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 …

Roger Nesbitt Follow

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 …

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 …

Ann Miura-Ko Feb 15, 2020 · 11 min read

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.

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 …

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.

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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, …

Don Neufeld Mar 25 · 5 min read

Andy Johns Oct 14, 2019 · 11 min read

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 …

The number of “good jobs” in the United States and other countries is declining despite sustained government and policy efforts.

Worried you’ll miss us?

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:

I turn 35 today. Here are 35 principles I have accumulated and try to live by (you can listen to the narrated version here ):

by James Currier (@JamesCurrier ). James is a General Partner at NFX, a seed-stage venture firm headquartered in San Francisco.

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 …

May 2021

The New York Times

Dick Brouwer

Are you looking to understand — and improve — your remote work culture?

Locals at the Marienfluss Conservancy in Namibia meet to discuss conservation. Photo courtesy of NACSO/WWF Namibia

Enlarge / Three barrels welded together are lowered onto a pressure dome for SN2 at the South Texas Launch Site this week.

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 …

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.

Michael Karliner

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 …

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 …

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.

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.

Hiring, onboarding & retention

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, …

Director to VP Engineering: what is expected and how to prepare?

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?

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.

Robin Rendle ∙ January 2021

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 …

Note: This article first appeared on LinkedIn.

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“…the mere consciousness of an engagement will sometimes worry a whole day.” — Charles Dickens

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.

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.

Matt Eccleston Jun 25, 2020 · 13 min read

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.

Image: Cryptokitties.co

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 …

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.

Millions of workers are planning to jump to new jobs or new lines of work after the pandemic eases up.

How to Build a Life

In today’s episode, I want to talk about an idea I call fifth-generation management.

When people talk about “managing up”, sometimes it’s framed as a bad thing –

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.

Also published on a16z.com

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. …

“Snow White Storyboards” at Airbnb

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 …

“When the formula stops working, you change the formula.” — Arin Hanson

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, …

Energy loss in your daily life is just like heat leaking out of a badly sealed house. Credit: Passivhaus Institut, CC BY-SA

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Goal Setting by Julian Cutler

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 …

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.

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 …