Software distribution has over the years gone through an enormous revolution in efficiency. Originally, software was developed on things called ‘plug boards’, a matrix of sockets that allowed quick (or so they thought) re-configuration of …

Skydio Jul 13 · 3 min read

Originally posted Jul 15, 2018

You have a solid set of engineers, you’ve embraced OKRs and Agile, you’ve got standups, and you also do Sprint planning and retrospectives. But have you still felt frustrated by your team’s speed of execution? Have you asked yourself, …

One of the toughest challenges I’ve faced while running product teams in the past is knowing which level to engage a team and when. Anyone can easily get caught up in debates about specific product details and unpacking a singular OKR …

This entry is part 9 of 9 in the series Recognitions

I’ve been talking to a lot of people in different layers of the stack during my

David Sacks Jul 1 · 13 min read

Everyone wants to succeed, and for managers, that means leading highly capable teams that deliver excellent results. In order to drive team members to deliver successfully, managers need to identify what those capabilities are and harness …

DEV.BIZ.OPS Aug 13 · 5 min read

As designers, we are often very comfortable in working together using the physical space to our own advantage — critiques, workshops, brainstorming sessions, etc. It’s usually part of our education, and it evolves with our practice and …

One of my favorite “laws” is Conway’s Law, an adage that organizations will design systems that mirror their communication structure. As I’ve long said, “how you work is as important as what you work on”:

I.

My team recently embarked on a journey toward unbundling our part of Gusto’s monolithic Ruby on Rails app.

One good thing that has come out of the recent quarantine is that we’ve begun to explore what’s truly possible when all kinds of teams work from home. Though there have been growing pains for many in-person office jobs, most people have …

Pam Dineva Apr 28, 2016 · 5 min read

Note: With dad-hood I’m doing more lists. They’re easier to write while learning to care for this awesome little farting/burping/pooping/smiling human. Apologies if you’re a fan of the longer posts. I’ll get back to them …

New data show that Americans are suffering from record levels of mental distress.

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A mythology often develops around successful large engineering projects. We celebrate the end results and reflect on the positive steps taken to get there but quickly forget about all the missteps and uncertainty along the way. These …

Over the years, I’ve worked on many important, large-scale projects, from figuring out high level strategy and blue sky products, to overhauling core flows and IA, to implementing design systems from the ground up.

Spotify doesn’t use “the Spotify model” and neither should you.

#### Alexis Lloyd

The Neobiological Revolution, is here. Now’s the time to put lessons from the Digital Revolution to use.

Villi Iltchev Apr 10 · 4 min read

April 2019

This post is part of Blogging Futures, a collaborative blogchain-based learning adventure exploring how we can reimagine blogging. Feel free to join the conversation!

We’re forgoing our usual format this week to do a deeper dive on signals in a space that’s very close Addressable ideas & the connective tissue of the web

Teams say that they want to be empowered, but when everything is in front of you, it’s really hard to make decisions, defend them, and show how you measure against them.

ALAMOSA — The protesters, about a dozen in all, gathered on June 4 in the intersection of State Avenue and Main Street. Like protesters across the country in the aftermath of George Floyd’s killing by police, they were demanding police …

As a leader, you often feel short of time. Blocking time for yourself — free of meetings and calls — is vital for boosting your creativity and setting you up in a pro-active mode. Oftentimes great people have their escape; they run …

Most (all?) of our portfolio companies have been working remotely for over three months now. So have we at USV.

A conversation with InVision and Automattic, two organizations with a combined 24 years of office-less work experience

Contents

Monolith by Rene Aigner

In most of the previous companies I have worked with, our goal was to keep empowering teams, yet there was somewhat of a confined matrix around it. So much so, that the teams never truly felt empowered. What we were going to do in the …

We had video calls in science fiction, and we had video conferencing in the 1990s, just as the web was taking off, as a very expensive and impractical tool for big companies. It was proposed as a use case for 3G, which didn’t happen at all, …

Many engineering leaders are finding that remote work in today’s circumstances is causing fatigue. Kids and roommates are home, you may not have a proper desk setup, there’s no commute time to zone out and collect your thoughts, and you …

Editor’s note: We’ve anonymized the interview subject’s identity at his request.

February 3rd 2017

Amazon launched 22 years ago this week.

How are you feeling right now?

@rezendi /

Angela Lashbrook May 19 · 6 min read

By Tom Moon, MFT–

Nowadays there are more opinions on how to develop software than there are firms actually doing the development. Some people call programming a science. Others call it engineering, a craft, or even art. Just as coding’s 70-year history has …

For the past 3 years, I have been running a platform engineering organization. Since that term is vague, where I work it means the software side of infrastructure. Compute platforms like kubernetes, storage systems, software development …

I expect I’ll annoy everyone with this post: the anti-JavaScript crusaders, justly aghast at how much of the stuff we slather onto modern websites; the people arguing the web is a broken platform for interactive applications anyway and we …

Here are the 50 ideas that changed my life.

I thought I was done with the series of articles on the importance of empowered engineers, but then an article came out a few days ago criticizing the Spotify model of Agile at scale, and I could not pass up the opportunity to try to turn …

“That is not only not right; it is not even wrong”

When given the opportunity to establish a process, we’re all biased to advocate for one in which we would be successful ourselves. In hiring, this plays out in two main ways: “A” players build monocultures, hiring people just like them, and …

Gabriel Grinberg Mar 30 · 8 min read

The emerging norm for web development is to build a React single-page application, with server rendering. The two key elements of this architecture are something like:

Andrew Wilkinson Mar 19, 2017 · 8 min read

Before you die, you see Roko’s Basilisk. It’s like the videotape in The Ring. Dreamworks LLC

Objective 1: Create a high performing engineering team

Manage your Stratechery subscription.

For the fourth time in my adult memory, humanity has collectively, visibly lost the plot at a global level. My criteria are fairly restrictive: The dotcom bust and the 2007 crash don’t make my list for instance, and neither do previous …

Over the last decade, WordPress has established itself as the go-to content management platform for online newspapers, magazines, and blogs of all sizes. It’s also begun to gain footholds in the broader world of publishing: corporate …

Last year while thinking about product management in infrastructure

What do executives do, anyway?

Magazine

6 min read

The English word avatar is derived from the Sanskrit avatāra, meaning “to descend,” which came to signify a deity who has come down to earth and taken human form. Lord Rama, above, was the seventh avatar of the Hindu god Vishnu, summoned to …

Getty images

My coaching clients are typically senior leaders with rapidly growing or very large organizations who are responsible for hiring a management team, identifying a winning strategy, and building a culture that supports their goals. A theme …

Most companies are looking for outcomes, unfortunately the majority of what they get is output.

Most of my coaching clients are senior leaders in rapidly growing companies, and they often find themselves in the midst of a difficult transition. Previously they were in a position to add value by doing–because they knew the most about …

In the Enchiridion (or handbook) of Epictetus [1], the Stoic philosopher offers guidance to those of us with high aspirations:

I don’t get to write very often about productivity these days. I’m too busy doing things. There’s some sad irony there.

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One of the most significant steps in a leader’s development is cultivating the ability to 1) tolerate greater uncertainty 2) over longer periods of time 3) on a larger number 4) of increasingly important issues. A coaching client once …

HBR Staff/d3sign/Getty Images

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Tal Joffe Nov 26, 2019 · 10 min read

This post is about the interview process for an engineering leader. Hiring involves a lot more than the interview part – everything from reviewing resumes, sourcing great candidates, getting them to come onsite, the interview itself, …

Different engineering teams function in different ways. Each employ various strategies and processes, informed and shaped by changing technologies, markets, personnel, competitive landscapes, and company culture.

Skyscanner Engineering Mar 13, 2018 · 5 min read

Today we introduce the Marketplace 100, a ranking of the largest and fastest-growing consumer-facing marketplace startups and private companies.

Here in the Wasatch mountains, 2020 arrived with fresh snowfall and the promise of more powder to come in the first few days of the new year. For those who traveled here for the Christmas and New Year holiday in hopes of an idyllic winter …

Comfort is everything at MeUndies. Well, comfort, killer designs, charity, and efficient workflows. The first three are obvious if you explore the MeUndies website, where you can learn about the company’s sustainably sourced, naturally soft …

It’s now clear that the epidemic was never going to be contained. What’s next?

Humans love measuring things. Mostly because they love comparing themselves to their neighbors, which involves measuring things.

*“Uitwaaien” is a popular activity around Amsterdam—one believed to have important psychological benefits.*Photograph by John Loo / Flickr

Editor’s Note: When the members of the class of 2010 entered business school, the economy was strong and their post-graduation ambitions could be limitless. Just a few weeks later, the economy went into a tailspin. They’ve spent the past …

You’ve heard me talk about crash-only programming, right? It’s a programming paradigm for critical infrastructure systems, where there is — by design — no graceful way to shut down. A program can only crash and try to recover from a crashed …

November of 2008. I had more hair, a flip phone, and absolutely no idea what was coming.

Every year, OpenAI’s employees vote on when they believe artificial general intelligence, or AGI, will finally arrive. It’s mostly seen as a fun way to bond, and their estimates differ widely. But in a field that still debates whether …

Dan Hill Dec 30, 2017 · 3 min read

You become what you focus on.

Johan Steenkamp Feb 10, 2018 · 4 min read

Nassim Nicholas Taleb Aug 14, 2016 · 8 min read

I realized a long time ago that I was not the type of person who could create, build & polish ideas all by myself. I need collaboration with others to hone and build ideas. More than not, I’m not the one who starts the idea. I pick up …

I was recently asked an interesting question:

Last year, journalist Anne Helen Petersen wrote a widely shared piece in Buzzfeed naming millennials the “Burnout Generation”. According to Petersen, we’re overworked, underpaid, and often paralyzed by the systemic dysfunction of our …

Normalization of deviance

*This article is based on a presentation I gave as part of