Good, practical stuff around energy, time management and decision-making.  Easy read, useful insights.

A useful reminder that as we grow as leaders, we make mistakes: it’s how we respond to those mistakes which defines our future path.

This is an older post, but still highly relevant.  Q: what’s the most valuable resource you have?   A: the time and attention of your engineers.  Lots of small, correctable process, behaviour and environment issues contribute to frittering away the high-quality cycles of your team.  Take a look.

A cry for help by the writer who is constantly interrupted by Slack.  What processes do you have around Slack to make it useful without constantly interrupting your team?  This quote stood out:

“When I’m using Slack, all I crave is Inbox Zero, which is now an impossibility. There’s no way to get to the bottom of Slack, it just keeps on coming”

Lots of detail here about how GoDaddy dug into both their culture and their processes and changed both (you can’t change one without the other).  Optimistic, practical, useful.

A pretty amazing collection of Big Thought essays.  Lots to chew on here.

Loved this blast from the past from Alan Kay, including a headline from an article he published in 1977 (see below).  Amazingly, forty years later, we’re still living in Alan Kay’s future.  Also contains some great stuff on what Jobs grasped immediately when he saw the Xerox PARC system, and what he didn’t.  Fun read.

“Rates of progress in microelectronics suggest that in about a decade many people will possess a notebook-size computer with the capacity of a large computer of today.  What might such a system do for them?”    Alan Kay, 1977

Loved this.  How to grow a company?  Manage your ass off.  A great example of how implementing terrific management chops whilst being careful not to mess up the culture Just Works.

Overwhelmed with detail?  Not enough time to think, to build, to really work?   Thought so.  Rands is here to help out.  Bit of a long read, but if you don’t have the time to read it, you should definitely read it.

“There is never enough time; you are greatly outnumbered by chaotic, beautiful snowflakes, and there is too much to do and too much to know. This is the status quo of management, and without a clear counter-investment in building, you are going to get lost in the busy”

Lengthy, but very complete set of recommendations for how, and how not, to interview engineers.  Good, practical stuff, with data.

This is a bit of an older article, and many of these tips are known, but far from being common practice.  So, worth reviewing, and if you’re not doing them, do them.

A simple, direct re-introduction to a profoundly difficult skill: remembering that It’s Not About Us.  If you get a chance, find a quiet spot and give this some time - it’s not hard to read, refreshingly free of New Age Nonsense, and provides a terrific perspective on the foundations of relating to other people.

“…the majority of people in our world say and do what they do from their own set of fears, conclusions, defenses and attempts to survive. Most of it, even when aimed directly at us, has nothing to do with us”

So far this has been amazing.  It’s all of the stuff I’ve read about the science behind human behavior, plus a ton more, somehow explained clearly and in detail, and backed up with citations.  Are we inherently biased?  Yes.  And also, kind of no.  Do we make worse decisions when we’re tired? Yes, we absolutely do.  Here’s why.  And so on.

If you’re interested in the mechanics of why we do the wonderful, weird, spectacularly right and bizarrely wrong things we do, check this out.  It provides a solid basis for all the “soft people skills” that make, or break, management and leadership.

I’ve just become aware of Camille Fournier - turns out I’ve read a few of her posts  and not realized where they came from (a few years ago she posted the career ladder for engineers at Rent the Runway, which remains a go-to reference).

The Manager’s Path is clear, direct and full of relevant experience in the journey from engineer up into the wilds of management.  Read it.  Give it out.  Spread it around.

Wonderful.  Introduces the notion of “Decency Debt”: the accumulating effect of all the small acts of impoliteness, aggression and rudeness on a company culture.

“…there’s another kind of debt that seems to follow these meteoric leaders around, like a shadow. The failure to be basically decent, and to build an organization that values decency, builds up. Like technical debt, it comes more from ignorance and expediency than malice…”

The title says it.  Includes an interesting answer to the “but! what about Steve Jobs?!” argument for bad behavior.

None of this has to be hard.  This is a super-useful list of simple things to do to increase the basic decency and humanity of your culture.

One of several “we’re going to start doing this differently now” pieces I’ve read in the last week or so.   Things may actually be starting to change…

Why are some developers so productive?  An explanation: they have the whole thing in their head (I think there’s more to it, but this is a useful contribution).

Camille Fournier on why ICs get stuck: a great, well-thought out post (as always).

“Noticing how people get stuck is a super power, and one that many great tech leads (and yes, managers) rely on to get big things done”