├── .git_hooks ├── install_hooks.sh └── pre-commit ├── .pre-commit-config.yaml ├── LICENSE ├── README.md ├── articles └── mistakes_25_years.md ├── glossary.md └── pictures ├── Dilbert ├── music_in_office.gif ├── new_features.jpg └── office_noice.gif ├── calvin_and_hobbes_style.gif ├── comforting-lies-unpleasant-truths.jpg ├── good_code_review.jpg ├── interruptions.png ├── maslow_of_developer_needs.jpg ├── pillars.png ├── strategic_planning.jpg ├── survivorship_bias_2x.png ├── techDebtQuadrant.png ├── what_the_customer_really_needed.jpg └── xkcd ├── README.md ├── making_progress.png ├── onboarding.png ├── optimization.png └── the_general_problem.png /.git_hooks/install_hooks.sh: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1 | #!/bin/sh 2 | 3 | ln -s ./../../.git_hooks/pre-commit .git/hooks/pre-commit 4 | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- /.git_hooks/pre-commit: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1 | #!/bin/sh 2 | 3 | doctoc --title "# Table of Contents" README.md 4 | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- /.pre-commit-config.yaml: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1 | repos: 2 | - repo: https://github.com/pre-commit/pre-commit-hooks 3 | rev: v2.3.0 4 | hooks: 5 | - id: check-yaml 6 | - id: end-of-file-fixer 7 | - id: trailing-whitespace 8 | - repo: https://github.com/psf/black 9 | rev: 19.3b0 10 | hooks: 11 | - id: black 12 | - repo: https://github.com/thlorenz/doctoc 13 | rev: v1.4.0 14 | hooks: 15 | - id: doctoc 16 | args: 17 | - --title 18 | - "## Table of Contents" 19 | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- /LICENSE: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1 | MIT License 2 | 3 | Copyright (c) 2017 Charles-Axel Dein 4 | 5 | Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy 6 | of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal 7 | in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights 8 | to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell 9 | copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is 10 | furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions: 11 | 12 | The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all 13 | copies or substantial portions of the Software. 14 | 15 | THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR 16 | IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, 17 | FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE 18 | AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER 19 | LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, 20 | OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE 21 | SOFTWARE. 22 | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- /README.md: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1 | 2 | 3 | ## Table of Contents 4 | 5 | - [About this list](#about-this-list) 6 | - [Books](#books) 7 | - [Turn the Ship Around!: A True Story of Turning Followers into Leaders](#turn-the-ship-around-a-true-story-of-turning-followers-into-leaders) 8 | - [Other generalist books](#other-generalist-books) 9 | - [Book reading lists](#book-reading-lists) 10 | - [What is engineering management?](#what-is-engineering-management) 11 | - [General management resources](#general-management-resources) 12 | - [Articles](#articles) 13 | - [Tools](#tools) 14 | - [Engineering Management Topics](#engineering-management-topics) 15 | - [1-1](#1-1) 16 | - [Antipatterns](#antipatterns) 17 | - [Biases](#biases) 18 | - [Brainstorming](#brainstorming) 19 | - [Career growth and job ladder](#career-growth-and-job-ladder) 20 | - [Change management](#change-management) 21 | - [Code reviews](#code-reviews) 22 | - [Communication](#communication) 23 | - [Conflict resolution](#conflict-resolution) 24 | - [CTO (Chief Technical Officer), VPoE and other levels](#cto-chief-technical-officer-vpoe-and-other-levels) 25 | - [Data organization](#data-organization) 26 | - [Culture](#culture) 27 | - [Decisions](#decisions) 28 | - [Delegation](#delegation) 29 | - [Delivery](#delivery) 30 | - [Developer productivity and devexp (developer experience)](#developer-productivity-and-devexp-developer-experience) 31 | - [Diversity and inclusion](#diversity-and-inclusion) 32 | - [Employee handbook](#employee-handbook) 33 | - [Employee retention](#employee-retention) 34 | - [Escalations](#escalations) 35 | - [Executives](#executives) 36 | - [FinOps (cost)](#finops-cost) 37 | - [First-time manager](#first-time-manager) 38 | - [Feedback](#feedback) 39 | - [Hands-on](#hands-on) 40 | - [Hiring](#hiring) 41 | - [General](#general) 42 | - [Hiring: interviews](#hiring-interviews) 43 | - [Hiring: interview questions](#hiring-interview-questions) 44 | - [Hiring: job postings](#hiring-job-postings) 45 | - [Hiring: process](#hiring-process) 46 | - [Hiring: résumé review](#hiring-r%C3%A9sum%C3%A9-review) 47 | - [Hiring: sourcing](#hiring-sourcing) 48 | - [Hiring: take home exercises](#hiring-take-home-exercises) 49 | - [Hiring: quotes](#hiring-quotes) 50 | - [Incident prevention and response (on-call, outages)](#incident-prevention-and-response-on-call-outages) 51 | - [Learning, retro, postmortem](#learning-retro-postmortem) 52 | - [Management style](#management-style) 53 | - [Meetings](#meetings) 54 | - [Mentoring](#mentoring) 55 | - [Mindset and attitude](#mindset-and-attitude) 56 | - [Motivation](#motivation) 57 | - [Onboarding new team members or yourself](#onboarding-new-team-members-or-yourself) 58 | - [Organizational structure](#organizational-structure) 59 | - [Performance management](#performance-management) 60 | - [Personal productivity](#personal-productivity) 61 | - [Planning (roadmap, goal setting, KPI, OKR, etc.)](#planning-roadmap-goal-setting-kpi-okr-etc) 62 | - [Goals](#goals) 63 | - [OKRs](#okrs) 64 | - [Presentations, design and public speaking](#presentations-design-and-public-speaking) 65 | - [Prioritization](#prioritization) 66 | - [Problem solving](#problem-solving) 67 | - [Processes for engineering](#processes-for-engineering) 68 | - [Product management](#product-management) 69 | - [Production and productivity](#production-and-productivity) 70 | - [Project management](#project-management) 71 | - [Estimating work (project management)](#estimating-work-project-management) 72 | - [Quality](#quality) 73 | - [Release management](#release-management) 74 | - [Remote teams](#remote-teams) 75 | - [RFCs (request for comments)](#rfcs-request-for-comments) 76 | - [Scaling an organization](#scaling-an-organization) 77 | - [Second level manager (2LM)](#second-level-manager-2lm) 78 | - [Security](#security) 79 | - [Soft skills, Emotional Quotient (EQ)](#soft-skills-emotional-quotient-eq) 80 | - [Storytelling](#storytelling) 81 | - [Strategy](#strategy) 82 | - [Survey](#survey) 83 | - [Talent management](#talent-management) 84 | - [Team vision](#team-vision) 85 | - [Technical strategy](#technical-strategy) 86 | - [Team culture](#team-culture) 87 | - [Team dynamics](#team-dynamics) 88 | - [Training](#training) 89 | - [Trust](#trust) 90 | - [Work ethics & work/life balance](#work-ethics--worklife-balance) 91 | - [Workshop facilitation](#workshop-facilitation) 92 | - [Writing](#writing) 93 | - [Other sources](#other-sources) 94 | - [Other lists](#other-lists) 95 | - [Movies](#movies) 96 | - [TV Shows](#tv-shows) 97 | - [Keeping up-to-date: blogs and newsletters](#keeping-up-to-date-blogs-and-newsletters) 98 | - [Newsletter](#newsletter) 99 | - [Blogs](#blogs) 100 | - [Podcast](#podcast) 101 | - [My other lists](#my-other-lists) 102 | 103 | 104 | 105 | ## About this list 106 | 107 | Items: 108 | 109 | - 🧰 : list of resources 110 | - 📖 : book 111 | - 🎞 : video/movie extract/movie 112 | - 🎤 : slides/presentation 113 | - 🎧 : podcast 114 | - ⭐️ : must-read 115 | 116 | ## Books 117 | 118 | More than any other field, management is full of fluffy books that could be summarized in one 100-word article. That being said, there's a number of excellent books, listed below. 119 | 120 | ### Turn the Ship Around!: A True Story of Turning Followers into Leaders 121 | 122 | 📖 [Turn the Ship Around!: A True Story of Turning Followers into Leaders](http://www.amazon.com/Turn-Ship-Around-Turning-Followers/dp/1591846404) is hands down my preferred management book. 123 | 124 | This book made me truly understand what empowering local decision means. In particular, I liked how the author explains that the usual chain of command requires information to go up the chain, and decision to go down, which is insanely inefficient. 125 | 126 | It provides great tools for managers to help their team members come up with their own decisions, in particular the notion of **deliberate action**. There's a also [a presentation](http://www.slideshare.net/micrimson/turn-the-ship-around-041614) that talks about the main concepts the author developed. 127 | 128 | There are numerous cheesy management books and this is not one of them. The narration is great as well and the explanations are short, and to the point. 129 | 130 | You can find a short summary in video [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=psAXMqxwol8) 131 | 132 | > “Control without competence is chaos.” 133 | 134 | — L. David Marquet, Turn the Ship Around! 135 | 136 | ### Other generalist books 137 | 138 | - 📖 [The Advantage, Enhanced Edition: Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else In Business](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B006ORWT3Y/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?ie=UTF8&btkr=1), Patrick M. Lencioni. 139 | - The only way for people to embrace a message is to hear it over a period of time, in a variety of different situations, and preferably from different people. That’s why great leaders see themselves as Chief Reminding Officers as much as anything else. 140 | - The best way to do cascading communication is face-to-face and live. Seeing a leader and hearing the tone of his or her voice is critical for employees, as is being able to ask a question or two. 141 | - But then again, most organizations are unhealthy precisely because they aren’t doing the basic things, which require discipline, persistence, and follow-through more than sophistication or intelligence. 142 | - 📖 [Managing Humans: Biting and Humorous Tales of a Software Engineering Manager](https://www.amazon.com/Managing-Humans-Humorous-Software-Engineering/dp/1484221575): "Read hilarious stories with serious lessons that Michael Lopp extracts from his varied and sometimes bizarre experiences as a manager at Apple, Pinterest, Palantir, Netscape, Symantec, Slack, and Borland. Many of the stories first appeared in primitive form in Lopp’s perennially popular blog, Rands in Repose." 143 | - 📖 Oren Ellenbogen, [Leading Snowflakes: the Engineering Manager Handbook](http://leadingsnowflakes.com/): some truly great content and concrete ideas to move from maker to manager mode, code reviewing your management decisions, delegating tasks without losing quality or visibility. 144 | - 📖 Adam Grant, [Give and Take: Why Helping Others Drives Our Success](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00AFPTSI0/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1): "This gem is a joy to read, and it shatters the myth that greed is the path to success.", Robert Sutton. 145 | - 📖 Ken Blanchard, [Lead Like Jesus: Lessons from the Greatest Leadership Role Model of All Time](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B004VF62IO/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1). 146 | - 📖 Andrew S. Grove, [High Output Management](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B015VACHOK/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1). A landmark book by Intel CEO Andy Grove. Introduced many of the management best practices such as 1-1, OKR. 147 | - Managerial leverage measures the impact of what managers do to increase the output of their teams. 148 | - You need to plan the way a fire department plans. It cannot anticipate where the next fire will be, so it has to shape an energetic and efficient team that is capable of responding to the unanticipated as well as to any ordinary event. 149 | - Every hour of your day should be spent increasing the output or the value of the output of the people whom you’re responsible for. 150 | - A common rule we should always try to heed is to detect and fix any problem in a production process at the lowest-value stage possible. 151 | - A genuinely effective indicator will cover the output of the work unit and not simply the activity involved. Obviously, you measure a salesman by the orders he gets (output), not by the calls he makes (activity). 152 | - A manager’s output = The output of his organization + The output of the neighboring organizations under his influence. 153 | - League standings are kept by team, not by individual. Business—and this means not just the business of commerce but the business of education, the business of government, the business of medicine—is a team activity. And, always, it takes a team to win. 154 | - Your decision-making depends finally on how well you comprehend the facts and issues facing your business. This is why information-gathering is so important in a manager’s life. 155 | - The lack of a decision is the same as a negative decision; no green light is a red light, and work can stop for a whole organization. 156 | - Delegation without follow-through is abdication. 157 | - Any decision be worked out and reached at the lowest competent level. The reason is that this is where it will be made by people who are closest to the situation and know the most about it. 158 | - Self-confidence mostly comes from a gut-level realization that nobody has ever died from making a wrong business decision, or taking inappropriate action, or being overruled. 159 | - A successful MBO [management by objective] system needs only to answer two questions: 1.  Where do I want to go? (The answer provides the objective.) 2.  How will I pace myself to see if I am getting there? (The answer gives us milestones, or key results). 160 | - The one thing an MBO system should provide par excellence is focus. This can only happen if we keep the number of objectives small. In practice, this is rare, and here, as elsewhere, we fall victim to our inability to say “no”—in this case, to too many objectives. We must realize—and act on the realization—that if we try to focus on everything, we focus on nothing. A few extremely well-chosen objectives impart a clear message about what we say “yes” to and what we say “no” to—which is what we must have if an MBO system is to work. 161 | - Alfred Sloan summed up decades of experience at General Motors by saying, “Good management rests on a reconciliation of centralization and decentralization.” Or, we might say, on a balancing act to get the best combination of responsiveness and leverage. 162 | - I would like to propose Grove’s Law: All large organizations with a common business purpose end up in a hybrid organizational form. 163 | - When a person is not doing his job, there can only be two reasons for it. The person either can’t do it or won’t do it; he is either not capable or not motivated. 164 | - That variable is the task-relevant maturity (TRM) of the subordinates, which is a combination of the degree of their achievement orientation and readiness to take responsibility, as well as their education, training, and experience. 165 | - When the TRM is low, the most effective approach is one that offers very precise and detailed instructions, wherein the supervisor tells the subordinate what needs to be done, when, and how: in other words, a highly structured approach. As the TRM of the subordinate grows, the most effective style moves from the structured to one more given to communication, emotional support, and encouragement. 166 | - The responsibility for teaching the subordinate must be assumed by his supervisor, and not paid for by the customers of his organization, internal or external. 167 | - At all times you should force yourself to assess performance, not potential. 168 | - A manager generally has two ways to raise the level of individual performance of his subordinates: by increasing motivation, the desire of each person to do his job well, and by increasing individual capability, which is where training comes in. 169 | - 📖 Patrick Lencioni, [The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable](https://www.amazon.com/Five-Dysfunctions-Team-Leadership-Fable/dp/0787960756/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1500281191&sr=1-1&keywords=dysfunctions). 170 | - 📖 Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead, Laszlo Bock. A pretty interesting description of Google's processes. A bit long at times. 171 | - 📖 [The Manager's Path](https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/the-managers-path/9781491973882/) , Camille Fournier. A very practical book with lots of down-to-earth advices. 172 | - 📖 [Team Topologies](https://itrevolution.com/product/team-topologies/), from ITRevolution Press. Discusses the intricacies of managing Engineering Departments, and especially patterns for improving team interactions. 173 | - 📖 [The Effective Executive](https://www.amazon.com/Effective-Executive-Definitive-Harperbusiness-Essentials/dp/0060833459) by Peter Drucker, Seminal Work in Management. Discusses challenges of management, especially managing Knowledge Workers. Proposes principles for effective decision-making and continued improvement of one's organization 174 | - May also serve as grounding for growing beyond Engineering Management, as well as working with other departments. 175 | 176 | There are some other more specific books quoted below. 177 | 178 | Other books I haven't read: 179 | 180 | - [Engineering Management for the Rest of Us](https://www.engmanagement.dev/) 181 | - [ZachGoldberg/Startup-CTO-Handbook](https://github.com/ZachGoldberg/Startup-CTO-Handbook/blob/main/StartupCTOHandbook.md) 182 | 183 | ### Book reading lists 184 | 185 | - [Jason Evanish's list](https://jasonevanish.com/books/) (Lighthouse founder) is quite comprehensive. 186 | - [Holiday Book Recommendations for Engineering Managers, Software Engineers and Product Managers](https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/holiday-tech-book-recommendations/#books-by-genre), Gergely Orosz 187 | - [Most Recommended Books to Make You a Better Engineering Manager](https://managersclub.com/most-recommended-books-engineering-leaders/) 188 | - [10 Must-Reads for Engineering Leaders](https://zaidesanton.substack.com/p/10-must-reads-for-engineering-leaders) 189 | - [Your 12-month engineering manager MBA reading list](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/anton-zaides_your-12-month-engineering-manager-mba-for-activity-7280274078215659520-rQWP/) 190 | 191 | ## What is engineering management? 192 | 193 | Here are some generic resources: 194 | 195 | - [Unintuitive Things I’ve Learned about Management](https://medium.com/the-year-of-the-looking-glass/unintuitive-things-i-ve-learned-about-management-f2c42d68604b#.2z9av4pzs) 196 | - Lars Dalgaard, [Thoughts on Building Weatherproof Companies](http://a16z.com/2016/03/25/building-weatherproof-companies/): while originally aimed at startups CEOs, this article from Andreessen Horowitz's blog is a very inspiring read on what it takes to scale your team. 197 | 198 | ### General management resources 199 | 200 | - [14 Points for Management](https://deming.org/explore/fourteen-points) by W. Edwards Deming. 201 | - [Keith Rabois on the Role of a COO, How to Hire and Why Transparency Matters](http://firstround.com/review/Keith-Rabois-on-the-role-of-a-COO-how-to-hire-and-why-transparency-matters/) includes some nice management nuggets. 202 | - 🧰 [ksindi/managers-playbook: Heuristics for effective management](https://github.com/ksindi/managers-playbook) 203 | - [The Evolution of Management](https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3350548), Kate Matsudaira, ACM Queue. A great compilation of advices for all management levels. 204 | - [Principles of Management](https://courses.lumenlearning.com/suny-principlesmanagement/) a nice introduction for all management aspects for new managers. 205 | 206 | [Tal Bereznitskey](https://hackernoon.com/managing-engineers-in-less-than-200-characters-edb35e4199e4#.n8wruugqz)'s awesome definition for managing engineers: 207 | 208 | > Hire motivated people. Trust them. Set high standards for everything. Lead by example. Get out of their way and let them be the heroes of the day. That’s it. 209 | 210 | ### Articles 211 | 212 | - [The Quiet Crisis unfolding in Software Development](https://medium.com/@billjordan1/the-quiet-crisis-unfolding-in-software-development-cffbdafbf450#.uy7x227pc) 213 | - [Mistakes of the First Twenty-five Years](articles/mistakes_25_years.md), in which Warren Buffet describes the "institutional imperative", or how an institution will amplify (not resist) a bad manager's irrational decisions. 214 | - [44 engineering management lessons](http://www.defmacro.org/2014/10/03/engman.html) from the cofounder of RethinkDB. Very high-level, a pretty good summary. 215 | - [21 management things I learned at Imgur](https://medium.com/@gerstenzang/21-management-things-i-learned-at-imgur-7abb72bdf8bf) 216 | - [The Rands Test](http://randsinrepose.com/archives/the-rands-test/), Rands in Repose. The equivalent of [The Joel Test](https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/08/09/the-joel-test-12-steps-to-better-code/) for management. 217 | - Do you have a 1:1? 218 | - Do you have a team meeting? 219 | - Do you have status reports? 220 | - Can you say No to your boss? 221 | - Can you explain the strategy of the company to a stranger? 222 | - Can you explain the current state of business? 223 | - Does the guy/gal in charge regularly stand up in front of everyone and tell you what he/she is thinking? Are you buying it? 224 | - Do you know what you want to do next? Does your boss? 225 | - Do you have time to be strategic? 226 | - Are you actively killing the Grapevine? 227 | - [What are the signs that you have a great manager?](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20230133) : great discussion on Hacker News 228 | - A great manager is at the service of their team. 229 | - You don't really notice a great manager. 230 | - Communicate context as high level and as complete as possible. 231 | - [Managing people](https://klinger.io/posts/managing-people-%F0%9F%A4%AF) 232 | - As a manager, everything is your fault 233 | - You manage processes; you lead people 234 | - Processes are expectations made explicit 235 | - Trust through transparency 236 | - Don't confuse autonomy and abandonment 237 | - Avoid drive-by management 238 | - Explicit > Implicit 239 | - Expect to refactor your company every few months 240 | - Chaos is felt less by the people creating it 241 | - Expect more from managers that report from you 242 | - [37 Years Ago, Steve Jobs Said the Best Managers Never Actually Want to Be Managers. Science Says He Was Right](https://www.inc.com/jeff-haden/37-years-ago-steve-jobs-said-best-managers-never-want-to-be-a-manager-science-says-he-was-right.html) 243 | - "If your boss could do your job, you're more likely to be happy at work" 244 | - [Group Dynamics: The Leader's Toolkit (Ed Batista)](https://www.edbatista.com/2022/09/group-dynamics-the-leaders-toolkit.html) 245 | - [Some mistakes I made as a new manager](https://www.benkuhn.net/newmgr/) 246 | - The trough of zero dopamine 247 | - Staying on the critical path 248 | - Managing the wrong amount 249 | - Procrastinating on hard questions 250 | - Indefinitely deferring maintenance 251 | - Angsting instead of asking 252 | - [How to grow as an Engineering Manager](https://medium.com/srivatsan-sridharan/how-to-grow-as-an-engineering-manager-687cad0bcac7), Srivatsan Sridharan 253 | - Create new opportunities for your learning 254 | - Choose an archetype: 255 | - Inspirational leader 256 | - Tough coach 257 | - Business strategic 258 | - Tech innovator 259 | - Master orchestrator 260 | - Savvy politician 261 | - [Numbers To Know For Managing (Software Teams)](https://staysaasy.com/management/2023/03/20/numbers-to-manage-by.html) 262 | - 4 - the number of minutes to spend on chit chat in the beginning of a meeting 263 | - 5 - the number of comments on a document before you should ask to talk about the issue 264 | - [Unexpected Anti-Patterns for Engineering Leaders](https://review.firstround.com/unexpected-anti-patterns-for-engineering-leaders-lessons-from-stripe-uber-carta/), Will Larson 265 | - Unexpected anti-pattern #1: shying away from micromanagement 266 | - Unexpected anti-pattern #2: pushing back on measuring flawed metrics 267 | - Unexpected anti-pattern #3: serving as the umbrella for your team 268 | - [Categories of leadership on technical teams](https://www.benkuhn.net/leadcats/) 269 | - Overall direction 270 | - People management 271 | - Project management 272 | - Technical leadership 273 | - The “tech lead manager” 274 | - Engineering manager / tech lead 275 | - Product manager / tech lead 276 | - People manager / research lead 277 | 278 | ### Tools 279 | 280 | - [devtomanager.com](https://devtomanager.com/): first-hand advice from seasoned experts 281 | 282 | ## Engineering Management Topics 283 | 284 | This is a list of inspiring articles related to engineering management. Those are usually short and concise articles that are packed with inspiring and concrete ideas. They have shaped my own management practice, and I hope they will inspire you as well. 285 | 286 | I don't necessarily agree with everything listed here. Actually, you'll see that some of those articles have diametrically opposed opinions. I do believe those thought-provoking resources will help you in your manager journey. 287 | 288 | ### 1-1 289 | 290 | - [On 1-1s](https://cate.blog/2016/11/05/on-11s/) 291 | - [How to have an honest one-on-one with an employee](https://m.signalvnoise.com/how-to-have-an-honest-one-on-one-with-an-employee-24bbddeb0f47#.qpltxoa2b) 292 | - [Tool: Hold effective 1:1 meetings](https://rework.withgoogle.com/guides/managers-coach-managers-to-coach/steps/hold-effective-1-1-meetings/) 293 | - [21 Reasons You Should Start Having One on Ones with Your Team](https://jasonevanish.com/2014/05/21/21-reasons-you-should-start-having-one-on-ones-with-your-team/) 294 | - [What is an Inquiring Leader?](https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/what-inquiring-leader-marilee-adams) 295 | - HBR, [How to Ask Better Questions](https://hbr.org/2009/05/real-leaders-ask.html) 296 | - [Mentor vs Advisor vs Coach](http://baxterblog.typepad.com/blog/2012/11/mentor-vs-advisor-vs-coach.html) 297 | - [How To Be Someone People Love To Talk To](http://www.bakadesuyo.com/2015/02/love-to-talk/) 298 | - 🧰 [Mega list of 1 on 1 meeting questions compiled from a variety to sources](https://github.com/VGraupera/1on1-questions) 299 | - [130+ One on One Meeting Questions Great Managers Ask](https://getlighthouse.com/blog/one-on-one-meeting-questions-great-managers-ask/) 300 | - Building rapport & trust 301 | - Talking about career development 302 | - Giving and receiving feedback 303 | - Talking about ways to improve your team or your company 304 | - Checking in on their general happiness 305 | - Special questions for remote employees 306 | - Leading your team through difficult times 307 | - Being a coach to your team 308 | - Skip level meeting questions 309 | - The one on one meeting questions you need to ask every time 310 | - [Why Your One-on-One’s Should Probably Be Longer](https://medium.com/vpe-coach/why-your-one-on-ones-should-probably-be-longer-cbf8961645fc) 311 | - The “30 minute One-on-One” Anti-Pattern 312 | - Change the day 313 | - [5 Questions Every Manager Needs to Ask Their Direct Reports](https://hbr.org/2022/01/5-questions-every-manager-needs-to-ask-their-direct-reports), HBR 314 | - How would you like to grow within this organization? 315 | - Do you feel a sense of purpose in your job? 316 | - What do you need from me to do your best work? 317 | - What are we currently not doing as a company that you feel we should do? 318 | - Do you have the opportunity to do what you do best every day? 319 | - [One on One Meeting Format Ideas](https://marcgg.com/blog/2021/03/27/one-on-one-format/) 320 | 321 | ### Antipatterns 322 | 323 | - [Seven Deadly Diseases of Management](https://deming.org/explore/seven-deadly-diseases), Dr. Deming. Great video as well. I don't necessarily agree with everything but Deming is still one of the great management thinker. 324 | 325 | ### Biases 326 | 327 | - 📖 [Thinking, Fast and Slow](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking,_Fast_and_Slow) by Daniel Kahneman and published in 2012 is already a classic. It offers a whirling tour into our biases and the limits of human judgment. Truly amazing read. 328 | - [You're not going to believe what I'm about to tell you](http://theoatmeal.com/comics/believe), The Oatmeal (comics) about the backfire effect ("given evidence against their beliefs, people can reject the evidence and believe even more strongly", [confirmation bias - Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias)). 329 | 330 | Cognitive biases don't only apply to hiring... They can impact performance reviews, 1-1, team meetings, even small talk with colleagues. 331 | 332 | - [Cognitive bias cheat sheet](https://betterhumans.coach.me/cognitive-bias-cheat-sheet-55a472476b18#.6temb6hyg) 333 | - [A flowchart of cognitive biases](https://www.breakdown-notes.com/makemap/load/biases) 334 | - [The Cognitive Bias Codex](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/65/Cognitive_bias_codex_en.svg) 335 | 336 | ### Brainstorming 337 | 338 | - [Extreme questions to trigger new, better ideas](https://longform.asmartbear.com/posts/extreme-questions/), A Smart Bear 339 | - The following prompts jostle you out of tiny thinking 340 | - If you were forced to increase your prices by 10x, what would you have to do to justify it? 341 | - If all our customers vanished, and we had to earn our growth and brand from scratch, what would we do? 342 | - If you were never allowed to provide tech support, in any form, what would have to change? 343 | - If our biggest competitor copied every single feature we have, how do we still win? 344 | - What if we are forced to ship a full, completed (at least MVP) new feature, in just two weeks, that would delight and surprise some fraction of our customers. 345 | - What if you were forced to charge customers in a completely different manner? 346 | - No more synchronous meetings, ever again? 347 | - If we could never talk to our customers again, how would we figure out what to build? 348 | - What if it didn’t matter how unprofitable you were? 349 | - What externality has the potential to kill the entire company? 350 | 351 | > The dangerous man is the one who has only one idea, because then he’ll fight and die for it. The way real science goes is that you come up with lots of ideas, and most of them will be wrong. 352 | 353 | — Francis Crick 354 | 355 | ### Career growth and job ladder 356 | 357 | Also check the [charlax/professional-programming's Career Growth section](https://github.com/charlax/professional-programming/#career-growth). 358 | 359 | - [Square’s Growth Framework for Engineers and Engineering Managers](https://developer.squareup.com/blog/squares-growth-framework-for-engineers-and-engineering-managers/) 360 | - Have two tracks 361 | - Becoming a manager is not a promotion 362 | - Organized into two major sections: Scope & Impact and Behaviors 363 | - No strict minimum requirements for years of experience at any given level 364 | - Promotions are descriptive not prescriptive 365 | - Promotion decisions are structured and rigorous 366 | - [Titles are Toxic](http://randsinrepose.com/archives/titles-are-toxic/), Rands in Repose. A pretty interesting take on titles. 367 | - [Thriving on the Technical Leadership Path](https://keavy.com/work/thriving-on-the-technical-leadership-path/) 368 | - I’ve chosen to cultivate a path for myself that enables me to dig into complex technical and product problem spaces and help lead technical and strategic direction for my organization, as an engineer but not a manager. 369 | - [Refactoring Our Engineering Skills Matrix](https://engine.expert360.com/refactoring-our-engineering-skills-matrix-b5314e2b0013) 370 | - [How to waste your career, one comfortable year at a time](https://apoorvagovind.substack.com/p/how-to-waste-your-career-one-comfortable) 371 | - 🎤 [Creating a Career Ladder for Engineers](https://speakerdeck.com/polotek/creating-a-career-ladder-for-engineers) 372 | - [Medium Engineering Growth Framework](https://medium.com/s/engineering-growth-framework) 373 | - [Engineering levels at Carta](https://medium.com/building-carta/engineering-levels-at-carta-d33db2a55a20) 374 | - [Things We Learned Creating Technology Career Steps](https://engineering.atspotify.com/2016/02/22/things-we-learned-creating-technology-career-steps/) (Spotify) 375 | - Behavior Versus Achievements 376 | - [Engineering levels and progression](https://location.foursquare.com/resources/blog/developer/engineering-levels-and-progression/), Foursquare 377 | - A pretty concise description of what's expected at different levels (L3, L4, etc.) 378 | - [On Being A Senior Engineer](https://www.kitchensoap.com/2012/10/25/on-being-a-senior-engineer/), Kitchen Soap 379 | - [Keith Rabois on how to identify great talent](https://www.startuparchive.org/p/keith-rabois-on-how-to-identify-great-talent) 380 | - “What you want to do with every single employee every single day is expand the scope of their responsibilities until it breaks… and that’s the role they should stay in.” 381 | - If you see people frequently going up to a person's desk, it's a sign that that person can help them. Promote these people and give them more responsibility as fast as you can. 382 | - [An impact-based level system for engineers](https://medium.com/@elliotgraebert/an-impact-based-level-system-for-engineering-organizations-2e0f9bee20e6) 383 | - Level 1 — Scoped Tasks 384 | - Level 2 — Scoped Projects 385 | - Level 3 — Unscoped Projects 386 | - Level 4 — Team Force Multiplier 387 | - Level 5 — Group Force Multiplier 388 | - Level 6 — Company Force Multiplier 389 | 390 | Curated examples of job ladder/career development matrix: 391 | 392 | - ⭐️ [RentTheRunway's Software Development/Leadership Ladder](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1k4sO6pyCl_YYnf0PAXSBcX776rNcTjSOqDxZ5SDty-4/edit#gid=0) 393 | - [Songkick](https://www.songkick.com/downloads/growth-framework/sk-growth-framework.pdf): concise, clear and includes examples. 394 | - [Gitlab](https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/engineering/careers/matrix/) 395 | - Medium, [Engineering Growth Framework](https://medium.com/s/engineering-growth-framework), Medium pulls back the curtain on how they do career growth. 396 | - [Medium's skills spreadsheet](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1EO-Dbsayn8Nz9Ii3MKcwRbt-EIJ2MjQdpoyhh0tBdZk/edit#gid=1098466721): mixes all rubrics regardless of role 397 | - [Khan Academy](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1qr0d05X5-AsyDYqKRCfgGGcWSshTMd_vfTggfhDpbls/edit) 398 | - Skills: maximise impact, be open, empathise and respect, have conviction, seek engineering maturity. 399 | - Levels: beginning skillful, skillful, more skillful, super skillful, ludicrously skillful 400 | - [CircleCI](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/131XZCEb8LoXqy79WWrhCX4sBnGhCM1nAIz4feFZJsEo/edit#gid=0): detailed and complete 401 | - [Dropbox](https://dropbox.github.io/dbx-career-framework/overview.html) 402 | - [progression-framework/frameworks/engineering](https://github.com/monzo/progression-framework/tree/master/frameworks/engineering) 403 | - [jorgef/engineeringladders](https://github.com/jorgef/engineeringladders) 404 | - [Fog Creek Professional Ladder – Joel on Software](https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2009/02/13/fog-creek-professional-ladder/) 405 | - [Square](https://developer.squareup.com/blog/squares-growth-framework-for-engineers-and-engineering-managers/) ([competencies](https://assets.ctfassets.net/1wryd5vd9xez/6bDnTwb4H7bfiFvg55ldRR/b1cb8514f0afd0a4050991d35ccbac03/Square_Software_Engineering_Career_Ladder.pdf)) 406 | - [career-ladders](https://career-ladders.dev/engineering/) 407 | 408 | List of lists: 409 | 410 | - [30+ Engineering Career Ladders](https://nidup.io/garden/engineering-career-ladders?s=09) 411 | - [Another list of career pathways](https://www.progression.fyi/) by a [Progression, a tool to define and measure career growth](https://progressionapp.com/) 412 | 413 | Concepts: 414 | 415 | - [Four stages of competence](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_stages_of_competence), Wikipedia 416 | 417 | ### Change management 418 | 419 | - 🎧 [At The Table with Patrick Lencioni: 50. Let the Haters Hate](https://atthetable-patricklencioni.libsyn.com/50-let-the-haters-hate) 420 | - [Nemawashi](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nemawashi) (Wikipedia): "an informal process of quietly laying the foundation for some proposed changed". 421 | - [Why the status quo is so hard to change in engineering teams](https://www.okayhq.com/blog/status-quo-is-so-hard-to-change-in-engineering-teams) 422 | - Process-related Learned Helplessness 423 | - Complexity-related Learned Helplessness 424 | - Resignation by a thousand cuts 425 | - Declare process bankruptcy 426 | 427 | ### Code reviews 428 | 429 | See my [professional-programming section about code reviews](https://github.com/charlax/professional-programming#code-reviews) 430 | 431 | ### Communication 432 | 433 | - [Tough News: We’ve Made 10 Layoffs. How We Got Here, the Financial Details and How We’re Moving Forward](https://open.buffer.com/layoffs-and-moving-forward/): a great post by Joel Gascoigne (CEO & Founder of Buffer) sharing some pretty tough news to the team and to the world. Great transparency, great message, great ownership. A model to follow. 434 | - [How To Pitch A Product](http://avc.com/2010/08/how-to-pitch-a-product/), AVC. 435 | - [Ken Norton’s Discipline of No](https://blog.mixpanel.com/2016/09/20/learning-to-say-no-with-ken-norton/). #attitude #habits. 436 | - [Nonviolent communication](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonviolent_Communication) (Wikipedia) 437 | - [Mental Models I Find Repeatedly Useful](https://medium.com/@yegg/mental-models-i-find-repeatedly-useful-936f1cc405d#.7mqxmkpz9) 438 | - [Breaking Bad News](http://boz.com/articles/bad-news.html) 439 | - [Operations and Internal Communication Strategies For Effective CEOs](https://www.sametab.com/blog/operations-and-internal-communication-strategies-for-effective-ceos) 440 | - Narratives (not facts) are what move people 441 | - The why always before the what 442 | - Alignment is not one-way only 443 | - Repeat, repeat, repeat 444 | - Consider writing a personal weekly newsletter 445 | - [Tools for better thinking](https://untools.co/) 446 | - Decision matrix 447 | - Ladder of inference 448 | - First principles 449 | - [How To Say No](https://www.starterstory.com/how-to-say-no). Templates for saying no to written interviews, going to an event, doing free work... 450 | - 🎧 [At The Table with Patrick Lencioni: 59. Don't Make Me Repeat Myself](https://atthetable-patricklencioni.libsyn.com/59-dont-make-me-repeat-myself) 451 | - [How to Disagree](http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html), Paul Graham 452 | - Disagreement hierarchy 0: name calling 453 | - DH1: ad hominem 454 | - DH2: responding to tone 455 | - DH3: contradiction 456 | - DH4: counterargument 457 | - DH5: refutation 458 | - DH6: refuting the central point 459 | - Analyzing your own level of disagreement can help with unintentional intellectual dishonesty. 460 | - When you have something real to say, being mean gets in the way 461 | - [Apple Pie Position](https://twitter.com/shreyas/status/1628567045800591361), Shreyas Doshi 462 | - A statement that instantly elevates the person who is saying it and is simultaneously hard for anyone else to push back on, and so everyone avoids the personal risk and just nods “yes”, even though its actual value in this specific situation might be relatively low, zero, or even negative. 463 | - E.g., "We need to define the success metrics for X" 464 | - E.g., "We need a better go-to-market motion to improve product adoption" 465 | - [How to Communicate When Trust Is Low (Without Digging Yourself Into A Deeper Hole)](https://charity.wtf/2023/08/17/how-to-communicate-when-trust-is-low-without-digging-yourself-into-a-deeper-hole/) 466 | - Acknowledge it is hard 467 | - Speak tentatively 468 | - Try to sound friendly, take a breath 469 | - "The story in my head" 470 | - Engineer positive interactions (the magic ratio for healthy relationships is at least five positive interactions for every one negative interaction) 471 | - Communicate positive intent 472 | - Give people the opening to do better 473 | - Value the effort 474 | - [Why You Should Send a Weekly Summary Email](https://jefago.medium.com/why-you-should-send-a-weekly-summary-email-1c556149ed42) 475 | 476 | 477 | ### Conflict resolution 478 | 479 | - 🎞 [Disagree and commit](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oZw2cg8AXDw) 480 | 481 | ### CTO (Chief Technical Officer), VPoE and other levels 482 | 483 | See also the section about [Organizational structure](#organizational-structure) 484 | 485 | - Martin Casado, [Hire a VP of Engineering](https://a16z.com/2017/05/26/hiring-vp-engineering-why-what/) on the Andreessen Horowitz blog 486 | - The most important function of a VP of engineering is to build out the engineering team and set a startup’s engineering culture. 487 | - Competent engineering management should therefore be able to push the team towards more practical, incremental designs that can garner useful external feedback quickly — without compromising the long-term generality of the system. The VP’s role here is not producing the architecture, but ensuring that incremental release is a real requirement in the design process. 488 | - Strong engineering management tends to give their teams enough ownership and latitude that they are happy and fulfilled in driving the product forward. 489 | - AVC, [VP Engineering Vs CTO](https://avc.com/2011/10/vp-engineering-vs-cto/) 490 | - Mark Suster, [Want to Know the Difference Between a CTO and a VP Engineering?](https://bothsidesofthetable.com/want-to-know-the-difference-between-a-cto-and-a-vp-engineering-4fc3750c596b#.gw) 491 | - 🎤 [CTO vs VP Engineering Balancing Innovation](https://www.slideshare.net/bcantrill/cto-vs-vp-of-engineering), Bryan Cantrill, Jason Hoffman 492 | - Will Larson, [Your first 90 days as CTO or VP Engineering.](https://lethain.com/first-ninety-days-cto-vpe/) 493 | - Durable improvements depend on creating systems that create changes, not performing tactical actions that create the ephemeral appearance of improvement. 494 | - Figure out if something is really wrong and needs immediate attention. 495 | - Shadow customer meetings, partner meetings or user testing. 496 | - Find your business analytics and how to query them. 497 | - Shadow existing interviews, onboarding and closing calls. 498 | - Kickoff engineering brand efforts. 499 | - Build a trivial change and deploy it. 500 | - [The 7 roles of a CTO](https://oded.substack.com/p/the-7-roles-of-a-cto) 501 | - Executive 502 | - Representative 503 | - People manager (sometimes) 504 | - Hands on developer (sometimes) 505 | - Owns security and IT 506 | - Salesperson 507 | - Does whatever it takes 508 | - [Advice for new directors](https://www.rubick.com/advice-for-new-directors/) 509 | - A lot of your job is training managers 510 | - Biggest skill to learn: sensing your organization 511 | - You’ll need a new perspective 512 | - You should focus on systems 513 | - Beware the distortions of power 514 | - You’re judged by the difference you make on your organization. 515 | - [Your CTO Should Actually Be Technical](https://blog.southparkcommons.com/your-cto-should-actually-be-technical/) 516 | - Exceptional technical ability is the only way for CTOs/VPEs to be true judges of quality. 517 | - It allows them to make highly educated tradeoffs 518 | - [5 Things Founders, Investors and Recruiters Should Know about the CTO role](https://medium.com/cto-as-a-service/5-things-founders-investors-and-recruiters-should-know-about-the-cto-role-a65d7bb66264) 519 | - “The CTO’s primary job is to make sure the company’s technology strategy serves its business strategy” — Eric Ries. 520 | - As a CTO, you don’t work in the box, because your task is to examine the box and make it better. 521 | - The CTO might code, but only on POCs and prototypes. 522 | - [What It Really Means to be a Manager, Director, or VP](https://kellblog.com/2015/03/08/career-development-what-it-really-means-to-be-a-manager-director-or-vp/) 523 | - Managers are paid to drive results with some supports 524 | - Directors are paid to drive results with little or no supervision ("set and forget") 525 | - VPs are paid to make the plan. (no "get-out-of-jail-free" card because "the CEO approved the plan") 526 | 527 | ### Data organization 528 | 529 | - [Building a data team at a mid-stage startup: a short story](https://erikbern.com/2021/07/07/the-data-team-a-short-story.html) 530 | - [Building The Analytics Team At Wish](https://medium.com/wish-engineering/scaling-analytics-at-wish-619eacb97d16) (a four-part series of articles) 531 | - Rebuilding The Data Pipeline 532 | - Building The Data Warehouse 533 | - Deploying Business Intelligence Tooling 534 | - Data engineering should build a system that allows analysts to produce their own pipelines. 535 | - Strong interviewers need to have flexible questions that react to signals from the candidates. 536 | - [Engineers Shouldn’t Write ETL: A Guide to Building a High Functioning Data Science Department](https://multithreaded.stitchfix.com/blog/2016/03/16/engineers-shouldnt-write-etl/) 537 | - You Probably Don’t Have Big Data 538 | - Nobody enjoys writing and maintaining data pipelines or ETL. It’s the industry’s ultimate hot potato. 539 | - Give data scientists ownership of the ETL end-to-end 540 | - Engineers design new Lego blocks that data scientists assemble in creative ways to create new data science. 541 | - It is absolutely essential for platform engineers to stay ahead of the data science teams 542 | - Engineers should see themselves as being “Tony Stark’s tailor”, building the armor that prevents data scientists from falling into pitfalls that yield unscalable or unreliable solutions. 543 | - We [should be ok with] sacrificing technical efficiency for velocity and autonomy 544 | 545 | ### Culture 546 | 547 | - [The maze is in the mouse](https://medium.com/@pravse/the-maze-is-in-the-mouse-980c57cfd61a) lays out how Google's culture impeded its results and execution. 548 | - "It is a soft peacetime culture where nothing is worth fighting for." 549 | - Google employees get very little done because they are trapped in a maze of processes. 550 | - The culture focuses on consensus ("respect each other") and risk-avoidance at the expense of heroism or value-creating ideas/bets. 551 | - Each employee's mission is not about the customer but about serving a VP or a technical belief/process. 552 | - Most managers are [peacetime managers](https://a16z.com/2011/04/14/peacetime-ceo-wartime-ceo/) and lack a sense of urgency. 553 | - There is a general lack of humility regarding the internal tech stack. The delusion of exceptionalism means that employees believe everything they do is perfect. 554 | - "Strategy is rarely articulated clearly (that would be career risk)" 555 | 556 | ### Decisions 557 | 558 | - [Square Defangs Difficult Decisions with this System — Here’s How](http://firstround.com/review/square-defangs-difficult-decisions-with-this-system-heres-how/) 559 | - [How to simplify complex decisions by cleaving the facts](https://blog.asmartbear.com/complex-decisions.html), Jason Cohen. 560 | - [Mental Models: The Best Way to Make Intelligent Decisions (113 Models Explained)](https://www.fs.blog/mental-models/) 561 | - [How to Make a Big Decision](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/01/opinion/sunday/how-make-big-decision.html), the NYT. 562 | - [Principles for Decision-Making in a Flat Organization](https://doist.com/blog/decision-making-flat-organization/) 563 | - We risk more when we delay decisions in an attempt to reach total consensus. 564 | - If there is a good enough solution X, don’t ask people what they think about it. Instead, ask everyone if they can live with it and if not, why. 565 | - Consensus is the path, not the destination. 566 | - [Principles.dev - Software Engineering Principles](https://principles.dev/) 567 | - [Guiding principle: consent over consensus](https://jchyip.medium.com/guiding-principle-consent-over-consensus-8aee08540d62) 568 | - [Tools for better thinking](https://untools.co/): Situation-Behavior-Impact, conflict resolution diagram, Ishikawa diagram, Einsenhower matrix, second order thinking, decision matrix, etc. 569 | - [Balancing Engineering Cultures: Debate Everything vs. Just Tell Me What To Build](https://www.fishmanafnewsletter.com/p/balancing-engineering-cultures-debate-vs-do) 570 | - To get out of "debate everything" 571 | - Help people operate in the "gray area" 572 | - Introduce the "FG" scale to streamline debates 573 | - Incentivize outcomes 574 | - To get out of "just build it" 575 | - Incentivize outcomes and feedback 576 | - Provide context and venue to discuss 577 | - Codify expectations (product and eng) 578 | - [Ask Questions, Repeat The Hard Parts, and Listen](https://randsinrepose.com/archives/ask-questions-repeat-the-hard-parts-and-listen/), Rands in Repose: a good framework for letting your team make decisions autonomously. "My job is to teach you not to need me" 579 | - [Be good-argument-driven, not data-driven](https://twitchard.github.io/posts/2022-08-26-metrics-schmetrics.html) 580 | - [Principles for decision-making in a flat organization](https://async.twist.com/decision-making-flat-organization/) 581 | - [Second-order Thinking](https://read.perspectiveship.com/p/second-order-thinking) 582 | 583 | > Arguments you should avoid using - that are logical fallacies 584 | > “Because it’s always been done this way.” 585 | > “Because we tried it before, and it didn’t work.” 586 | > “Because company X uses this.” 587 | > “Because {important person} said so.” 588 | > 589 | > Reason on tradeoffs, constraints, opportunities instead. 590 | > 591 | > – Gergely Orosz 592 | 593 | ### Delegation 594 | 595 | - [The Counterintuitive Art of Leading by Letting Go](http://99u.com/articles/43081/the-counter-intuitive-art-of-leading-by-letting-go) 596 | - Against micromanagement: "After you plant a seed in the ground, you don’t dig it up every week to see how it is doing", William Coyne, Head of R&D at 3M. 597 | - [Your Small Imprecise Ask Is a Big Waste of Their Time](https://staysaasy.com/startups/2023/11/10/imprecise-asks.html) 598 | 599 | > The 70/10/80 Principle of delegation: “Find someone who can do what you do at 70% the success rate. Teach them the extra 10% and be okay with 80%.” 600 | 601 | ### Delivery 602 | 603 | - [A primer on engineering delivery metrics](https://leaddev.com/scaling-software-systems/primer-engineering-delivery-metrics) 604 | - [Engineering productivity can be measured - just not how you'd expect](https://www.okayhq.com/blog/engineering-productivity-can-be-measured). Interesting take. 605 | - Non-measurement unfairly rewards people with charisma while productive but less-persuasive engineers wallow in frustration. 606 | - Measure Blockers at the Team Level 607 | 608 | ### Developer productivity and devexp (developer experience) 609 | 610 | *See also the "Personal productivity" section in this page.* 611 | 612 | - [DevEx: What Actually Drives Productivity](https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3595878), ACM Queue. Defines the components of developer productivity, as well as metrics. 613 | - Flow state 614 | - Feedback loops 615 | - Cognitive load 616 | - [How To Get Buy-in for DevEx Initiatives: Strategies From GitHub, Notion, and More](https://getdx.com/resources/devex-executive-buy-in) 617 | - Categorize projects into themes that resonate with leadership 618 | - Play the long game: avoid having a single-minded agenda 619 | - Start by identifying “the thorn” in your leadership’s side 620 | - Quantify the business value of projects 621 | - [Measuring Developer Productivity via Humans](https://martinfowler.com/articles/measuring-developer-productivity-humans.html), Martin Fowler 622 | 623 | ### Diversity and inclusion 624 | 625 | - 📖 [Breaking Through Bias: Communication Techniques for Women to Succeed at Work](https://www.amazon.com/Breaking-Through-Bias-Communication-Techniques/dp/B01F93NFP4) 626 | - Most men believe that they have no biases against women and that the organizations in which they work treat women and men equally. If senior-level men read this book, they will realize that neither of these beliefs is correct. 627 | - 📖 [Thinking, Fast and Slow](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking,_Fast_and_Slow), Wikipedia 628 | - 🎞 [2 Minutes Book Summary: Thinking Fast and Slow](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ivtvPVkFkw&ab_channel=Lifehack) 629 | - [Guess Who Doesn’t Fit In at Work](http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/31/opinion/sunday/guess-who-doesnt-fit-in-at-work.html) 630 | - [List of cognitive biases on Wikipedia](http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases) 631 | - 🎞 [Making the Unconscious Conscious](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NW5s_-Nl3JE) (Google Video) 632 | 633 | Hiring: 634 | 635 | - [Why Hiring for "Culture Fit" Hurts Your Culture](http://www.paperplanes.de/2015/6/11/why-hiring-for-culture-fit-hurts-your-culture.html) 636 | - [Xavier Niel explains 42: the coding university without teachers, books, or tuition](http://venturebeat.com/2016/06/16/xavier-niel-explains-42-the-coding-university-without-teachers-books-or-tuition/): a thought-provoking take on CS diplomas. 637 | - [A Quick Puzzle to Test Your Problem Solving](http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/07/03/upshot/a-quick-puzzle-to-test-your-problem-solving.html?_r=0)... and a great way to learn about confirmation bias (which is not only applicable to hiring but also to testing). 638 | - 🎞 [Hiring women at Klarna](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWYNst72ucI) 639 | 640 | ### Employee handbook 641 | 642 | - [Clef's employee handbook](https://github.com/clef/handbook) has been open sourced on Github. 643 | - [Gitlab's handbook](https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/) 644 | - [Valve's handbook](http://www.valvesoftware.com/company/Valve_Handbook_LowRes.pdf) 645 | - [Inaka's handbook](https://github.com/inaka/guidelines) 646 | - [Basecamp's handbook](https://github.com/basecamp/handbook) 647 | - [Mattermost's handbook](https://docs.mattermost.com/guides/core.html) 648 | - [Strapi's handbook](https://handbook.strapi.io) 649 | 650 | ### Employee retention 651 | 652 | - [Theory-building and why employee churn is lethal to software companies](https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2022/theory-building/) 653 | - "The death of a program happens when the programmer team possessing its theory is dissolved." Programming as Theory Building by Peter Naur, 1985. 654 | - Software is the insights of the development team made manifest. 655 | - Most code documentation becomes useful after you have built the theory in your mind 656 | - The most reliable method a programmer has for building an accurate ‘theory’ of a piece of software is to have been there when it was first written ("first generation programmer") 657 | - Too many second-generation developers and the first generation gets overwhelmed, and work stalls. 658 | - Too few second-generation developers and there is no renewal—each developer that leaves the team is a potential catastrophe. 659 | - Team stability is vital for software development 660 | 661 | ### Escalations 662 | 663 | - [Learn how to escalate issues](http://www.goodproductmanager.com/2007/05/09/learn-how-to-escalate-issues/) 664 | - [Mental frameworks for making decisions](http://nathanbarry.com/mental-frameworks/): how to handle escalations as a manager. 665 | - [Inspection and the limits of trust](https://lethain.com/inspection/) 666 | 667 | ### Executives 668 | 669 | - [The One Key to Dealing with Senior Executives: Answer the Question!](https://kellblog.com/2012/01/17/the-one-key-to-dealing-with-senior-executives-answer-the-question/) 670 | 671 | 672 | ### FinOps (cost) 673 | 674 | - [Efficiency: Managing Infrastructure Costs](https://infraeng.dev/efficiency/) 675 | 676 | ### First-time manager 677 | 678 | - [How to Ensure a New Manager Succeeds](https://getlighthouse.com/blog/new-manager-how-to-help-succeed/) 679 | - [Six Recipes for Software Managers](http://eng.localytics.com/six-recipes-for-software-managers/) 680 | - 1-1 681 | - Team surveys 682 | - A safe environment 683 | - An informed department 684 | - Resilient teams 685 | - Self improvement 686 | - [The Problem with Tech Leads](https://medium.com/@Bar_Code/the-problem-with-tech-leads-a840af1f511c#.ay11fv7u9) 687 | - [Trained Engineers - Overnight Managers (or, The Art Of Not Destroying Your Company)](http://sysadvent.blogspot.nl/2016/12/day-16-trained-engineers-overnight.html) 688 | - [A Manager’s FAQ](https://medium.com/eshares-blog/a-managers-faq-35858a229f84#.u1iu04owe) 689 | - [This 90-Day Plan Turns Engineers into Remarkable Managers](http://firstround.com/review/this-90-day-plan-turns-engineers-into-remarkable-managers/) 690 | - [The New Manager Death Spiral](http://randsinrepose.com/archives/the-new-manager-death-spiral/), Rands in Repose. 691 | - [Learnings from six months as a first-time manager](https://www.dein.fr/posts/2014-01-29-learnings-from-six-months-as-a-first-time) 692 | - [How to fail as a new engineering manager](https://blog.usejournal.com/how-to-fail-as-a-new-engineering-manager-30b5fb617a) 693 | - [Choosing the Management Track](https://blog.danielna.com/choosing-the-management-track/) 694 | - You won’t code anymore. 695 | - Management forces you to care more about everything. 696 | - Management creates an unavoidable power hierarchy. 697 | - You need to be technical enough to intervene. 698 | - Companies ultimately succeed or fail by their coordinated execution, culture and leadership. 699 | - [The best leaders are great individual contributors, not professional managers](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33843160), an insightful thread on Hacker News 700 | - [17 Reasons NOT To Be A Manager](https://charity.wtf/2019/09/08/reasons-not-to-be-a-manager/) 701 | 702 | ### Feedback 703 | 704 | See the Performance section too. 705 | 706 | - 📖 [Radical Candor — The Surprising Secret to Being a Good Boss](http://firstround.com/review/radical-candor-the-surprising-secret-to-being-a-good-boss/) 707 | - 📖 [Amazon.com: Crucial Conversations Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High](https://www.amazon.com/Crucial-Conversations-Talking-Stakes-Second-ebook-dp-B005K0AYH4/dp/B005K0AYH4/ref=mt_kindle?_encoding=UTF8&me=&qid=) by Kerry Patterson. 708 | - So the first step to achieving the results we really want is to fix the problem of believing that others are the source of all that ails us. It’s our dogmatic conviction that “if we could just fix those losers, all would go better” that keeps us from taking action that could lead to dialogue and progress. Which is why it’s no surprise that those who are best at dialogue tend to turn this logic around. They believe the best way to work on “us” is to start with “me.” 709 | - Respect is like air. As long as it’s present, nobody thinks about it. But if you take it away, it’s all that people can think about. 710 | - “One dull pencil is worth six sharp minds.” Don’t leave your hard work to memory. If you’ve gone to the effort to complete a crucial conversation, don’t fritter away all the meaning you created by trusting your memories. Write down the details of conclusions, decisions, and assignments. 711 | - [A Primer on Giving Critical Feedback](http://www.tombartel.de//2016/05/21/a-primer-on-giving-critical-feedback/) 712 | - Feedback goes both ways: [Tool: Try Google’s Manager Feedback Survey](https://rework.withgoogle.com/guides/managers-give-feedback-to-managers/steps/try-googles-manager-feedback-survey/) 713 | - [Negative feedback antipatterns](https://www.dein.fr/posts/2016-12-02-negative-feedback-antipatterns) 714 | - [The Open Feedback Circle (OFC)](https://medium.com/@padminipyapali/open-feedback-circle-a69601ea5dfd), a great idea by Padmini Pyapali. 715 | - We met once a month, sat around a table, and shared feedback with each other in front of our other teammates. This gathering took feedback exchange from being a biannual activity we dreaded to a monthly ritual we looked forward to. 716 | - Vulnerability Cultivates Trust 717 | - [Simon Sinek: Purpose should be prioritized over metrics](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PhuKJWm1_fQ&ab_channel=DenkProducties) 718 | - Targets are great. But how targets are reached matters too. A team that would meet its target two months later should be rewarded more than a team that reach its target at the expense of morale and quality. 719 | - SEALs measure performance and trust. They would rather have a medium performance high trust person on the team than a high performance low trust person. 720 | - Simon's team runs team peer reviews. One person shares their top three weaknesses, the team can comment but they can only say thank you, then they do the same for their strength. 721 | - [The manager I hated and the lesson he taught me](https://www.blog4ems.com/p/the-manager-i-hated) 722 | 723 | ### Hands-on 724 | 725 | - [Should managers still code?](https://theengineeringmanager.substack.com/p/should-managers-still-code) 726 | - If you mean being the primary implementer of features, then probably not. If you mean being an integral part of how your team produces code, then yes, absolutely. I recommend it highly. 727 | - [Being in the details](https://www.theengineeringmanager.com/managing-managers/being-in-the-details/) 728 | 729 | ### Hiring 730 | 731 | #### General 732 | 733 | - 📖 [Hiring The Best Knowledge Workers, Techies & Nerds: The Secrets & Science Of Hiring Technical People](https://www.amazon.com/Hiring-Knowledge-Workers-Techies-Nerds/dp/0932633595), Johanna Rothman. A solution-oriented book. 734 | - Train your interview team to apply a limited-consensus approach to hiring. When groups use limited consensus, not everyone may agree with the decision, but each person should be satisfied enough with a particular candidate’s suitability not to block the decision to hire him or her. 735 | - What if the vetoer is someone I don’t want to keep in the organization?” The answer to this is simple: In the interview process, only involve employees whose work you respect and value. If an employee isn’t successful in his or her technical position, don’t make that employee part of the interview team. 736 | - Make sure members of your team interview an internal candidate the same way they would interview an external candidate. 737 | - Know why you’re hiring more people. Define your problems to define your hiring strategy. 738 | - Sometimes, the main reason a hiring manager doesn’t hire a candidate is that he or she has a gut feeling that the person just won’t fit well with the culture. But a “gut feeling” is not a good reason not to hire someone, so train yourself to articulate culture-fit differences. 739 | - I personally do not consider certification to mean anything much when I am hiring someone for a technical position. Because the knowledge tested is functional-skills book knowledge, make sure you understand what the person must do to maintain his or her certification and the value of that certification to your environment. 740 | - Too often, internal recruiters look for tool and technology expertise or for advanced academic degrees, rather than for functional skill or for product-domain experience. 741 | - If you feel the need to take notes, take them on paper, never on a computer. My reason for this is that when you use a computer, you have to sit behind a screen, which creates a barrier between you and the candidate. 742 | - Promising an unconditional promotion is not just risky; it is stupid. Circumstances within the company can change; the employee may not perform up to expectations; the economy may tank. 743 | - A good example of [offer letter](https://medium.com/@henrysward/a-better-offer-letter-4e9bf61a7365#.md4rm1zlp) from eShares. 744 | - [We Hire the Best, Just Like Everyone Else](http://blog.codinghorror.com/we-hire-the-best-just-like-everyone-else/), Jeff Atwood. 745 | - ⭐️ [How to Hire](https://medium.com/swlh/how-to-hire-34f4ded5f176#.jxkz3wrs3): one of the best articles about hiring. 746 | - Hire for Strength vs Lack of Weakness 747 | - Hire for Trajectory vs Experience 748 | - Hire Doers vs Tellers 749 | - Hire Learners vs Experts 750 | - Hire Different vs Similar 751 | - Always pass on ego 752 | - ⭐️ [The hiring post](http://sockpuppet.org/blog/2015/03/06/the-hiring-post/): another truly awesome post about hiring by Thomas Ptacek. 753 | - [This is why you never end up hiring good developers](http://qz.com/258066/this-is-why-you-dont-hire-good-developers/) 754 | - Many interview techniques test skills that are at best irrelevant to real working life; 755 | - You want somebody who knows enough to do the job right now; 756 | - Or somebody smart and motivated enough that they can learn the job quickly; 757 | - You want somebody who keeps getting better at what they do; 758 | - Your interview should be a collaborative conversations, not a combative interrogation; 759 | - You also want somebody who you will enjoy working with; 760 | - It’s important to separate “enjoy working with” from “enjoy hanging out with;” 761 | - Don’t hire assholes, no matter how good they are; 762 | - If your team isn’t diverse, your team is worse than it needed to be; 763 | - Accept that hiring takes a really long time and is really, really hard. 764 | - [Engineering Management - Hiring](http://algeri-wong.com/yishan/engineering-management-hiring.html) explains why hiring should be your top priority. 765 | - [When we only hire the best means we only hire the trendiest](http://danluu.com/programmer-moneyball/) 766 | - [How to Hire](https://hbr.org/2018/01/how-to-hire), Patty McCord (built HR function at Netflix). 767 | - [Trouble hiring senior engineers? It's probably you](https://hiringengineersbook.com/post/trouble-hiring/). 768 | - When hiring senior engineers, you’re not buying, you’re selling. 769 | - [I've been an engineer and a recruiter. Hiring is broken.](http://blog.alinelerner.com/ive-been-an-engineer-and-a-recruiter-hiring-is-broken-heres-why-and-heres-what-it-should-be-like-instead/) 770 | - 🎧 [How to Get the Ideal Team Player](https://coachingforleaders.com/podcast/301/) 771 | - [6 qualities that make a great engineer](https://www.intercom.com/blog/traits-of-exceptional-engineers/) 772 | - Ambitious and determined 773 | - Habitually simplify 774 | - Can debug anything, quickly 775 | - Help others be great 776 | - Know what’s valuable 777 | - Are creative and positive 778 | - [How to hire low experience, high potential people](https://worktopia.substack.com/p/how-to-hire-low-experience-high-potential) 779 | - [Dumb and gets things done](https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2010/12/27/dumb-and-gets-things-done/) 780 | - Joel Spolsky says that the ideal programmer is someone who is smart and gets things done. But what about people who are dumb and get things done? 781 | - Leaders need to make things happen. Teachers need to teach. Programmers need to write code. These basic skills are necessary, but they are not enough. 782 | 783 | #### Hiring: interviews 784 | 785 | - [Vanquish whiteboard interview puzzles with test-driven development](http://www.codewithoutrules.com/2016/04/04/interview-puzzles/), Jocelyn Goldfein. 786 | - Joel Spolsky, [The Phone Screen](http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/ThePhoneScreen.html) 787 | - 🎞 [The pursuit of happyness' interview scene](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gHXKitKAT1E) 788 | - [Real talk: the technical interview is broken](https://medium.com/@CODE2040/real-talk-the-technical-interview-is-broken-b84b8375dccb#.vxuvtrhad) 789 | - [Finding a Tech Leadership Job in Silicon Alley](https://medium.com/@Bar_Code/finding-a-tech-leadership-job-in-silicon-alley-3631e97ff33e#.2w4yzwtgx) (interviewing seen from the candidate experience point of view). 790 | - [How I Interview](https://rkoutnik.com/articles/How-I-Interview.html) 791 | - [What if companies interviewed translators the way they interview coders?](https://medium.freecodecamp.org/welcome-to-the-software-interview-ee673bc5ef6) - a great counter example of how interview can be disconnected from one's actual job. 792 | - 🎞 [Monthy Python: a terrible candidate experience](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D4iFzweRf3E) 793 | - [Your interviews shouldn’t be spoilable](https://medium.com/@rafeco/your-interviews-shouldnt-be-spoilable-c9088ecea1ee) 794 | - How much should you share with the candidate? As much as an ethical person would share with a friend who they referred for the job. 795 | - If an interview can be spoiled, it means that the answers can be memorized. 796 | - Your spoilable interview is going to get spoiled. Some referred candidates are going to get the answers from their friends. 797 | - If foreknowledge doesn’t reduce the quality of your interviews, it means that you have to change your questions less often 798 | - [Becoming a good technical interviewer - Dashlane Blog](https://blog.dashlane.com/becoming-a-good-technical-interviewer/) 799 | - Interviewing should always be a pleasant experience for the candidate 800 | - The fine balance between guiding and giving the solution 801 | - I’m interviewing someone much more senior than I am. What if I don’t understand their solution? 802 | - [6 red flags I saw while doing 60+ technical interviews in 30 days](https://blog.interviewing.io/6-red-flags-i-saw-while-doing-60-technical-interviews-in-30-days/) 803 | - Your interviewer is only open to solving the problem ONE way 804 | - Undue pressure to accept an offer letter 805 | - Not enough clarity about your role 806 | - Consistent lack of interest or low morale from interviewers 807 | - Your interviewers aren’t prepared for the interview 808 | - Lack of a clear direction on where the company is headed 809 | - [How to hire engineering talent without the BS](https://jes.al/2023/03/how-to-hire-engineering-talent-without-the-bs/) 810 | - Antipatterns: memory, speed 811 | - Best practices: upfront, realistic, structured, guided, empathetic, 812 | 813 | Specifics about hiring engineering managers: 814 | 815 | - [Cracking the Engineering Manager interview — Part 1](https://medium.com/srivatsan-sridharan/cracking-the-engineering-manager-interview-part-1-adb0b63c7f2f) 816 | - [Hunting for Rock Star Engineering Managers](https://hackernoon.com/hunting-for-rock-star-engineering-managers-9ef9c3716b02) 817 | - [VP of Engineering interview](https://karimfanous.medium.com/how-do-you-interview-a-vp-of-engineering-81deddf6daa2) 818 | - What is the reasonable interaction between PM and Engineering? 819 | - How do you increase your team’s throughput? 820 | - How do you scale an engineering team? 821 | - How does engineering support sales? 822 | - What’s interesting to you about this company? What do you think you can add to the team? 823 | - What can you do to accelerate product delivery? 824 | 825 | #### Hiring: interview questions 826 | 827 | - [45 sample behavioral questions for interview with developer](https://devskiller.com/45-behavioral-questions-to-use-during-non-technical-interview-with-developers/) 828 | - [30 most common behavioral interview questions](https://www.themuse.com/advice/30-behavioral-interview-questions-you-should-be-ready-to-answer) 829 | - [Behavioral interviews](http://career.egr.uh.edu/sites/career.egr.uh.edu/files/files/behavioral-interview.pdf) 830 | - 🧰 [MaximAbramchuck/awesome-interview-questions](https://github.com/MaximAbramchuck/awesome-interview-questions): a list of list of interview questions. 831 | - [40 Favorite Interview Questions from Some of the Sharpest Folks We Know](https://firstround.com/review/40-favorite-interview-questions-from-some-of-the-sharpest-folks-we-know/), First Round Review 832 | - What do you want to do differently in your next role? 833 | - Imagine yourself in three years. What do you hope will be different about you then compared to now? 834 | - Among the people you've worked with, who do you admire and why? 835 | - What are you really good at, but never want to do anymore? 836 | - How did you prepare for this interview? 837 | - What do you believe you can achieve with us personally or professionally that you can't anywhere else in the world? 838 | - When was the last time you changed your mind about something important? 839 | - What’s one misconception your coworkers have about you? 840 | - What was the last thing you nerded out on? 841 | - What are 10 ways to speed up Domino’s pizza delivery? 842 | - [How to create a good problem-solving interview](https://blog.dashlane.com/how-to-create-a-good-problem-solving-interview/) 843 | - What to look for: methodology, communication, programming skills 844 | - Don’t aim for complexity 845 | - Interview your coworkers 846 | - Standardize your interview 847 | - [5 coding interview questions I hate](https://blog.thoughtspile.tech/2022/03/21/bad-tech-interview/) 848 | - Trivia 849 | - Specifics 850 | - Obfuscated questions 851 | - Unspecified behavior 852 | - [Bug squash: An underrated interview question](https://blog.jez.io/bugsquash/) 853 | 854 | #### Hiring: job postings 855 | 856 | - [Software Engineer Job Descriptions that Attract the Best Developers](https://www.codementor.io/blog/software-engineer-job-descriptions-that-attract-the-best-developers-241lev4cs8) 857 | - [How to communicate why your startup is worth joining](https://wasp-lang.dev/blog/2022/08/15/how-to-communicate-why-your-startup-is-worth-joining) 858 | - Lots of great ideas. 859 | 860 | #### Hiring: process 861 | 862 | - [Medium’s engineering interview process](https://medium.engineering/mediums-engineering-interview-process-b8d6b67927c4#.hwjb9hizh): Medium open sourced their hiring process. 863 | - Gitlab, [Hiring Principles](https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/hiring/principles/). Their whole process is also open sourced. 864 | - [How Firebase Interviewed Software Engineers](https://startupandrew.com/posts/how-firebase-interviewed-software-engineers/) 865 | - We looked for candidates who were friendly, smart, and motivated 866 | - We looked for generalist, pragmatic problem solvers 867 | - [No engineer has ever sued a company because of constructive post-interview feedback. So why don't employers do it?](http://blog.interviewing.io/no-engineer-has-ever-sued-a-company-because-of-constructive-post-interview-feedback-so-why-dont-employers-do-it/) 868 | - Be clear that it’s a no-go. 869 | - When you give suggestions, be specific and constructive. 870 | - Make recommendations. Is there a book they could read? 871 | 872 | #### Hiring: résumé review 873 | 874 | - [When Is Short Tenure a Red Flag?](https://jacobian.org/2022/oct/14/when-is-short-tenure-a-red-flag/) 875 | - [What we look for in a resume](https://huyenchip.com/2023/01/24/what-we-look-for-in-a-candidate.html) 876 | 877 | #### Hiring: sourcing 878 | 879 | - [How To Hire Engineers: Step 1, Sourcing](https://medium.com/@jocelyngoldfein/how-to-hire-engineers-step-1-sourcing-f388fddc63fd#.fwtgweq0e) 880 | - [The Case For Language-Agnostic Hiring](https://alphalist.com/blog/the-case-for-language-agnostic-hiring) 881 | - Good Programmers Can Adapt to Any Language 882 | - Hire Broad-minded Devs- Not Ones Boxed Into a Specific Language 883 | - Encourage Knowledge Sharing Among Devs 884 | 885 | #### Hiring: take home exercises 886 | 887 | - [How GitHub does take home technical interviews](https://github.blog/2022-03-31-how-github-does-take-home-technical-interviews/) 888 | - [guardian/coding-exercises](https://github.com/guardian/coding-exercises) 889 | - [Take-home vs whiteboard coding: The problem is bad interviews](https://andrewrondeau.com/blog/2020/04/take-home-vs-whiteboard-coding-the-problem-is-bad-interviews) 890 | - [Live Coding Interviews](https://garrettdimon.com/journal/posts/live-coding-interviews) describes ways in which a live coding interview won't give you accurate signals. 891 | 892 | #### Hiring: quotes 893 | 894 | > If you can 'hire tough,' you can 'manage easy'. 895 | 896 | Sue Tetzlaff, The Employee Experience: A Capstone Guide to Peak Performance 897 | 898 | > I am convinced that nothing we do is more important than hiring and developing people. At the end of the day you bet on people, not on strategies. 899 | 900 | Lawrence Bossidy, GE 901 | 902 | > I hire people brighter than me and then I get out of their way. 903 | 904 | Lee Iacocca, Ford 905 | 906 | > You can dream, create, design and build the most wonderful place in the world... but it requires people to make the dream a reality. 907 | 908 | Walt Disney 909 | 910 | > Hire character. Train skill. 911 | 912 | Peter Schutz, Porsche 913 | 914 | > In technology, it's about the people. Getting the best people, retaining them, nurturing a creative environment, and helping to find a way to innovate. 915 | 916 | Marissa Mayer 917 | 918 | > I'd rather interview 50 people and not hire anyone than hire the wrong person. 919 | 920 | Jeff Bezos 921 | 922 | > Talent wins games, but teamwork and intelligence win championships. 923 | 924 | Michael Jordan, American former professional basketball player 925 | 926 | > Often the best solution to a management problem is the right person. 927 | 928 | Edwin Booz 929 | 930 | > Somebody once said that in looking for people to hire, you look for three qualities: integrity, intelligence, and energy. And if you don't have the first, the other two will kill you. You think about it; it's true. If you hire somebody without [integrity], you really want them to be dumb and lazy. 931 | 932 | Warren Buffet 933 | 934 | > One cannot hire a hand; the whole man always comes with it. 935 | 936 | Peter Drucker 937 | 938 | > If you think it's expensive to hire a professional to do the job, wait until you hire an amateur. 939 | 940 | Red Adair 941 | 942 | ### Incident prevention and response (on-call, outages) 943 | 944 | Also see my [professional-programming list](https://github.com/charlax/professional-programming/#incident-response-oncall-alerting-outages-firefighting-postmortem) 945 | 946 | - [Handling Incidents and Outages](https://www.infoq.com/news/2015/06/handling-incidents-outages/) 947 | - [When the Sky Falls](http://randsinrepose.com/archives/when-the-sky-falls/), Rands in Repose 948 | - 🎞 [Incident Analysis: How *Learning* is Different Than *Fixing*](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zw_ASI-rk1s&ab_channel=DevSecCon) ([slides](https://speakerdeck.com/jallspaw/incident-analysis-how-star-learning-star-is-different-than-star-fixing-star?slide=8 949 | 950 | ### Learning, retro, postmortem 951 | 952 | See my [professional-programming section about incident-response](https://github.com/charlax/professional-programming) 953 | 954 | - [This is How Effective Leaders Move Beyond Blame](http://firstround.com/review/this-is-how-effective-leaders-move-beyond-blame/) 955 | - A great description of what blamelessness actually means: [How is team-member-1 doing?](https://about.gitlab.com/2017/03/17/how-is-team-member-1-doing/) (team-member-1 is the name of the person that "gave the unfortunate command to delete our primary database" during the global Gitlab outage in Feb 2017. 956 | - [Debriefing Facilitation Guide](https://extfiles.etsy.com/DebriefingFacilitationGuide.pdf): Etsy's guide to debriefing & incident review. 957 | - [General James 'Mad Dog' Mattis Email About Being 'Too Busy To Read' Is A Must-Read](http://www.businessinsider.com/viral-james-mattis-email-reading-marines-2013-5): "by reading, you learn through others’ experiences, generally a better way to do business, especially in our line of work where the consequences of incompetence are so final for young men." 958 | - [You can increase your intelligence: 5 ways to maximize your cognitive potential](https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/you-can-increase-your-intelligence-5-ways-to-maximize-your-cognitive-potential/): forgive the clickbait link, it's actually a good article. 959 | - [Startup Graveyard – History Shouldn't Have to Repeat Itself](http://startupgraveyard.io/) 960 | - [Design critiques at Figma](https://www.figma.com/blog/design-critiques-at-figma/?ref=uxdesignweekly) 961 | - Pick the right format: standard, brainstorms, small groups, silent, 962 | printed, etc. 963 | - Use smaller rooms 964 | - Buy a timer and keep diligent time 965 | - Remember to critique OUTSIDE of weekly meetings 966 | 967 | Quotes: 968 | 969 | - "Excellence is achieved by the mastery of fundamentals", Vince Lombardi, considered to be one of the best coaches in NFL history. 970 | 971 | ### Management style 972 | 973 | - [Humane Development](https://ernie.io/2014/12/17/humane-development/): "we are humans working with humans to develop software for the benefit of humans." 974 | - [Leadership is making a comeback](https://www.reaktor.com/blog/leadership-is-making-a-comeback/) : interesting article that proposes a model where the leader is neither a servant nor a hero, but a host. 975 | - [Management Philosophy](https://www.3002.ca/2017/06/management-philosophy.html) 976 | - [12 "Manager READMEs" from Silicon Valley’s Top Tech Companies](https://hackernoon.com/12-manager-readmes-from-silicon-valleys-top-tech-companies-26588a660afe) 977 | - 🎞 [What is your philosophy on leadership? How do you inspire your team to do their best?](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TQhns5AwAkA): beautiful sequence between Nelson Mandela (played by Morgan Freeman) and François Pienaar (Matt Damon). 978 | - [Why Software Development Requires Servant Leaders](https://adl.io/essays/why-software-development-requires-servant-leaders/) 979 | - Andreessen Horowitz, [Peacetime CEO/Wartime CEO](https://a16z.com/2011/04/14/peacetime-ceo-wartime-ceo/) 980 | - Peacetime CEO knows that proper protocol leads to winning. Wartime CEO violates protocol in order to win. 981 | - [Excerpts from One From Many, Dee Hock](https://twitter.com/zackkanter/status/1272200276015853569), Zack Kanter on Twitter. 982 | - Your first responsibility as a manager is to manage yourself: your integrity, character, ethics, knowledge, wisdom, temperament, words and acts. 983 | - The second responsibility is to manage those who have authority over us. 984 | - The third responsibility is to manage your peers: without their respect and confidence, nothing can be accomplished. 985 | - The fourth responsibility is to manage those whom we have authority. 986 | - You can't manage your bosses, peers, regulators etc. But you can understand them, motivate them, influence them, forgive them. 987 | - "It is from failure that amazing growth and grace so often come, provided only that one can recognise it, admit it, learn from it, rise above it, and try again. True leadership presumes a standard quite beyond human perfectibility and that is quite alright, for joy and satisfaction are in the pursuit of an objective, not in its realization." 988 | - [Managing Staff-plus engineers](https://lethain.com/managing-staff-plus-engineers/) 989 | - [An Engineering Team where Everyone is a Leader](https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/a-team-where-everyone-is-a-leader/), Gergely Orosz. 990 | - One project, one engineering lead 991 | - Mentoring, then coaching the first few leaders 992 | - Transparency and accountability via weekly, written updates 993 | - [All You Need to Become a Servant Leader](https://effyai.substack.com/p/all-you-need-to-become-a-servant) 994 | - Examples of servant leaders and book recommendations 995 | - You need: empathy, self-awareness, active listening, trust, transparency 996 | - [Developing leadership styles](https://lethain.com/developing-leadership-styles/), Will Larson, Includes mechanics and examples. 997 | - Leading with policy 998 | - Leading from consensus 999 | - Leading with conviction 1000 | - [From good to great: A capability framework for building exceptional product engineering teams](https://buriti.ca/from-good-to-great-a-capability-framework-for-building-exceptional-product-engineering-teams-a8ca4e9e8f47) 1001 | - [Accountability Sinks](https://250bpm.substack.com/p/accountability-sinks) 1002 | 1003 | Quote: 1004 | 1005 | > If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea. 1006 | > 1007 | > – Antoine de Saint-Exupery 1008 | 1009 | > Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things. 1010 | > 1011 | > – Peter Drucker 1012 | 1013 | > The people who work for you have three resources: time, energy, and give-a-fuck. Time is the cheapest. It replenishes one hour every hour. Energy is more expensive. When you're out you need lots of time off to recharge. Once give-a-fuck is burned, it's gone forever. 1014 | > 1015 | > – @leftoblique 1016 | 1017 | ![](./pictures/calvin_and_hobbes_style.gif) 1018 | 1019 | ### Meetings 1020 | 1021 | - [On Better Meetings](http://larahogan.me/blog/better-meetings/): Lara Hogan shares tips about ensuring efficient meetings. 1022 | - 🎞 [Almost Live! - Middle Management Suck-Ups](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IUIQX5esnNo): a great example of a terrible ineffective meeting. 1023 | - [Run Better Meetings with This Expert-Level Advice](http://firstround.com/review/first-round-reviews-6-must-reads-to-run-fast-efficient-meetings/), First Round Review 1024 | - [Engineering Team Meeting: Format & Topic Ideas](https://marcgg.com/blog/2020/04/06/engineering-team-meeting-ideas/): lots of great ideas to start it. 1025 | - [The Document Culture of Amazon](https://www.justingarrison.com/blog/2021-03-15-the-document-culture-of-amazon/) 1026 | - Documents help eliminate many biases, for or against, the person who wrote the document. 1027 | - There’s no “can you see my screen”, background noise, or call audio disconnects while understanding the main content for the meeting. 1028 | - [Cancel your meetings if you can live with the outcome](https://andygrunwald.com/blog/cancel-your-meetings-if-you-can-live-with-the-outcome/) 1029 | - ["My new favorite team ritual: A weekly meeting called "Fight Club" where you meet with your leadership team with the intention of having a conflict.](https://twitter.com/lennysan/status/1754554023318106596) 1030 | - [Meetings *are* the work.](https://medium.com/@ElizAyer/meetings-are-the-work-9e429dde6aa3) 1031 | - [Embrace Silence](https://tech.forter.com/embrace-silence.html) 1032 | - [Simple Sabotage](https://www.amazon.com/Simple-Sabotage-Detecting-Behaviors-Undermine/dp/0062371606) "A Modern Field Manual for Detecting and Rooting Out Everyday Behaviors That Undermine Your Workplace". Covers anti-patterns of collaborative behavior, and provides specific recommendations for fixing these when they occur in meetings. 1033 | 1034 | ### Mentoring 1035 | 1036 | - [The Conjoined Triangles of Senior-Level Development](http://frontside.io/blog/2016/07/07/the-conjoined-triangles-of-senior-level-development.html) looks into how to define a senior engineer. 1037 | - [30 questions to ask your mentor](https://blog.get-merit.com/30-questions-to-ask-a-mentor/) 1038 | - [Advice is Cheap — Context is Priceless](http://firstround.com/review/advice-is-cheap-context-is-priceless/) 1039 | - [Developers mentoring other developers: practices I've seen work well](https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/developers-mentoring-other-developers/), Gergey Orosz 1040 | - Provide context and perspective 1041 | - Leverage your network to help the mentee 1042 | - Be supportive 1043 | - Avoid giving answers on a silver plate 1044 | - Tailor your approach for technical vs non-technical topics 1045 | - People learn best when they help themselves 1046 | - [Your Strengths Are Your Weaknesses](https://terriblesoftware.org/2025/03/31/your-strengths-are-your-weaknesses/) 1047 | - The qualities we celebrate in our team members are usually the same ones causing our biggest headaches. 1048 | - We want self-aware engineers who understand their natural tendencies and can adjust them based on what each situation demands. 1049 | - [Managing strong personalities](https://betterthanrandom.substack.com/p/managing-big-egos) 1050 | - "If you are not able to coach the big players, you are not able to coach anyone. It is very important for a coach to understand that you are not going to teach them how to play football. You're not going to teach Ronaldo how to take a free kick. You’re not going to teach Ibra how to hold the ball on his chest. You’re not going to teach Drogba how to attack the first post and score in the air. You are going to teach them how to play football in that team." – Jose Mourinho 1051 | - [Jeeps, Ferraris, and Other Engineers](https://maheshba.bitbucket.io/blog/2025/04/29/cars.html) 1052 | 1053 | ### Mindset and attitude 1054 | 1055 | - [Taking Ownership Is The Most Effective Way to Get What You Want](http://www.theeffectiveengineer.com/blog/take-ownership-of-your-goals) 1056 | - [Shreyas Doshi on Twitter: "Good managers, what they do, how they think & act](https://twitter.com/shreyas/status/1290685921348562948) 1057 | - Good managers are skilled at asking questions that give their team members a new perspective on the problem and reach the right solution on their own. 1058 | - Good managers address context first, then content. 1059 | - Good managers know that, above all else, they are agents of their company. Their default mode is to make and facilitate company-optimal choices. 1060 | - Good managers know that fixing broader company culture is an important part of their role as a designated leader within the company. 1061 | - Good managers understand that the long game is all about people. 1062 | - Good managers don’t have just one go-to management style nor do they have a notion of “THE ideal employee”. 1063 | - Good managers can discern good intent from bad. 1064 | - [Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang: "you can’t show me a task that is beneath me." Do what is required not what is desired](https://x.com/Codie_Sanchez/status/1794457275802787841) 1065 | 1066 | > It's only when the tide goes out that you learn who's been swimming naked. 1067 | > – Warren Buffet 1068 | 1069 | > @farbood: Doing the right thing, is direction. Doing things right, is speed. 1070 | 1071 | > @jasonfried: You don’t get to call yourself a leader. That’s up to other people. 1072 | 1073 | ### Motivation 1074 | 1075 | - 🎞 [Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc) (summary of Daniel Pink's book). 1076 | - The [two-factor theory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-factor_theory) (Wikipedia) "states that there are certain factors in the workplace that cause job satisfaction, while a separate set of factors cause dissatisfaction." 1077 | - [Bored People Quit](http://randsinrepose.com/archives/bored-people-quit/), Rands in Repose 1078 | - [The Development Abstraction Layer](https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/04/11/the-development-abstraction-layer-2/), Joel on Software 1079 | 1080 | Quotes: 1081 | 1082 | - "The best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago. The second best time is now", Chinese proverb. 1083 | - "A ship in harbor is safe, but that is not what ships are made for.", John A Shedd. 1084 | 1085 | ### Onboarding new team members or yourself 1086 | 1087 | - [How to quickly (and successfully) onboard engineers](https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2022/07/21/quickly-onboarding-engineers-successfully/), GitLab 1088 | - 🎞 [5 Onboarding Fiascos From the Movies](https://business.linkedin.com/talent-solutions/blog/recruiting-humor-and-fun/2016/the-worst-new-hire-first-days-in-movies-that-you-should-never-let-happen-in-your-company) 1089 | - [Onboarding - Mattermost Handbook](https://handbook.mattermost.com/operations/workplace/people/working-at-mattermost/onboarding) 1090 | - [Gitlab's engineering onboarding list](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/people-group/people-operations/employment-templates/blob/master/.gitlab/issue_templates/onboarding.md) 1091 | - [How To Use Your Unfair Advantage To Create an Unforgettable First Day For New Hires](https://lnbogen.com/2013/04/11/how-to-use-your-unfair-advantage-to-create-an-unforgettable-first-day-for-new-hires/), Oren Ellenbogen 1092 | - [Engineering Onboarding Processes at Medium](https://medium.engineering/engineering-onboarding-processes-at-medium-368095116ac3), Medium 1093 | - [A Career Cold Start Algorithm](https://boz.com/articles/career-cold-start), Andrew Bosworth. How to run your first 1-1s on a new team. 1094 | - For the first 25 minutes: ask them to tell you everything they think you should know. 1095 | - For the next 3 minutes: ask about the biggest challenges the team has right now. 1096 | - In the final 2 minutes: ask who else you should talk to. Write down every name they give you. 1097 | - [Onboarding](https://martinfowler.com/articles/bottlenecks-of-scaleups/06-onboarding.html), MartinFowler.com 1098 | - [Ask HN: How to onboard yourself to a new product/industry in a new job?](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39777223) 1099 | 1100 | ### Organizational structure 1101 | 1102 | See also [Data organization](#data-organization) 1103 | 1104 | - Martin Fowler's [Team organization](https://martinfowler.com/tags/team%20organization.html) articles 1105 | - [Conway's Law](https://martinfowler.com/bliki/ConwaysLaw.html), Martin Fowler 1106 | - "Any organization that designs a system (defined broadly) will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization's communication structure.", Melvin Conway 1107 | - [Conway’s Law in Team Topologies](https://medium.com/@fwynyk/conways-law-in-team-topolgies-did-you-really-get-it-69c1a4d702af) 1108 | - The Reverse or Inverse Conway Maneuver implies that we should design our teams (not the software yet) to “match” the required software architecture. 1109 | - [Spotify’s Failed #SquadGoals](https://www.jeremiahlee.com/posts/failed-squad-goals/) 1110 | - Engineering managers in this model had little responsibility beyond the career development of the people they managed. 1111 | - There was no single person accountable for the engineering team’s delivery or who could negotiate prioritization of work at an equivalent level of responsibility. 1112 | - Autonomy requires alignment. Company priorities must be defined by leadership. Autonomy does not mean teams get to do whatever they want. 1113 | - Business units, departments, teams, and managers more effectively communicate organization structure roles and responsibilities than Spotify’s synonyms and are not attached to a way of working that failed their creator. 1114 | - [Independence,autonomy,too many small teams](https://kislayverma.com/organizations/independence-autonomy-and-too-many-small-teams/) 1115 | - Every autonomous team is expected to generate direct business value all by itself, without a lot of overlap with other teams. 1116 | - The team should be able to meets its goals independently (i.e. without reliance on or interference from other teams). 1117 | - Coordination, also known as alignment, communication, shared roadmap, Gantt chart and many other positive sounding names, is the arch-enemy of the autonomous team. 1118 | - 🎞 [Monoliths vs Microservices is Missing the Point—Start with Team Cognitive Load](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=haejb5rzKsM&ab_channel=ITRevolution) by the authors of team topologies. 1119 | - [Organizing software teams](https://medium.com/swlh/how-to-structure-teams-for-building-better-software-products-91e4dea021d) (Team Topologies Book Summary) 1120 | - There should be no shared ownership of components, libraries, or code. 1121 | - If you have microservices but are still waiting to do end-to-end testing of a combination of services, you have a distributed monolith (a distributed monolith is when all changes in a service require updates to other services). 1122 | - Use software boundaries defined by business-domain bounded contexts 1123 | - Teams composed of only people with single functional expertise should be avoided at all costs. 1124 | - Four fundamental team topologies: stream-aligned, enabling, complicated subsystem, platform. 1125 | - [Structure Eats Strategy](https://janbosch.com/blog/index.php/2017/11/25/structure-eats-strategy/) 1126 | - BAPO: the B (business) should define the A (architecture) which is the starting point for the P (process), on which the O (organization) is based. 1127 | - Most companies are not BAPO but instead they are OPAB: the existing organization is used as a basis for the definition of convenience-driven processes, which in turn leads to an accidental architecture. 1128 | - [Infrastructure Platform Engineering Organizational structures and models](https://www.alashiban.com/you-may-not-need-that-costly-time-consuming-infra-re-org/): an incredible article about how to structure the infra team. 1129 | - Describes the 4 canonical org models and their pros & cons: 1130 | - Product org with embed infra teams 1131 | - Shared cloud engineering team 1132 | - Infra org 1133 | - Infra-platform org 1134 | - Concludes that in the end expertise should be encoded in software solutions & automation 1135 | - [Architects, Anti-Patterns, and Organizational F*ery](https://charity.wtf/2023/03/09/architects-anti-patterns-and-organizational-fuckery/) 1136 | - [Team Topologies](https://martinfowler.com/bliki/TeamTopologies.html), great book summary by Martin Fowler. 1137 | - The primary benefit of a platform is to reduce the cognitive load on stream-aligned teams 1138 | - [Beyond the Holacracy Hype](https://hbr.org/2016/07/beyond-the-holacracy-hype) 1139 | - [Organizational boundary problems: too many cooks or not enough kitchens?](https://medium.com/@ElizAyer/organizational-boundary-problems-too-many-cooks-or-not-enough-kitchens-2ddedc6de26a). A lot of useful resources to design organizations. 1140 | - [How and why we built our startup around small teams](https://newsletter.posthog.com/p/the-magic-of-small-engineering-teams) 1141 | - [Bad idea: Platforms automatically improve productivity](https://jchyip.medium.com/bad-idea-platforms-automatically-improve-productivity-ed8f15ce2c41) 1142 | - Platforms as products improve productivity; “because I said so” platforms do not. 1143 | - [Small teams](https://posthog.com/handbook/company/small-teams), Posthog Employee Handbook 1144 | - [Infrastructure Gravity & Domain Engineering](https://jackdanger.com/infrastructure-gravity/) argues for the value of having a "Domain Engineering" team. 1145 | 1146 | ### Performance management 1147 | 1148 | - [Firing people](https://zachholman.com/talk/firing-people): Zach Holman's talk about his experience being fired from Github offers some great insights into a process that is rarely talked about. 1149 | - [It’s Never Too Early to Fire](https://a16z.com/2017/05/24/on-firing-why-when-how/), Andreessen Horowitz. 1150 | - [Performance Reviews Are a Waste of Time](https://blog.bradfieldcs.com/performance-reviews-are-a-waste-of-time-87c88d7553b4): a good contrarian take on formal performance reviews 1151 | - [The How and Why of Performance Review Calibration](https://lattice.com/library/the-how-and-why-of-performance-review-calibration) 1152 | - [9 Box Grid: A Practitioner’s Guide](https://www.aihr.com/blog/9-box-grid/) 1153 | - [How to Effectively Manage Low Performers: The CARES Framework](https://blog.novatools.org/how-to-effectively-manage-low-performers-the-cares-framework-702e00732e8d): Communicate, Accountability, Roadmap, Execution, Support. 1154 | - [Unlocking performance management for start-ups and scale-ups](https://leaddev.com/process/unlocking-performance-management-start-ups-and-scale-ups) 1155 | - `Team performance = f(results, behaviors)` 1156 | - [Hey, wait – is employee performance really Gaussian distributed??](https://timdellinger.substack.com/p/hey-wait-is-employee-performance) 1157 | - Article argues that it's Pareto-distributed instead. 1158 | - [The Worst Programmer I Know](https://dannorth.net/the-worst-programmer/): don’t try to measure the individual contribution of a unit in a complex adaptive system, because the premise of the question is flawed 1159 | 1160 | ### Personal productivity 1161 | 1162 | *See also: Developer productivity section* 1163 | 1164 | About productivity in general: 1165 | 1166 | - [43 Folders Series: Inbox Zero](http://www.43folders.com/izero): how to get and maintain your email inbox at a sane level. 1167 | - [CannotMeasureProductivity](https://martinfowler.com/bliki/CannotMeasureProductivity.html), Martin Fowler (about how you cannot measure developer productivity. 1168 | - 🎧 [How to Change Your Behavior](https://coachingforleaders.com/podcast/change-your-behavior-bj-fogg/), Coaching for Leaders 1169 | - It’s a myth that it takes 21 or 66 days to create a habit. Repetition doesn't create habits. Emotions create habits. 1170 | - Create a tiny habit through an ABC process: anchor moment, a tiny behavior, and instant celebration. 1171 | - Avoid raising the bar on the tiny behavior. Do more if you want to, but don’t change the standard. 1172 | - ['Touch it once' method for tasks can boost productivity](https://www.cnbc.com/2018/06/21/touch-it-once-method-for-tasks-can-boost-productivity.html) 1173 | - As soon as you touch something, you immediately act on it. 1174 | - [The Ultimate Guide to Personal Productivity Methods](https://todoist.com/inspiration/personal-productivity-methods), Todoist 1175 | - [Evidence-based advice on how to be successful in any jobs](https://80000hours.org/career-guide/how-to-be-successful/): most self-help advices are not research-based. The ones listed in this article are. 1176 | - [The Complete Guide to Deep Work](https://todoist.com/inspiration/deep-work) 1177 | - The ability to perform deep work is becoming increasingly rare at exactly the same time it is becoming increasingly valuable in our economy. 1178 | - Choose Your Deep Work Strategy 1179 | - Build a Deep Work Routine 1180 | - Discipline #1: Focus on the Wildly Important 1181 | - Discipline #2: Act on the Lead Measures 1182 | - Discipline #4: Create a Cadence of Accountability 1183 | - Our Ability for Deep Work is Finite 1184 | - The Craftsman Approach to Tool Selection 1185 | - Stop Using Social Media 1186 | - Get Your Boss on Board With Deep Work 1187 | - [Every productivity thought I've ever had, as concisely as possible](https://guzey.com/productivity/) 1188 | - Context intentionality as the key difference between home and every other place on planet earth 1189 | - Rules are about exceptions 1190 | - [100 Tips for a Better Life](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7hFeMWC6Y5eaSixbD/100-tips-for-a-better-life) 1191 | - Deficiencies do not make you special. The older you get, the more your inability to cook will be a red flag for people. 1192 | - History remembers those who got to market first. Getting your creation out into the world is more important than getting it perfect. 1193 | - Discipline is superior to motivation. The former can be trained, the latter is fleeting. You won’t be able to accomplish great things if you’re only relying on motivation. 1194 | - You do not live in a video game. There are no pop-up warnings if you’re about to do something foolish, or if you’ve been going in the wrong direction for too long. You have to create your own warnings. 1195 | - Cultivate a reputation for being dependable. Good reputations are valuable because they’re rare (easily destroyed and hard to rebuild). You don’t have to brew the most amazing coffee if your customers know the coffee will always be hot. 1196 | - Compliment people more. Many people have trouble thinking of themselves as smart, or pretty, or kind, unless told by someone else. You can help them out. 1197 | - [The Top 9 Productivity Myths That Just Aren't True](https://todoist.com/inspiration/top-myths-productivity), Todoist 1198 | - [Build tools around workflows, not workflows around tools](https://thesephist.com/posts/tools/) 1199 | - [Rethinking Best Practices](https://willgallego.com/2021/08/14/rethinking-best-practices/) 1200 | - [The Cult of Done Manifesto](https://medium.com/@bre/the-cult-of-done-manifesto-724ca1c2ff13) 1201 | - [Asking questions the right way](https://vadimkravcenko.com/shorts/asking-right-questions/) 1202 | - [How to Be Great? Just Be Good, Repeatably](https://blog.stephsmith.io/how-to-be-great/) 1203 | 1204 | > @shreyas: Don’t be fooled by Best Practices. By the time something is labeled and advertised as a Best Practice, it is just average. Following these practices only suggests you won’t be left behind, not that you will lead the pack. Best Practices are actually Average Practices. 1205 | 1206 | Automation: 1207 | 1208 | - [Focus by Automation](https://myme.no/posts/2024-03-19-focus-by-automation.html) 1209 | 1210 | About GTD: 1211 | 1212 | - 📖 David Allen, [Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity](https://www.amazon.com/Getting-Things-Done-Stress-Free-Productivity/dp/0142000280): while it could be much shorter, this book is probably the best way to learn about the GTD methodology. 1213 | - [Productivity 101: A Primer to the Getting Things Done (GTD) Philosophy](http://lifehacker.com/productivity-101-a-primer-to-the-getting-things-done-1551880955): a great summary of GTD. 1214 | - [Zen Habits](https://zenhabits.net/): a blog you can follow to get productivity tips and tricks. 1215 | - [Zen To Done (ZTD)](https://zenhabits.net/zen-to-done-ztd-the-ultimate-simple-productivity-system/): a simpler productivity system. 1216 | - 🏙 [2011 GTD Getting Things Done](https://speakerdeck.com/krunchtime/2011-getting-things-done) 1217 | 1218 | About calendars: 1219 | 1220 | - [Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule](http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html), Paul Graham 1221 | - [Why Are Maker Schedules So Rare?](http://calnewport.com/blog/2017/04/05/why-are-maker-schedules-so-rare/) 1222 | - [Busy to Death](https://barryoreilly.com/2017/05/31/busy-to-death/): a good story involving W. Edwards Deming. 1223 | - [Makers, Don't Let Yourself Be Forced Into the 'Manager Schedule'](https://blog.nuclino.com/makers-don-t-let-yourself-be-forced-into-the-manager-schedule) 1224 | - Research shows that it takes as long as 30 minutes for makers to get into the flow 1225 | - Use maker-manager office hours 1226 | - Communication can happen at a quieter asynchronous frequency in the form of thoughtful, written discussions rather than soul-sucking meetings or erratic one-line-at-a-time chat messages 1227 | - Build a team knowledge base to minimize repetitive questions and allow self-onboarding. 1228 | - [Your non-linear problem of 90% utilization](https://blog.asmartbear.com/utilization.html), Jason Cohen: why constantly running at 90% utilization is actually counter-productive. 1229 | - [Your Calendar = Your Priorities](https://cutlefish.substack.com/p/tbm-4952-your-calendar-your-priorities) 1230 | - [Advice for time management as a manager](https://www.benkuhn.net/tmgr/) 1231 | 1232 | About distractions: 1233 | 1234 | - [How to stop being "terminally online"](https://nights.bearblog.dev/how-to-stop-being-terminally-online/) 1235 | - Determine why you're terminally online 1236 | - Examine your biases 1237 | - Rationalize your FOMO 1238 | - Accept yourself as you are 1239 | - Stop being so ironic 1240 | - Take it slow 1241 | - Find other ways to contact people 1242 | - Expand your definition of the Internet 1243 | - Find other news site 1244 | - Use an RSS feed 1245 | - Find ways to help 1246 | - Find a hobby 1247 | - Limit to career usage 1248 | - Have faith 1249 | 1250 | > "Do what you love until you love to Do" I often think about the “Read what you love until you love to read” comment from @naval, and this is a good generalization. My experience has been that it is easier to educate a Do-er than to motivate the educated; you have to believe you can Do before you embark on an effort. – John Carmack 1251 | 1252 | In terms of task management software, I can't recommend [Things](https://culturedcode.com/things/) enough (macOS and iOS only). It is a delightful piece of software that gets out of the way and lets you focus on your tasks. 1253 | 1254 | ### Planning (roadmap, goal setting, KPI, OKR, etc.) 1255 | 1256 | - [Top 10 Reasons for Slow Velocity](https://svpg.com/top-10-reasons-for-slow-velocity/) 1257 | - [The Heilmeier Catechism](https://www.darpa.mil/work-with-us/heilmeier-catechism): a crafted a set of questions to help DARPA officials think through and evaluate proposed research programs. 1258 | - [The Fundamentals of Roadmapping](https://medium.com/@austinfish/the-fundamentals-of-roadmapping-f465f5ac733) 1259 | - With constant innovation, new market entrants and potential black swans like a global pandemic, the best a leader can do is set a 12–18 month strategic plan that is directionally aligned with the company’s true north. That plan should be broken down by quarter with the assumption that the degree of confidence in achieving goals within each quarter will decline over time. 1260 | - Expect each team across the organization to cascade their operational roadmaps from these strategic foci. Operational roadmaps should identify key initiatives and milestones. 1261 | - [How to measure and improve success in your engineering team](https://leaddev.com/productivity-eng-velocity/how-measure-and-improve-success-your-engineering-team) 1262 | - [“Stories” Don’t Tell a Story: Good Sprint Planning Uses Milestones](https://cgroom.medium.com/stories-dont-tell-a-story-good-sprint-planning-uses-milestones-a71326aa8849) 1263 | - Manage Through Milestones 1264 | - [Rituals for hypergrowth: An inside look at how YouTube scaled](https://coda.io/d/Rituals-for-hypergrowth-An-inside-look-at-how-YouTube-scaled_dtrl4NzUguc/Rituals-for-hypergrowth-An-inside-look-at-how-YouTube-scaled_su_30#_lumUl) 1265 | - Planning cadence: 6-month strategic planning and 6-week sprints 1266 | - Strategic planning had two key outputs: (a) a list of Big Rocks and (b) the matrix of project allocations 1267 | - Our process was designed to avoid the “just in time” ad-hoc meetings 1268 | - Many of our meetings included a long “bullpen” period (i.e. unstructured multithreaded discussion time) 1269 | - Replace read-outs / meetings with broadcast emails 1270 | - Pre-reads (”Come prepared and expect others to be prepared”) 1271 | - [Dear PMs, It's Time to Rethink Agile at Enterprise Startups](https://review.firstround.com/dear-pms-its-time-to-rethink-agile-at-enterprise-startups) 1272 | - [When Everything is Important But Nothing is Getting Done](https://sharedphysics.com/everything-is-important/) 1273 | - Step 0: Create Consensus That There is a Problem 1274 | - Step 1: Create a Unified View of All Existing Work 1275 | - Step 2: Create and Implement Criteria for Comparing Projects 1276 | - Step 3: Sequence The Projects & Commit to that Sequence 1277 | - Step 4: Getting Work Started 1278 | - Step 5: Identify and Fix Your Organizational Constraints 1279 | - Step 6: Create A Clear Finish Line (Definition of Done) 1280 | - Step 7: Keep It Going 1281 | - [The practical application of "Rocks, Pebbles, Sand"](https://longform.asmartbear.com/docs/rocks-pebbles-sand/), A Smart Bear 1282 | - If you schedule little things first, you run out of time for the big things. 1283 | - Rocks maximize Impact 1284 | - Rocks: Beware: “Maximizing impact” is harder than you think 1285 | - Execs decide, but ideally PMs are in command 1286 | - Sand maximizes Throughput 1287 | - Beware: Administrative overhead destroys throughput 1288 | - Sand: Prioritize with intuition and desire, not math and metrics 1289 | - Self-managed teams schedule their own Sand 1290 | - Pebbles maximize ROI 1291 | - Beware the surprisingly high impact of estimation error on ROI 1292 | - [Key Performance Indicators Infographic](https://news.kpiinstitute.org/key-performance-indicators-infographic/) 1293 | - [Measure what matters. Even if you don’t fully control it](https://www.madsjohnsen.com/p/measure-what-matters-even-if-you-dont-fully-control-it) 1294 | - [Leading and Lagging Indicators: How to measure Product OKRs](https://herbig.co/leading-lagging-indicators-okrs/). Very clear treatment of the topic, with lots of references and links. 1295 | - OKR ideally measure outcome, not output. 1296 | - Lagging indicators are easy to spot, unresponsive and hard to change, definitive results of the past 1297 | - Leading indicators are difficult to uncover, responsive to team actions, predictors of future success 1298 | - Whether it's lagging or leading depends on the team/context 1299 | - Prioritize leading indicators to avoid lagging decision-making 1300 | - [How to plan?](https://kellanem.com/notes/how-to-plan) 1301 | - Do fewer things. 1302 | - Bottom up processes don't work. 1303 | - Planning is the wrong time to introduce anything new. 1304 | - You must provide frameworks and constraints. 1305 | - Project planning has an inflection point. 1306 | - Don't wait to kill bad ideas. 1307 | - Minimize dependencies. 1308 | - Headcount planning won't map to your plans. 1309 | - What if money is no object? 1310 | - [How-to Evaluate a Product Roadmap, for Engineers](https://stephen.fm/how-to-evaluate-a-product-roadmap/) 1311 | - Does the roadmap clearly connect to the higher-level company or product mission, vision, and strategy? 1312 | - Is the roadmap intuitive, and can it be easily explained without jargon? 1313 | - Is the roadmap outcome-oriented or aligned with customer value? 1314 | - Is the roadmap flexible or iterative? 1315 | - Are the roadmap initiatives scoped and prioritized based on evidence? 1316 | - Does the roadmap identify major dependencies or risks? 1317 | - Does the roadmap feel aggressive but achievable? 1318 | - Is the roadmap easily referenceable later? 1319 | - [Stop inventing product problems; start solving customer problems](https://uxdesign.cc/stop-solving-product-problems-start-solving-customer-problems-6c9cf3e28db3) 1320 | - The build trap is when organizations focus more on shipping and developing features rather than on the actual value those things produce. — Melissa Perri, Escaping the Build Trap 1321 | - When low-maturity product teams start engaging with outcome goals, vanity metrics such as "number of queries" or "email send rate" predominate. 1322 | - When you ask “what features do users want the dashboard to have” you’ll never hear “users don’t need a dashboard” unless you’re really good at reading between the lines. 1323 | - Project teams tend to fix the problem of "missing features" rather than "customer unable to reach their goal" 1324 | - Shipping the MVP can quickly evolve into incrementally working out interesting coding problems, at the cost of making measurable improvements to the user experience. 1325 | - “Working backward from customer needs is a huge amount of work. But it will save you even more work later.” — Jeff Bezos 1326 | - In reality, no products are desirable to customers. Customers have desirable outcomes, which products can help them reach. 1327 | 1328 | > Truth emerges more readily from error than from confusion. 1329 | > Francis Bacon 1330 | 1331 | #### Goals 1332 | 1333 | - [With Goals, FAST Beats SMART](https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/with-goals-fast-beats-smart/): goals should be embedded in frequent discussions; ambitious in scope; measured by specific metrics and milestones; and transparent for everyone in the organization to see. 1334 | 1335 | > A goal without a plan is just a wish. 1336 | > Antoine de Saint-Exupéry 1337 | 1338 | #### OKRs 1339 | 1340 | - [How to Use OKRs for Quarterly and Annual Planning](https://www.wrike.com/blog/okrs-quarterly-planning/) 1341 | - 🎞 [Startup Lab workshop: How Google sets goals: OKRs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJB83EZtAjc&ab_channel=GV) 1342 | - [How to Make OKRs Actually Work at Your Startup](https://firstround.com/review/How-to-Make-OKRs-Actually-Work-at-Your-Startup/), First Round Review 1343 | - 🎞 [Why the secret to success is setting the right goals](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L4N1q4RNi9I&ab_channel=TED), John Doerr 1344 | - [A Modern Guide to Lean OKRs](https://worldpositive.com/a-modern-guide-to-lean-okrs-part-i-c4a30dba5fa1) (a three-part series) 1345 | - [OKR: The Ultimate Objectives and Key Results Resource](https://weekdone.com/resources/objectives-key-results/) 1346 | - [OKR Examples (And Tips for Creating Your Own)](https://okrexamples.co/) 1347 | - [Manager OKRs, Maker OKRs: How Early Stage Startups Should Think About Goal-Setting](https://hunterwalk.medium.com/manager-okrs-maker-okrs-how-startups-should-think-about-goal-setting-7be87195fadc) 1348 | - [Objectives and Key Results](https://about.gitlab.com/company/okrs/), GitLab Handbook 1349 | - [10 Tips For Using OKRs Effectively](https://rushabhdoshi.com/posts/2020-06-18-10-tips-for-making-okrs-effective/) 1350 | - Objectives must be Big and Motivating 1351 | - KRs must be measurable 1352 | - Use binary KRs sparingly 1353 | - All Key Results must have dashboards 1354 | - Key Results must be exhaustive 1355 | - Pair Metrics with Counter-Metrics 1356 | - Distinguish between Committed and Aspirational OKRs 1357 | - Cascade OKRs up, down, and laterally 1358 | - Personal OKRs are powerful 1359 | - Prefer a small number of tightly focused OKRs to a long list 1360 | - Effective OKR usage takes years 1361 | 1362 | ### Presentations, design and public speaking 1363 | 1364 | - 🎞 Garr Reynolds, [Presentation Zen Talk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZ2vtQCESpk) (Talks at Google) 1365 | - 📖 Garr Reynolds, [Presentation Zen book](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B006R4H5FG/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1) 1366 | - Garr Reynolds, [Top Ten Slide Tips](http://www.garrreynolds.com/preso-tips/design/) 1367 | - 🎤 [You suck at PowerPoint](https://www.slideshare.net/jessedee/you-suck-at-powerpoint) 1368 | - 📖 Edward Tufte, [The Visual Display of Quantitative Information](https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0961392142/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=presentatio00-20&camp=1789&creative=9325&linkCode=as2&creativeASIN=0961392142&linkId=ba73067796f2ff27685dd4a852663241), a classic book on how to present data. 1369 | - 📖 [The Non-Designer's Design Book](https://www.amazon.com/Non-Designers-Design-Book-3rd/dp/0321534042) - despite its clickbait title, it's actually a great book with a very memorable acronym to learn about how easy it is to design great documents. 1370 | - 📖 William Lidwell, Kritina Holden, Jill Butler, [Universal Principles of Design](https://www.amazon.com/Universal-Principles-Design-William-Lidwell/dp/1592530079). 1371 | - [A Five Minutes Guide to Better Typography](http://pierrickcalvez.com/journal/a-five-minutes-guide-to-better-typography) 1372 | - [Presentation Zen: Living large: "Takahashi Method" uses king-sized text as a visual](https://presentationzen.blogs.com/presentationzen/2005/09/living_large_ta.html) 1373 | - [How to tell great spoken stories](https://www.julian.com/blog/storytelling) 1374 | - Limited memorization 1375 | - Hook 1376 | - Mystery 1377 | - Climax 1378 | - Hero’s perspective 1379 | - Relive the story; blow your own mind 1380 | - Charisma is confidence, joy, and love for your audience 1381 | - Vary your speed, volume, energy, and rhythm 1382 | - Lean into silence 1383 | - Picture yourself as being happy and excited to tell this story 1384 | - [Death by PowerPoint: the slide that killed seven people](https://mcdreeamiemusings.com/blog/2019/4/13/gsux1h6bnt8lqjd7w2t2mtvfg81uhx) (see [Edward Tufte's article on this topic](https://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0001yB)) 1385 | - See also Edward Tufte's [The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint](https://www.inf.ed.ac.uk/teaching/courses/pi/2016_2017/phil/tufte-powerpoint.pdf), which includes an incredible analysis of this slide. 1386 | - [How to present to executives](https://lethain.com/present-to-executives/), Irrational Exuberance 1387 | - Never fight feedback 1388 | - Don’t evade responsibility or problems 1389 | - Don’t present a question without an answer 1390 | - Avoid academic-style presentations 1391 | - Don’t fixate on your preferred outcome 1392 | - [1 Trick to Finish Your Next Talk in Style](https://davidnihill.com/1-trick-to-finish-your-next-talk-in-style/) 1393 | - “Okay I am going to take a few questions before I make my conclusion.” 1394 | - [How to tell a great story](https://www.julian.com/blog/storytelling), Julian Shapiro 1395 | - Blow your own mind 1396 | - [How to Create, Structure, Design, Prepare and Hold a Great Presentation](https://ia.net/topics/five-canons-of-rhetoric), iA, provides a great summary for how to approach and deliver a presentation. It follows Quitilian's Five Canons of Rhetoric: 1397 | - 1. *Inventio*: developing and refining an argument. 1398 | - 2. *Dispositio*: organizing an argument for greatest effect. 1399 | - 3. *Elocutio* (style): presenting the argument. 1400 | - 4. *Memoria*: learning and memorizing the speech. 1401 | - 5. *Actio* (delivery): gestures, pronunciation, tone, and pace. 1402 | 1403 | Some great examples of presentations: 1404 | 1405 | - 🎤 [How Google Works](https://www.slideshare.net/ericschmidt/how-google-works-final-1) 1406 | 1407 | ### Prioritization 1408 | 1409 | See also the [Prioritization section on my entrepreneurship-resources list](https://github.com/charlax/entrepreneurship-resources#prioritization) 1410 | 1411 | - [How To Do Less](https://alexturek.com/2022-03-07-How-to-do-less/) 1412 | - Ordering a todo list vs. only doing the top item in the list 1413 | - Two meta-priorities: (1) keep the lights on, and make keeping them on cheaper, (2) cut the entire roadmap down to one thing at a time 1414 | - How to handle disappointment 1415 | - Say no, early and often 1416 | - How to say no 1417 | - How to correct distractions 1418 | - Maintaining flexibility: default to iterate, but be willing to invest 1419 | - [Prioritization is a Political Problem as Much as an Analytical Problem](https://www.mironov.com/pri-politics/) 1420 | - Does not work: Asking exec teams to collectively prioritize long lists of things 1421 | - Does not work: Lectures about algorithms, development processes, and staffing shortages 1422 | - Does not work: Expecting spreadsheets to prioritize for us 1423 | - Helpful: Set an explicit top-down allocation of effort across a few broad categories 1424 | - Helpful: Push every exec-level stakeholder to provide a very short, fully ordered list of their group's needs 1425 | - Helpful: Briefly recap top 3-4 products or projects every week 1426 | - Helpful: Use Now/Next/Never to frame upcoming choices 1427 | - Helpful: Define in advance what kinds of work can be realistically outsourced, and actively recruit external partners 1428 | - [TBM 245: The Magic Prioritization Trick](https://cutlefish.substack.com/p/tbm-245-the-magic-prioritization) 1429 | 1430 | ### Problem solving 1431 | 1432 | See my [professional-programming section about problem solving](https://github.com/charlax/professional-programming#problem-solving) 1433 | 1434 | ### Processes for engineering 1435 | 1436 | - [The Joel Test: 12 Steps to Better Code](http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000043.html) 1437 | - [Simple Rules Set You Free](https://art19.com/shows/friction-with-bob-sutton/episodes/772b5237-73f3-45da-b64c-06f0af95637f), from the Friction podcast with Bob Sutton 1438 | - [Constructive Chaos vs. Clusterf***s](https://art19.com/shows/friction-with-bob-sutton/episodes/7f85199b-f380-4f74-8139-b29930dd27b4), from the Friction podcast with Bob Sutton 1439 | - [Bureaucrat mode](https://andrewchen.substack.com/p/bureaucrat-mode?post%5C_id=149020613&publication%5C_id=2401262), Andrew Chen 1440 | 1441 | @samkottler: No amount of process will ensure the right work is getting done. 1442 | 1443 | ### Product management 1444 | 1445 | See also my [entrepreneurship-resource repo](https://github.com/charlax/entrepreneurship-resources). 1446 | 1447 | - [The most important thing Dropbox did to scale Product Management](https://medium.com/startup-grind/the-most-important-thing-dropbox-did-to-scale-product-management-fed90e30697e#.t5uu8idgb): a very simple model for stating the stage a product is in. 1448 | - [How Amazon Web Services (AWS) Achieved an \$11.5B Run Rate by Working Backwards](https://hitenism.com/amazon-working-backwards/): explain Amazon's product management process. 1449 | - [Bottleneck #03: Product v Engineering](https://martinfowler.com/articles/bottlenecks-of-scaleups/03-product-v-engineering.html), Martin Fowler 1450 | - Signs you are approaching a scaling bottleneck 1451 | - Identify and reinforce your “First Team” 1452 | - Define and communicate how your scaleup delivers value 1453 | - Create multidisciplinary stream-aligned teams 1454 | - Negotiate a balanced product investment mix 1455 | 1456 | ### Production and productivity 1457 | 1458 | - [The Toyota Way](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Toyota_Way), Wikipedia 1459 | - Base your management decisions on a long-term philosophy, even at the expense of short-term financial goals. 1460 | - Create a continuous process flow to bring problems to the surface. 1461 | - Use "pull" systems to avoid overproduction. 1462 | - Level out the workload 1463 | - Build a culture of stopping to fix problems, to get quality right the first time 1464 | - Standardized tasks and processes are the foundation for continuous improvement and employee empowerment. 1465 | - Use visual control so no problems are hidden. 1466 | - Use only reliable, thoroughly tested technology that serves your people and processes. 1467 | - Grow leaders who thoroughly understand the work, live the philosophy, and teach it to others. 1468 | - Develop exceptional people and teams who follow your company's philosophy. 1469 | - Respect your extended network of partners and suppliers by challenging them and helping them improve. 1470 | - Go and see for yourself to thoroughly understand the situation 1471 | - Make decisions slowly by consensus, thoroughly considering all options; implement decisions rapidly 1472 | - Become a learning organization through relentless reflection (hansei) and continuous improvement (kaizen) 1473 | - [The LinkedIn DPH Framework](https://linkedin.github.io/dph-framework/) 1474 | - Goals, Signals, and Metrics 1475 | - Developer Personas 1476 | - Common Pitfalls When Designing Metrics 1477 | - Their example: Developer Build Time (DBT), Post-Merge CI Duration, CI Determinism, Code Reviewer Response Time. 1478 | 1479 | ### Project management 1480 | 1481 | - 📖 [The Mythical Man-Month](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month) by Frederick Brooks is a classical book about software project management. 1482 | - Now I do not think software managers have less inherent courage and firmness than chefs, nor than other engineering managers. But false scheduling to match the patron's desired date is much more common in our discipline than elsewhere in engineering. 1483 | - The boss must first distinguish between action information and status information. He must discipline himself not to act on problems his managers can solve. 1484 | - Jason Yip, [It's Not Just Standing Up: Patterns for Daily Standup Meetings](http://martinfowler.com/articles/itsNotJustStandingUp.html): standup are a pretty controversial topics. This article on Martin Fowler's blog provides a good list of patterns and anti-patterns to ensure they're a good productive use of everybody's time. 1485 | - [15 Fundamental Laws of Software Development](https://www.exceptionnotfound.net/fundamental-laws-of-software-development/) 1486 | - [How we structure our work and teams at Basecamp](https://basecamp.com/articles/how-we-structure-our-teams) 1487 | - [Will your project be a success? Find out in five minutes.](https://www.projectsmart.co.uk/health-check/project-question-answer.php) 1488 | - Project Smart, [Project management tools](https://www.projectsmart.co.uk/tools.php) 1489 | - [How should deadlines be used in software engineering?](https://blog.keen.io/how-should-deadlines-be-used-in-software-engineering/) 1490 | - [My 20-Year Experience of Software Development Methodologies](https://zwischenzugs.wordpress.com/2017/10/15/my-20-year-experience-of-software-development-methodologies/): includes a great poster about different project management methodologies. 1491 | - [JIRA is an antipattern](https://techcrunch.com/2018/12/09/jira-is-an-antipattern/), Jon Evans. 1492 | - [Agile Lite: Agile without all the burnout](https://github.com/davebs/AgileLite) 1493 | - [Who are you trying to impress with your deadlines?](http://jatins.gitlab.io/me/why-deadline/) 1494 | - Deadlines set wrong expectations for what's good 1495 | - People are going to cut corners if you put them to tough deadlines. 1496 | - No one is going to experiment with new ways of doing things if you fetishize finishing under deadlines. We'd still be doing MVC in frontend apps if someone at Facebook didn't miss a deadline. 1497 | - Have deadlines, but fuzzy. How fuzzy should be decided by your goals. If missing a deadline could potentially lose you a million dollars, the fuzziness factor for that should be zero. 1498 | - [WaterfallProcess](https://martinfowler.com/bliki/WaterfallProcess.html), Martin Fowler 1499 | - [Efficient Software Project Management at its Roots](https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/efficient-software-project-management-at-its-roots/) 1500 | - The key for a successful kickoff meeting is the interactivity. 1501 | - With good milestones in place, it makes no difference whether the team uses story points, engineer-days or any other way to measure progress. 1502 | - Having a regular, no-BS update on where the team really is 1503 | - Dependency and Risk Management in a pragmatic way 1504 | - Celebrate after completion! 1505 | - [How to Lead a Project - as a Software Engineer](https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/how-to-lead-a-project-in-software-development/), Gergely Orosz 1506 | - Setup a framework for collaboration 1507 | - Communicate status to stakeholders 1508 | - Help the team focus - and don't be afraid to delegate 1509 | - The article includes a short checklist for first-time project managers: kickoff meeting, milestones, design process, weekly update emails, daily standups, weekly goals, demoing progress. 1510 | - [Directly Responsible Individuals](https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/people-group/directly-responsible-individuals/#what-is-a-directly-responsible-individual) 1511 | - [Software Estimation Is Hard. Do It Anyway](https://jacobian.org/2021/may/20/estimation/) 1512 | - [Great engineering teams focus on milestones instead of projects](https://www.rubick.com/milestones-not-projects/) 1513 | - Milestones should be small, high-quality, understandable, valuable 1514 | - We can estimate 1-3 weeks of work 1515 | - Breaking down projects helps with delivery incremental business value. 1516 | - [6 Principles for Building a World Class TPM Team](https://doordash.engineering/2021/08/02/6-principles-for-building-a-world-class-tpm-team/amp/), Sophia Vicent 1517 | - [Driving engineers to an arbitrary date is a value destroying mistake](https://iism.org/article/driving-engineers-to-an-arbitrary-date-is-a-value-destroying-mistake-49) 1518 | - [How Big Tech Runs Tech Projects and the Curious Absence of Scrum](https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/project-management-in-tech?s=r), Gergely Orosz 1519 | - [How finishing what you start makes teams more productive and predictable](https://lucasfcosta.com/2022/07/19/finish-what-you-start.html) 1520 | - [How to plan?](https://kellanem.com/notes/how-to-plan) 1521 | - Do fewer things. 1522 | - Bottom up processes don’t work. 1523 | - Planning is the wrong time to introduce anything new. 1524 | - You must provide frameworks and constraints 1525 | - Project planning has an inflection point. 1526 | - Don’t wait to kill bad ideas. 1527 | - Minimize dependencies 1528 | - Headcount planning won’t map to your plans 1529 | - Basecamp's [Shape Up: Stop Running in Circles and Ship Work that Matters](https://basecamp.com/shapeup) 1530 | - Backlogs are a big weight we don’t need to carry. (on this topic: [when you work in six week cycles, later means another time](https://x.com/jasonfried/status/1873850796359770584)) 1531 | - Important ideas come back 1532 | - Choosing the right cycle length (six weeks) 1533 | - Assign projects, not tasks 1534 | - Making bets with a capped downside (the circuit breaker) and honoring them with uninterrupted time 1535 | - Downhill versus uphill work and communicating about unknowns 1536 | - [Project Management for Software Engineers](https://sookocheff.com/post/engineering-management/project-management-for-software-engineers/): a 5-step process to running a project. 1537 | - [Rescuing a project in progress](https://world.hey.com/jason/rescuing-a-project-in-progress-d31883f7), Jason Fried 1538 | - Stop, status, selection, focus, finish, next. 1539 | 1540 | > The ultimate inspiration is the deadline. 1541 | > — Nolan Bushnell 1542 | 1543 | > You must create hilariously aggressive deadlines for yourself, otherwise, you’ll get swept away in unnecessary details that aren’t actually mission-critical. If you’re thinking about color schemes and button widths, your timeline is too long. 1544 | > – Tara Viswanathan 1545 | 1546 | #### Estimating work (project management) 1547 | 1548 | - [Yes, You Should Estimate Software Projects](https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/yes-you-should-estimate/), Gergely Orosz 1549 | - [Cut Out Time Estimates on Roadmaps: Get Into a Product Delivery Rhythm](https://www.honeycomb.io/blog/product-strategy-and-roadmap-timing/) 1550 | - [Hacks for engineering estimates](https://www.shubhro.com/2022/01/30/hacks-engineering-estimates/) 1551 | - Estimate: prediction of how long a project will take 1552 | - Target: statement of a desirable business objective 1553 | - Commitment: promise to deliver defined functionality by a certain date 1554 | - Plan: steps to achieve a particular result 1555 | - Identify the extremes (latest/soonest) 1556 | - Note the precision (weeks? days? hours?) 1557 | - Ask for confidence level over time 1558 | - [Ask HN: How do you deal with managers/customers questioning your estimates?](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32056969) 1559 | - Call it a forecast, not an estimate. 1560 | - Supply confidence intervals 1561 | - Show compassion 1562 | - Offer solutions 1563 | - Try this tool: https://estigator.mozz.app/app/ 1564 | - [SomeEstimates](https://www.shaiyallin.com/post/someestimates) 1565 | 1566 | ### Quality 1567 | 1568 | See also my [professional-programming repo](https://github.com/charlax/professional-programming) 1569 | 1570 | - [The code quality pyramid](https://www.fabianzeindl.com/posts/the-codequality-pyramid) 1571 | - [Time for a Code-Yellow?: A Blunt Instrument That Works](https://nilam.ca/2024/11/02/time-for-a-code-yellow-a-blunt-instrument-that-works/) 1572 | 1573 | ### Release management 1574 | 1575 | - [The Tick-Tock of Apple](https://512pixels.net/2012/02/the-tick-tock-of-apple/) 1576 | 1577 | ### Remote teams 1578 | 1579 | - [How to Work Faster in a Remote Team](https://zapier.com/learn/remote-work/remote-work-productivity/) 1580 | - Notion, [Remote work wiki](https://www.notion.so/Remote-work-wiki-1b21ef5501714fffa9f5c5c25677371f) 1581 | - Gitlab, [Remote work emergency plan: What to do (and where to start)](https://about.gitlab.com/company/culture/all-remote/remote-work-emergency-plan/) 1582 | - [A guide to distributed teams](https://increment.com/teams/a-guide-to-distributed-teams/), Increment: Teams. 1583 | - [The ultimate guide to remote work](https://zapier.com/learn/remote-work/), Zapier. Includes topics such as: 1584 | - How to brainstorm remotely 1585 | - Remote team activities: how to have fun when you work from home 1586 | - The best online whiteboards 1587 | 1588 | ### RFCs (request for comments) 1589 | 1590 | - [Scaling Engineering Teams via Writing Things Down and Sharing - aka RFCs](https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/scaling-engineering-teams-via-writing-things-down-rfcs/), Gergely Orosz 1591 | - Do planning before building something new. 1592 | - If everyone agrees how the project should be done then writing the approach down should be a piece of cake. 1593 | - The type of information pushed to people in an organization shapes the culture considerably. 1594 | - [Lightweight RFC Process](https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/GEODE/Lightweight+RFC+Process), Apache Software Foundation 1595 | - [6 Lessons I learned while implementing technical RFCs as a decision making tool](https://buriti.ca/6-lessons-i-learned-while-implementing-technical-rfcs-as-a-management-tool-34687dbf46cb) 1596 | - [A thorough team guide to RFCs.](https://buriti.ca/a-thorough-team-guide-to-rfcs-8aa14f8e757c) 1597 | - [Design Docs at Google](https://www.industrialempathy.com/posts/design-docs-at-google/) 1598 | 1599 | ### Scaling an organization 1600 | 1601 | - [Scaling Without Imploding](https://hackernoon.com/scaling-without-imploding-79b46a91ac63) 1602 | - [Stripe Atlas: Guide to scaling engineering organizations](https://stripe.com/atlas/guides/scaling-eng) 1603 | 1604 | ### Second level manager (2LM) 1605 | 1606 | - [Managing Your Time as a Middle Manager](https://newsletter.canopy.is/p/managing-your-time-as-a-middle-manager) 1607 | 1608 | ### Security 1609 | 1610 | - [The SaaS CTO Security Checklist Redux](https://www.goldfiglabs.com/guide/saas-cto-security-checklist/) 1611 | - [Does Your Organization Have a Security.txt File?](https://krebsonsecurity.com/2021/09/does-your-organization-have-a-security-txt-file/), Krebs on Security 1612 | - [SOC2: The Screenshots Will Continue Until Security Improves](https://fly.io/blog/soc2-the-screenshots-will-continue-until-security-improves/) 1613 | 1614 | ### Soft skills, Emotional Quotient (EQ) 1615 | 1616 | - [Those 20 Key Habits that Hold You Back](http://coachingfeedforward.blogspot.com/2010/07/those-20-key-habits-that-hold-you-back.html) 1617 | - [How to Deal with Difficult People on Software Projects](https://www.howtodeal.dev/) 1618 | - [Leadership Soft Skills: Master Your Own Mind to Lead Your Team to Success](https://codingsans.com/blog/leadership-soft-skills) 1619 | - The importance of soft skills in engineering leadership 1620 | - Process to improving leadership soft skills 1621 | - Practices to fine-tune leadership soft skills 1622 | - Helping direct reports improve leadership soft skills 1623 | - Emphasizing leadership soft skills in your culture 1624 | 1625 | ### Storytelling 1626 | 1627 | See Presentation 1628 | 1629 | ### Strategy 1630 | 1631 | See also: [Strategy section on charlax/entrepreneurship-resources](https://github.com/charlax/entrepreneurship-resources#strategy) 1632 | 1633 | Shameless plug here, two presentations I contributed to: 1634 | 1635 | - 🎤 [Amazon: the hidden empire](http://www.slideshare.net/faberNovel/amazoncom-the-hidden-empire) 1636 | - 🎤 [Apple: 8 easy steps to beat Microsoft](http://www.slideshare.net/faberNovel/apple-study-8-easy-steps-to-beat-microsoft-and-google) 1637 | - [Michael Porter's generic strategies](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porter%27s_generic_strategies) (Wikipedia) 1638 | - [Steve Jobs explaining why you should start from the customers, and go backward](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FF-tKLISfPE) (video 🎞). He makes the point that stopping the OpenDoc project was the right thing to do because it was a technology without any customer. 1639 | - [Can Do Vs Must Do](http://avc.com/2017/05/can-do-vs-must-do/) , AVC. "Doing a startup is like playing a video game. Each level requires you to master one thing and once you do that, you level up and then there is a new thing to master." 1640 | - "Waterline principle" from Bill Gore: "Think of being on a ship, and imagine that any decision gone bad will blow a hole in the side of the ship. If you blow a hole above the waterline (where the ship won’t take on water and possibly sink), you can patch the hole, learn from the experience, and sail on. But if you blow a hole below the waterline, you can find yourself facing gushers of water pouring in, pulling you toward the ocean floor. And if it’s a big enough hole, you might go down really fast, just like some of the financial firm catastrophes of 2008. To be clear, great enterprises do make big bets, but they avoid big bets that could blow holes below the waterline.", How We Might Fall. 1641 | - [Write five, then synthesize: good engineering strategy is boring](https://lethain.com/good-engineering-strategy-is-boring/), Will Larson. 1642 | - [Is engineering strategy useful?](https://lethain.com/is-engineering-strategy-useful/), Will Larson 1643 | - [Do not start by changing the culture to drive the improvements, follow it first](https://learnings.aleixmorgadas.dev/p/do-not-start-by-changing-the-culture) 1644 | 1645 | ### Survey 1646 | 1647 | - [Using cultural survey data.](https://lethain.com/using-cultural-survey-data/), Will Larson 1648 | 1649 | ### Talent management 1650 | 1651 | - [Your company needs Junior devs](https://softwaredoug.com/blog/2024/09/07/your-team-needs-juniors) 1652 | - Junior Talent forces your team to teach, coach, collaborate 1653 | - Knowledge discovery IS innovation 1654 | - The “Protege effect” is a well studied phenomenon where the teacher’s knowledge deepens when required to teach. 1655 | - Generalists innovate better than specialists 1656 | - Juniors mean psychological safety means more innovation 1657 | - Your org suffers from not hiring juniors 1658 | 1659 | ### Team vision 1660 | 1661 | "Starting with the why" is one of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People's best chapters. 1662 | 1663 | - Seth Godin, [A manifesto for small teams doing important work](http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2016/02/a-manifesto-for-small-teams-doing-important-work.html): really inspiring list of short cultural values for a team. Craft your own! 1664 | - Seth Godin, [Big questions before little ones](http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2016/03/big-questions-before-little-ones.html) 1665 | - 🎞 [Focusing is about saying no](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H8eP99neOVs) (Steve Jobs) 1666 | - 🎞 [Vision is about perseverance](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gFE-Tdz24hM) (Steve Jobs) 1667 | - 🎞 Bryan Cantrill (Joyent VP of Eng) about the [importance of why](https://youtu.be/1KeYzjILqDo?t=649). 1668 | - The primary motivator is mission and purpose. Software development is about delivering utility to humanity. 1669 | - The soul is what motivates. You need to be able to explain the "why". 1670 | - 🎞 Steve Jobs on the [same topic](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JayWnYq9zks). 1671 | - Focus on the gems. 1672 | - 🎞 [Start with why](https://www.ted.com/talks/simon_sinek_how_great_leaders_inspire_action?language=en), TED talk by Simon Sinek. 1673 | - 🎤 [Insist on Focus](https://www.youtube.com/watch?index=9&list=PL__mLVkEYIvwv61O6ohmAv2rE2X8ScP7b&v=fcohHIJr6Ns&ab_channel=Nugget), Keith Rabois 1674 | - The reason why this [forcing people to focus and work on only one important problem] was such a successful strategy is that most people tend to substitute from A+ problems that are very difficult to solve to B+ problems for which they already know a solution to. 1675 | - [Six critical questions every organization must answer](https://www.navigatethejourney.com/blog/2016/08/15/six-critical-questions-every-organization-must-answer) (from Patrick Lencioni's The Advantage) 1676 | 1677 | ### Technical strategy 1678 | 1679 | - Joel Spolsky, [Things You Should Never Do, Part I](http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html): Joel explains why (according to him) you should never rewrite a codebase. 1680 | - 🎤 [Choose Boring Technology](http://mcfunley.com/choose-boring-technology-slides), Dan McKinley. 1681 | - [Stevey's Google Platforms Rant](https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611): how Amazon became a platform. 1682 | - [Letter to Shareholders](https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1018724/000119312517120198/d373368dex991.htm), Jeff Bezos: “Day 2 is stasis. Followed by irrelevance. Followed by excruciating, painful decline. Followed by death. And that is why it is always Day 1.” So much is packed in this letter. Day 1 is about true customer obsession, resisting proxies, embracing external trends, high-velocity decision making. 1683 | - [5 Red Flags Signaling Your Rebuild Will Fail](https://www.pkc.io/blog/five-red-flags-signaling-your-rebuild-will-fail/) 1684 | - [Polyglot programming in startup environments](https://medium.com/@FarisZacina/polyglot-startup-environments-1211b93615d5) 1685 | - Never introduce a new programming language in an existing code-base because of personal preference. Building software is a team effort. Globalize your code languages. Team cohesion is what matters the most. 1686 | - You must have production experience in the programming language you want to replace or complement with another one 1687 | - A decision to introduce a new programming language must be based on non-functional requirements, measurements or other relevant arguments, and not personal opinions. 1688 | - Always think about the team and company, and especially about hiring and expanding the team. 1689 | - A programming language is just a tool to deliver software. Don’t be in a tight relationship with your screwdriver. 1690 | - [Tech Migrations, the Spotify Way](https://engineering.atspotify.com/2020/06/25/tech-migrations-the-spotify-way/) 1691 | - Ruthlessly prioritize 1692 | - Product-ify migrations: accountability, test first, train, lead with value, KYC, gamify 1693 | - Automate, automate, and move up the stack! 1694 | - [hwayne/awesome-cold-showers](https://github.com/hwayne/awesome-cold-showers): for when people get too hyped up about things 1695 | - [IT Software Engineering Principles](http://engineering-principles.onejl.uk/) 1696 | - [Leading With Confidence: How Engineering Managers Can Avoid Technical Decay](https://betterprogramming.pub/leading-with-confidence-how-engineering-managers-can-avoid-technical-decay-17653d115938) 1697 | - Ask for More Details From Individual Contributors About Their Challenges 1698 | - Establish Sessions for Knowledge Sharing and Solicit the Sharing of Recent Experiences 1699 | - Implement the Practice of Doing Side Projects 1700 | - Follow the Engineer/Manager Pendulum Career Path 1701 | 1702 | ### Team culture 1703 | 1704 | - [Lessons from 7 highly successful software engineering cultures](https://techbeacon.com/lessons-7-highly-successful-software-engineering-cultures) 1705 | - [Engineering a culture of psychological safety](https://blog.intercom.com/psychological-safety/) 1706 | - [Culture Eats Strategy For Breakfast](https://techcrunch.com/2014/04/12/culture-eats-strategy-for-breakfast/) 1707 | - [Habits of High-Functioning Teams](https://deniseyu.io/2020/05/23/habits-of-high-performing-teams.html) 1708 | - High Psychological Safety 1709 | - Good hygiene practices 1710 | - Active redistribution of “experience points” 1711 | - Communicating generously 1712 | - [Principles trump processes](https://www.jjude.com/principles-trumps) 1713 | - [Brilliant Jerks in Engineering](https://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2017-11-13/brilliant-jerks.html) 1714 | - The selfless brilliant jerk 1715 | - The selfish brilliant jerk 1716 | - Problems causes by brilliant jerks 1717 | - Dealing with brilliant jerks 1718 | - Includes lots of resources and practical questions! 1719 | 1720 | Those are considered classics: 1721 | 1722 | - [Valve Employee Handbook](http://www.valvesoftware.com/company/Valve_Handbook_LowRes.pdf) 1723 | - 🎤 [Netflix Culture Deck](http://www.slideshare.net/reed2001/culture-1798664) 1724 | - [Gitlab's employee handbook](https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/) (includes cultural values) 1725 | - [The HubSpot Culture Code: Creating a Company We Love](http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/34234/The-HubSpot-Culture-Code-Creating-a-Company-We-Love.aspx) 1726 | - [Don’t pave the path used by the unhappy cows](https://medium.com/@kellan/dont-pave-the-path-used-by-the-unhappy-cows-fef7a78777f8#.mtw3s2h1v) 1727 | - [Amazon's leadership principles](https://www.amazon.jobs/principles) 1728 | 1729 | [culturecodes](http://culturecodes.co/) is a repository of culture deck from companies (including the ones above). 1730 | 1731 | Engineering values: 1732 | 1733 | - [Engineering Values. A letter to the Medium Engineering…](https://medium.engineering/engineering-values-7143c0db0bd6) 1734 | - Professional & personal growth is more important than team stability 1735 | - Everyone is a mentor; human connection is the path to bringing out the best in people 1736 | - Excellent teams require diversity & inclusiveness 1737 | - Good leaders are active and supportive 1738 | - Good engineers are rigorous and resolute 1739 | - Pursuit of greatness is a virtue 1740 | - [Engineering Values at Lullabot](https://www.lullabot.com/engineering-values) 1741 | - People matter more 1742 | - Cultivate inclusivity 1743 | - Learn and share 1744 | - Excellence balances perfect and done 1745 | - Code for the future 1746 | - Work joy into work 1747 | - [Figma's engineering values](https://www.figma.com/blog/figmas-engineering-values/) 1748 | - Communicate early and often 1749 | - Lift your team 1750 | - Craftsmanship 1751 | - Prioritize impact 1752 | - [HubSpot’s Engineering Values](https://product.hubspot.com/blog/hubspots-engineering-values) 1753 | - Customers Come First 1754 | - Complacency Equals Failure 1755 | - Think Like an Owner 1756 | - Move Quickly & Iterate 1757 | - Small Teams Win 1758 | - Keep It Simple 1759 | - Embrace Organizational Change 1760 | - Scale Each Other 1761 | - [Our engineering values at Wise](https://www.wise.jobs/2020/10/27/transferwise-engineering-values/) 1762 | - Ship often. Learn. Iterate. Have impact. 1763 | - Be replaceable — single ownership is no ownership. 1764 | - Move fast, but build for tomorrow. 1765 | - Strong opinions, weakly held, openly shared. 1766 | - Raise the bar — for yourself and your team. 1767 | 1768 | ### Team dynamics 1769 | 1770 | - [Shields Down](https://randsinrepose.com/archives/shields-down/), Rands in Repose 1771 | - Boredom in its many forms is a major contributor to resignations, but the truth is the list of contributing factors to shield weakening is immense. 1772 | - Every moment as a leader is an opportunity to either strengthen or weaken shields. 1773 | 1774 | ### Training 1775 | 1776 | - [Great developers are raised, not hired](https://sizovs.net/2019/04/10/the-best-developers-are-raised-not-hired/) 1777 | - Take some money, energy, time that you spend on recruiting and invest it in teaching your best developers mentoring skills. 1778 | - Adjust your interview process and give a chance to candidates that are not good enough yet, but are eager to learn and have a growth mindset. 1779 | - Relax “hard requirements” in your job ads to avoid filtering out impostors. 1780 | - [“Sharing Interesting Stuff”: A simple yet powerful management tool](https://medium.com/shipup-blog/sharing-interesting-stuff-a-simple-yet-powerful-management-tool-771d3c2b39b7) 1781 | - Your direct report sends you something they consider worth sharing with you (can be a blog post, book chapter, video, podcast…) and a few related questions they have in mind a few days before you meet together. 1782 | - On the D day, you share your opinion about it and try to answer the questions that go with it. 1783 | - You switch roles for the next session. 1784 | - [Introduce Team G Morning Learning Sessions to Coach the Growth Mindset](https://philippe.bourgau.net/growth-mindset-coaching-turn-remote-work-commutes-into-team-learning/) 1785 | - Meet every morning for 30 minutes. Spend 20 minutes studying and 10 minutes sharing what you have learned. 1786 | - [Your Startup’s Management Training Probably Sucks — Here’s How to Make it Better](https://review.firstround.com/your-startups-management-training-probably-sucks-heres-how-to-make-it-better), First Round Review 1787 | - People often think they don’t like management training. But what they’re really saying is “I don’t like shitty management training.” 1788 | - Mistake: only training new managers 1789 | - Snacks are good for the kitchen. They’re less useful for leadership lessons. 1790 | - 4 topics every manager training should include: 1791 | - Goal setting 1792 | - Talent management 1793 | - Org planning 1794 | - Leadership & culture development 1795 | 1796 | ### Trust 1797 | 1798 | > The best new ideas always have unanticipated benefits. So it's stupid to require people who want to do new things to enumerate the benefits beforehand. The best you can do is choose smart people and then trust their intuitions about what's worth exploring. 1799 | > 1800 | > — Paul Graham https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1619753568264921089 1801 | 1802 | ### Work ethics & work/life balance 1803 | 1804 | - [The Virtues of Laziness and Impatience](http://www.elidedbranches.com/2016/06/the-virtues-of-laziness-and-impatience.html): "there are two areas I encourage you to practice showing, right now: figuring out what’s important, and going home." 1805 | - [Lazy Leadership](https://medium.com/the-modern-team/lazy-leadership-8ba19e34f959#.bwcfjz5ac): "entrepreneurship is really just a fancy word for delegation". 1806 | - [Your non-linear problem of 90% utilization](https://blog.asmartbear.com/utilization.html), Jason Cohen: why constantly running at 90% utilization is actually counter-productive. 1807 | - [Evidence-based advice on how to be successful in any jobs](https://80000hours.org/career-guide/how-to-be-successful/): most self-help advices are not research-based. The ones listed in this article are. 1808 | 1809 | ### Workshop facilitation 1810 | 1811 | - [List of workshop facilitation methods](https://cynefin.io/wiki/List_of_methods#Facilitation) 1812 | - [Ritual dissent](https://cynefin.io/wiki/Ritual_dissent) 1813 | - [Triopticon](https://cynefin.io/wiki/Triopticon) 1814 | - [Future backwards](https://cynefin.io/wiki/Future_backwards) 1815 | 1816 | ### Writing 1817 | 1818 | ➡️ See also my [professional-programming list](https://github.com/charlax/professional-programming#writing) 1819 | 1820 | See also the RFCs section. 1821 | 1822 | - [The 7 Emails You Need to Know How to Write](http://unreasonable.is/the-7-emails-you-need-to-know-how-to-write/) 1823 | - [The Inverted Pyramid](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_pyramid) or [BLUF (bottom line up front)]() (Wikipedia): a method to prioritize and structure information in a text. 1824 | - [How to say you’re sorry](https://m.signalvnoise.com/how-to-say-youre-sorry-1c3477c33c89#.7xxja07ae), Jason Fried (Founder & CEO Basecamp) 1825 | - [How to write with style](http://www.novelr.com/2008/08/16/vonnegut-how-to-write-with-style), Kurt Vonnegut. 1826 | - [A blogging style guide](https://robertheaton.com/2018/12/06/a-blogging-style-guide/) 1827 | - [How Jeff Bezos turned narrative into Amazon's Competitive Advantage](https://slab.com/blog/jeff-bezos-writing-management-strategy/) 1828 | - [Writing is Thinking: Learning to Write with Confidence](https://blog.stephsmith.io/learning-to-write-with-confidence/) 1829 | - Paul Graham, [How to Write Usefully](http://paulgraham.com/useful.html) 1830 | - Useful writing tells people something true and important that they didn't already know, and tells them as unequivocally as possible. 1831 | - Translated into essay writing, what this means is that if you write a bad sentence, you don't publish it. You delete it and try again. Often you abandon whole branches of four or five paragraphs. Sometimes a whole essay. 1832 | - Importance + novelty + correctness + strength, is the recipe for a good essay 1833 | - [Encouraging a Culture of Written Communication](https://www.mcls.io/blog/encouraging-a-culture-of-written-communication) 1834 | - Easy to Search. Single Source of Truth. 1835 | - Balancing Async and Synchronous Communication 1836 | - Thinking Out Loud 1837 | - [Design Docs at Google](https://www.industrialempathy.com/posts/design-docs-at-google/) 1838 | - [How to Write Something Compelling](https://letter.substack.com/p/write-like-naval?utm_source=url) 1839 | - If you want to design something attractive, you have to add an axis to your creative process. You have to make the ideas simple and universal at the same time. 1840 | - [What I think about when I edit](https://evaparish.com/blog/how-i-edit) 1841 | - Decide what you’re actually saying 1842 | - Repeat yourself (within reason) 1843 | - Eliminate passive voice 1844 | - Don't use adverbs 1845 | - Make use of whitespace 1846 | 1847 | ## Other sources 1848 | 1849 | ### Other lists 1850 | 1851 | - 🧰 [92bondstreet/cto](https://github.com/92bondstreet/cto): a curated list of CTO resources 1852 | - 🧰 [mateusz-brainhub/awesome-cto-resources](https://github.com/mateusz-brainhub/awesome-cto-resources): a community-curated list of awesome resources to help you grow as a CTO 1853 | - [kuchin/awesome-cto](https://github.com/kuchin/awesome-cto) 1854 | - [ryanburgess/engineer-manager](https://github.com/ryanburgess/engineer-manager) 1855 | 1856 | ### Movies 1857 | 1858 | - 🎞 [Moneyball](). [What's the problem?](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HiB9L3dG-Aw) 1859 | - 🎞 [Office Space](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Space) 1860 | - 🎞 [The Pursuit of Happyness](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pursuit_of_Happyness) contains some great lessons about hustle. [Watch the interview scene](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gHXKitKAT1E). 1861 | 1862 | ### TV Shows 1863 | 1864 | Netflix's [Chef's table](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chef%27s_Table) profiles a couple world-renown chef. The kitchen world bears a lot of similarities with management. In the season two, I especially recommend episode 1 and 3: 1865 | 1866 | - [Alex Atala](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_Atala)'s story shows that you need to constantly reinvent and disrupt yourself. 1867 | - [Dominique Crenn](http://www.ateliercrenn.com/) explains how she was given ownership over her work in her first kitchen experience (where she was basically given just a dish name, a list of ingredients, and was expected to invent the recipe with no kitchen training). She replicated that in her own kitchen. 1868 | 1869 | The Office is a great satire of a dysfunctioning office. 1870 | 1871 | ## Keeping up-to-date: blogs and newsletters 1872 | 1873 | Here are some blogs and newsletter I follow. 1874 | 1875 | ### Newsletter 1876 | 1877 | - [Software Lead Weekly](http://softwareleadweekly.com/) (Oren Ellenbogen): a short curation of great management articles. Also include some videos, and some less serious, funny material. A lot of the links founds in this repo appeared in Oren's weekly email. 1878 | - [HBR's Management Tip of the Day](https://hbr.org/email-newsletters) 1879 | - [Tech People Leadership](http://newsletter.techpeopleleadership.com/) (Joe Dunn): Links, notes and opinions for leaders in the tech industry. 1880 | - [CTO Insights](https://insights.toshotrajanov.com/) (Tosho Trajanov): Weekly readings on software engineering & technical leadership. 1881 | 1882 | ### Blogs 1883 | 1884 | - [Hacker News](https://news.ycombinator.com/): mandatory if you want to stay abreast of what's going in tech. There are some good management articles from time to time as well. Since it can be a pretty huge time sink, I subscribe to a curation of the top articles instead ([RSS feed here](http://www.daemonology.net/hn-daily/index.rss)). 1885 | 1886 | ### Podcast 1887 | 1888 | - [FRICTION with Bob Sutton](https://art19.com/shows/friction-with-bob-sutton?page=3). This podcast does not have any new episode since 2017, but it has some really great content. Great conversations. Lots of stories. 1889 | - Part organizational design. Part therapy. Organizational psychologist and Stanford Professor Bob Sutton is back to tackle friction, the phenomenon that frustrates employees, fatigues teams and causes organizations to flounder and fail. 1890 | 1891 | ## My other lists 1892 | 1893 | - [engineering-management](https://github.com/charlax/engineering-management/) 1894 | - [entrepreneurship-resources](https://github.com/charlax/entrepreneurship-resources) 1895 | - [professional-programming](https://github.com/charlax/professional-programming) 1896 | - [python-education](https://github.com/charlax/python-education) 1897 | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- /articles/mistakes_25_years.md: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1 | 2 | 3 | # Table of Contents 4 | 5 | - [Mistakes of the First Twenty-five Years (A Condensed Version)](#mistakes-of-the-first-twenty-five-years-a-condensed-version) 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | # Mistakes of the First Twenty-five Years (A Condensed Version) 10 | 11 | *[Full text here](http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/1989.html)* 12 | 13 | To quote Robert Benchley, "Having a dog teaches a boy 14 | fidelity, perseverance, and to turn around three times before 15 | lying down." Such are the shortcomings of experience. 16 | Nevertheless, it's a good idea to review past mistakes before 17 | committing new ones. So let's take a quick look at the last 25 18 | years. 19 | 20 | My first mistake, of course, was in buying control of 21 | Berkshire. Though I knew its business - textile manufacturing - 22 | to be unpromising, I was enticed to buy because the price looked 23 | cheap. Stock purchases of that kind had proved reasonably 24 | rewarding in my early years, though by the time Berkshire came 25 | along in 1965 I was becoming aware that the strategy was not 26 | ideal. 27 | 28 | If you buy a stock at a sufficiently low price, there will 29 | usually be some hiccup in the fortunes of the business that gives 30 | you a chance to unload at a decent profit, even though the long- 31 | term performance of the business may be terrible. I call this the 32 | "cigar butt" approach to investing. A cigar butt found on the 33 | street that has only one puff left in it may not offer much of a 34 | smoke, but the "bargain purchase" will make that puff all profit. 35 | 36 | Unless you are a liquidator, that kind of approach to buying 37 | businesses is foolish. First, the original "bargain" price 38 | probably will not turn out to be such a steal after all. In a 39 | difficult business, no sooner is one problem solved than another 40 | surfaces - never is there just one cockroach in the kitchen. 41 | Second, any initial advantage you secure will be quickly eroded 42 | by the low return that the business earns. For example, if you 43 | buy a business for $8 million that can be sold or liquidated for 44 | $10 million and promptly take either course, you can realize a 45 | high return. But the investment will disappoint if the business 46 | is sold for $10 million in ten years and in the interim has 47 | annually earned and distributed only a few percent on cost. Time 48 | is the friend of the wonderful business, the enemy of the 49 | mediocre. 50 | 51 | You might think this principle is obvious, but I had to 52 | learn it the hard way - in fact, I had to learn it several times 53 | over. Shortly after purchasing Berkshire, I acquired a Baltimore 54 | department store, Hochschild Kohn, buying through a company 55 | called Diversified Retailing that later merged with Berkshire. I 56 | bought at a substantial discount from book value, the people were 57 | first-class, and the deal included some extras - unrecorded real 58 | estate values and a significant LIFO inventory cushion. How could 59 | I miss? So-o-o - three years later I was lucky to sell the 60 | business for about what I had paid. After ending our corporate 61 | marriage to Hochschild Kohn, I had memories like those of the 62 | husband in the country song, "My Wife Ran Away With My Best 63 | Friend and I Still Miss Him a Lot." 64 | 65 | I could give you other personal examples of "bargain- 66 | purchase" folly but I'm sure you get the picture: It's far 67 | better to buy a wonderful company at a fair price than a fair 68 | company at a wonderful price. Charlie understood this early; I 69 | was a slow learner. But now, when buying companies or common 70 | stocks, we look for first-class businesses accompanied by first- 71 | class managements. 72 | 73 | That leads right into a related lesson: Good jockeys will 74 | do well on good horses, but not on broken-down nags. Both 75 | Berkshire's textile business and Hochschild, Kohn had able and 76 | honest people running them. The same managers employed in a 77 | business with good economic characteristics would have achieved 78 | fine records. But they were never going to make any progress 79 | while running in quicksand. 80 | 81 | I've said many times that when a management with a 82 | reputation for brilliance tackles a business with a reputation 83 | for bad economics, it is the reputation of the business that 84 | remains intact. I just wish I hadn't been so energetic in 85 | creating examples. My behavior has matched that admitted by Mae 86 | West: "I was Snow White, but I drifted." 87 | 88 | A further related lesson: Easy does it. After 25 years of 89 | buying and supervising a great variety of businesses, Charlie and 90 | I have not learned how to solve difficult business problems. What 91 | we have learned is to avoid them. To the extent we have been 92 | successful, it is because we concentrated on identifying one-foot 93 | hurdles that we could step over rather than because we acquired 94 | any ability to clear seven-footers. 95 | 96 | The finding may seem unfair, but in both business and 97 | investments it is usually far more profitable to simply stick 98 | with the easy and obvious than it is to resolve the difficult. On 99 | occasion, tough problems must be tackled as was the case when we 100 | started our Sunday paper in Buffalo. In other instances, a great 101 | investment opportunity occurs when a marvelous business 102 | encounters a one-time huge, but solvable, problem as was the case 103 | many years back at both American Express and GEICO. Overall, 104 | however, we've done better by avoiding dragons than by slaying 105 | them. 106 | 107 | My most surprising discovery: the overwhelming importance in 108 | business of an unseen force that we might call "the institutional 109 | imperative." In business school, I was given no hint of the 110 | imperative's existence and I did not intuitively understand it 111 | when I entered the business world. I thought then that decent, 112 | intelligent, and experienced managers would automatically make 113 | rational business decisions. But I learned over time that isn't 114 | so. Instead, rationality frequently wilts when the institutional 115 | imperative comes into play. 116 | 117 | For example: (1) As if governed by Newton's First Law of 118 | Motion, an institution will resist any change in its current 119 | direction; (2) Just as work expands to fill available time, 120 | corporate projects or acquisitions will materialize to soak up 121 | available funds; (3) Any business craving of the leader, however 122 | foolish, will be quickly supported by detailed rate-of-return and 123 | strategic studies prepared by his troops; and (4) The behavior of 124 | peer companies, whether they are expanding, acquiring, setting 125 | executive compensation or whatever, will be mindlessly imitated. 126 | 127 | Institutional dynamics, not venality or stupidity, set 128 | businesses on these courses, which are too often misguided. After 129 | making some expensive mistakes because I ignored the power of the 130 | imperative, I have tried to organize and manage Berkshire in ways 131 | that minimize its influence. Furthermore, Charlie and I have 132 | attempted to concentrate our investments in companies that appear 133 | alert to the problem. 134 | 135 | After some other mistakes, I learned to go into business 136 | only with people whom I like, trust, and admire. As I noted 137 | before, this policy of itself will not ensure success: A second- 138 | class textile or department-store company won't prosper simply 139 | because its managers are men that you would be pleased to see 140 | your daughter marry. However, an owner - or investor - can 141 | accomplish wonders if he manages to associate himself with such 142 | people in businesses that possess decent economic 143 | characteristics. Conversely, we do not wish to join with managers 144 | who lack admirable qualities, no matter how attractive the 145 | prospects of their business. We've never succeeded in making a 146 | good deal with a bad person. 147 | 148 | Some of my worst mistakes were not publicly visible. These 149 | were stock and business purchases whose virtues I understood and 150 | yet didn't make. It's no sin to miss a great opportunity outside 151 | one's area of competence. But I have passed on a couple of really 152 | big purchases that were served up to me on a platter and that I 153 | was fully capable of understanding. For Berkshire's shareholders, 154 | myself included, the cost of this thumb-sucking has been huge. 155 | 156 | Our consistently-conservative financial policies may appear 157 | to have been a mistake, but in my view were not. In retrospect, 158 | it is clear that significantly higher, though still conventional, 159 | leverage ratios at Berkshire would have produced considerably 160 | better returns on equity than the 23.8% we have actually 161 | averaged. Even in 1965, perhaps we could have judged there to be 162 | a 99% probability that higher leverage would lead to nothing but 163 | good. Correspondingly, we might have seen only a 1% chance that 164 | some shock factor, external or internal, would cause a 165 | conventional debt ratio to produce a result falling somewhere 166 | between temporary anguish and default. 167 | 168 | We wouldn't have liked those 99:1 odds - and never will. A 169 | small chance of distress or disgrace cannot, in our view, be 170 | offset by a large chance of extra returns. If your actions are 171 | sensible, you are certain to get good results; in most such 172 | cases, leverage just moves things along faster. Charlie and I 173 | have never been in a big hurry: We enjoy the process far more 174 | than the proceeds - though we have learned to live with those 175 | also. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- /glossary.md: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | # Table of Contents 5 | 6 | - [Glossary](#glossary) 7 | - [To merge](#to-merge) 8 | - [Concepts](#concepts) 9 | - [S](#s) 10 | - [SMART](#smart) 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | # Glossary 15 | 16 | ## To merge 17 | 18 | ## Concepts 19 | 20 | - [Availability heuristic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Availability_heuristic): "a mental shortcut that relies on immediate examples that come to a given person's mind when evaluating a specific topic, concept, method or decision" (Wikipedia). 21 | - [Bias blind spot](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bias_blind_spot): "recognizing the impact of biases on the judgement of others, while failing to see the impact of biases on one's own judgement" (Wikipedia). 22 | - [Broken window theory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_windows_theory) 23 | - [Brooks' law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooks%E2%80%99_law): "adding manpower to a late software project makes it later" (Wikipedia). 24 | - [Bystander effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bystander_effect): "cases in which individuals do not offer any means of help to a victim when other people are present. The probability of help is inversely related to the number of bystanders." (Wikipedia). 25 | - [Cognitive dissonance](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance): "discomfort experienced by an individual who holds two or more contradictory beliefs, ideas, or values at the same time" (Wikipedia). 26 | - [Conceptual integrity](http://architecture.typepad.com/architecture_blog/2011/10/the-importance-of-conceptual-integrity.html): "It is better to have a system omit certain anomalous features and improvements, but to reflect one set of design ideas, than to have one that contains many good but independent and uncoordinated ideas." (Fred 27 | - [Confirmation bias](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias): "the tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that confirms one's preexisting beliefs or hypotheses, while giving disproportionately less consideration to alternative possibilities" (Wikipedia). 28 | - [Conway's law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law): "organizations which design systems ... are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations". [Read the original paper](http://www.melconway.com/Home/Committees_Paper.html) 29 | - [Déformation professionnelle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%C3Tuesday9formation_professionnelle): "tendency to look at things from the point of view of one's own profession rather than from a broader perspective" (Wikipedia). 30 | - [Dominant design](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominant_design): "the one that wins the allegiance of the marketplace, the one that competitors and innovators must adhere to if they hope to command significant market following" (Wikipedia). 31 | - [Dunning–Kruger effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect): "cognitive bias in which relatively unskilled persons suffer illusory superiority, mistakenly assessing their ability to be much higher than it really is" (Wikipedia) 32 | - [Fundamental attribution error](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error): "the tendency for people to place an undue emphasis on internal characteristics (personality) to explain someone else's behavior in a given situation rather than considering the situation's external factors" (Wikipedia). 33 | - [Halo effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halo_effect): "an observer's overall impression of a person, company, brand, or product influences the observer's feelings and thoughts about that entity's character or properties" (Wikipedia). 34 | - [Hanlon's law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor): "never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity" (Wikipedia). 35 | - [Hindsight bias](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindsight_bias): "the inclination, after an event has occurred, to see the event as having been predictable, despite there having been little or no objective basis for predicting it" (Wikipedia). 36 | - [Hofstadter's Law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hofstadter%27s_law): "it always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law" (Wikipedia). 37 | - [Learned helplessness](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_helplessness) 38 | - [Linus' law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linus%27s_Law): "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow". 39 | - Maslow's Pyramid 40 | - [Mere-exposure effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mere-exposure_effect): "to develop a preference for things merely because they are familiar with them" (Wikipedia). 41 | - [NIHITO](http://pragmaticmarketing.com/resources/use-the-market-to-gain-credibility) (Nothing Important Happens In The Office): you need to learn from your customers and from the market first. 42 | - [Ninety-ninety](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ninety-ninety_rule): "the first 90 percent of the code accounts for the first 90 percent of the development time. The remaining 10 percent of the code accounts for the other 90 percent of the development time" (Wikipedia). 43 | - [Outcome bias](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outcome_bias): "an error made in evaluating the quality of a decision when the outcome of that decision is already known" (Wikipedia). 44 | - [Overconfidence effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overconfidence_effect): "a well-established bias in which a person's subjective _confidence_ in his or her judgments is reliably greater than the objective _accuracy_ of those judgments" (Wikipedia). 45 | - [Pareto principle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle): "for many events, roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes". 46 | - [Parkinson's law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law): "work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion" (Wikipedia). 47 | - [Parkinson's law of triviality](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_triviality): "members of an organisation give disproportionate weight to trivial issues" (Wikipedia). "A committee whose job was to approve the plans for a nuclear power plant spent the majority of its time on discussions about relatively minor but easy-to-grasp issues, such as what materials to use for the staff bike-shed, while neglecting the proposed design of the plant itself, which is far more important but also a far more difficult and complex task." 48 | - [Path dependence](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Path_dependence): "how the set of decisions one faces for any given circumstance is limited by the decisions one has made in the past, even though past circumstances may no longer be relevant" (Wikipedia). 49 | - [Peter's principle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle): "managers rise to the level of their incompetence" (Wikipedia). 50 | - [Pocket veto](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pocket_veto): "maneuver that allows a president or other official with veto power to exercise that power over a bill by taking no action" (Wikipedia). 51 | - [Pre-mortem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-mortem) 52 | - [Principle of least astonishment](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_least_astonishment): "component of a system should behave in a manner consistent with how users of that component are likely to expect it to behave" (Wikipedia). 53 | - [Prisoner's dilemma](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma): "a standard example of a game analyzed in game theory that shows why two completely "rational" individuals might not cooperate, even if it appears that it is in their best interests to do so." 54 | - [Robustness principle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robustness_principle): "be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others" (Wikipedia). 55 | - [Sayre's law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayre%27s_law): "in any dispute the intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the issues at stake" (Wikipedia). 56 | - [Sunk cost fallacy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunk_costs#Loss_aversion_and_the_sunk_cost_fallacy): "people justify increased investment of money, time, lives, etc. in a decision, based on the cumulative prior investment" (Wikipedia) 57 | - [Task relevant maturity](https://getlighthouse.com/blog/management-concept/): "How often you monitor should not be based on what you believe your subordinate can do in general, but on his experience with a specific task and his prior performance with it – his task relevant maturity… as the subordinate’s work improves over time, you should respond with a corresponding reduction in the intensity of the monitoring." (Intel CEO Andy Grove). 58 | - [Tragedy of the commons](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons): "a situation within a shared-resource system where individual users acting independently and rationally according to their own self-interest behave contrary to the common good of all users by depleting that resource." 59 | - [Volunteer's Dilemma](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volunteer%27s_dilemma): "a situation in which each of X players faces the decision of either making a small sacrifice from which all will benefit, or freeriding." 60 | 61 | ## S 62 | 63 | ### SMART 64 | 65 | > SMART is a mnemonic acronym, giving criteria to guide in the setting of objectives, for example in project management, employee-performance management and personal development. The letters S and M usually mean specific and measurable. Possibly the most common version has the remaining letters referring to achievable, relevant and time-bound. 66 | > -- [SMART criteria - Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMART_criteria) 67 | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- /pictures/Dilbert/music_in_office.gif: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/charlax/engineering-management/b186a99e4bd2de7eb3e489b0cd19be906270ccdf/pictures/Dilbert/music_in_office.gif -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- /pictures/Dilbert/new_features.jpg: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/charlax/engineering-management/b186a99e4bd2de7eb3e489b0cd19be906270ccdf/pictures/Dilbert/new_features.jpg -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- /pictures/Dilbert/office_noice.gif: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/charlax/engineering-management/b186a99e4bd2de7eb3e489b0cd19be906270ccdf/pictures/Dilbert/office_noice.gif -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- /pictures/calvin_and_hobbes_style.gif: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/charlax/engineering-management/b186a99e4bd2de7eb3e489b0cd19be906270ccdf/pictures/calvin_and_hobbes_style.gif -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- /pictures/comforting-lies-unpleasant-truths.jpg: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/charlax/engineering-management/b186a99e4bd2de7eb3e489b0cd19be906270ccdf/pictures/comforting-lies-unpleasant-truths.jpg -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- /pictures/good_code_review.jpg: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/charlax/engineering-management/b186a99e4bd2de7eb3e489b0cd19be906270ccdf/pictures/good_code_review.jpg -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- /pictures/interruptions.png: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/charlax/engineering-management/b186a99e4bd2de7eb3e489b0cd19be906270ccdf/pictures/interruptions.png -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- /pictures/maslow_of_developer_needs.jpg: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/charlax/engineering-management/b186a99e4bd2de7eb3e489b0cd19be906270ccdf/pictures/maslow_of_developer_needs.jpg -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- /pictures/pillars.png: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/charlax/engineering-management/b186a99e4bd2de7eb3e489b0cd19be906270ccdf/pictures/pillars.png -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- /pictures/strategic_planning.jpg: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/charlax/engineering-management/b186a99e4bd2de7eb3e489b0cd19be906270ccdf/pictures/strategic_planning.jpg -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- /pictures/survivorship_bias_2x.png: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/charlax/engineering-management/b186a99e4bd2de7eb3e489b0cd19be906270ccdf/pictures/survivorship_bias_2x.png -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- /pictures/techDebtQuadrant.png: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/charlax/engineering-management/b186a99e4bd2de7eb3e489b0cd19be906270ccdf/pictures/techDebtQuadrant.png -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- /pictures/what_the_customer_really_needed.jpg: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/charlax/engineering-management/b186a99e4bd2de7eb3e489b0cd19be906270ccdf/pictures/what_the_customer_really_needed.jpg -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- /pictures/xkcd/README.md: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1 | xkcd's work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 2 | License. 3 | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- /pictures/xkcd/making_progress.png: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/charlax/engineering-management/b186a99e4bd2de7eb3e489b0cd19be906270ccdf/pictures/xkcd/making_progress.png -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- /pictures/xkcd/onboarding.png: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/charlax/engineering-management/b186a99e4bd2de7eb3e489b0cd19be906270ccdf/pictures/xkcd/onboarding.png -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- /pictures/xkcd/optimization.png: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/charlax/engineering-management/b186a99e4bd2de7eb3e489b0cd19be906270ccdf/pictures/xkcd/optimization.png -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- /pictures/xkcd/the_general_problem.png: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/charlax/engineering-management/b186a99e4bd2de7eb3e489b0cd19be906270ccdf/pictures/xkcd/the_general_problem.png --------------------------------------------------------------------------------