famous, decades-old warning from MIT about the risk of industrial civilization collapsing appears to be accurate based on new …

Jason Yip Jul 4 · 3 min read

Welcome to the Convivial Society*, a newsletter about technology and society, broadly speaking. If you find the writing helpful, you can sign up if you haven’t already, share it with others, or subscribe.*

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In his six years at HashiCorp, **Kevin Fishner **has strung together a unique set of startup experiences. He joined the cloud infrastructure automation company in 2014 as the first business hire, going on to spin up the sales, solutions …

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After years of starting the day with a tall morning coffee, followed by several glasses of green tea at intervals, and the occasional cappuccino after lunch, I quit caffeine, cold turkey. It was not something that I particularly wanted to …

Fifteen months after shutting down “out of an abundance of caution,” Quartz’s office in New York City reopened to employees on June 1 under new guidelines befitting our changed world, increasingly far-flung workforce, and rapidly evolving …

Camille Fournier

At Superhuman, we use Reid Hoffman’s “Single Decisive Reason” (SDR) principle

Knowledge work is unique among skilled professions in that we lack a culture of systematic improvement.

June 2021

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The 4 Ds of time management, sometimes referred to as the 4 Ds of productivity, is a popular strategy for discerning whether or not a task or project is worth your time. It involves making a quick decision about what to act on now either by …

Ben Zotto

Sixty years ago the futurist Arthur C. Clarke observed that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. The internet—how we both communicate with one another and together preserve the intellectual products of human …

June 2021

What does it mean to be productive? At the beginning of the pandemic, when many workers went remote, some managers were tempted to start counting things — whether hours, objects, or other things. But they’re about 100 years and two …

At Raycast, we do not require code reviews. Engineers push to the main branch and request reviews when they think it’s necessary. In this blog post, I outline how we built an engineering culture that is based on trust and allows us to move …

I was promoted to director less than a year after becoming a manager. In the movie version of my life, getting promoted was a recognition of years of hard work and undeniable, innate leadership ability. The truth is probably closer to me …

Jason Yip

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. …

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. …

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 …

Michael Easter