Software Lead Weekly Software Lead Weekly

Assessing Employee Performance
8 minutes read.

This idea by Eric Elliott is brilliant, I've never thought of it that way: "True value doesn’t appear overnight. Keep your eye on the end game... The more experience your employee has, the longer you should allow for their contributions to be assessed." and also "The best way to be a 10x developer is to help 5 other developers be 2x developers." -- you absolutely need to read this story. It will make you think again on how you are providing feedback and setting expectations with both junior and senior engineers.

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Coder Interview, It's a Talent Market
1 minutes read.

As always, my humble effort to help you start the weekend with a smile on your face.

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Solving the ‘CEO Said’ Syndrome
6 minutes read.

How do you defuse people blindly following the "loudest" (or highest ranked) members in the team? Marc Barros offers some great advice, talking about his experience as a CEO for the 2nd time. My favorite takeaways were "Understand Who Else Has Reviewed The Work" and "Have Feedback Processes".

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An Alternate Reality for Startups
2 minutes read.

Mathias Meyer, the CEO of Travis CI, sets a great example for being a thoughtful leader. He cares about the product they build just as much as he cares about the kind of company he wants to build. I'm always inspired by his behavior and the attitude he sets in his company (like forcing a minimum vacation days policy), and how he always so kind and humble.

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Why We Overestimate the Short Term and Underestimate the Long Term in One Graph
2 minutes read.

"We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten." -- Bill Gates. Short and insightful insight by Ro Gupta, with a great graph that represents how humans think about the future in compare to how technological changes and productivity develops over time.

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Traits of Exceptional Engineers
6 minutes read.

Darragh Curran (VP Eng at Intercom) with a great post on the traits he believe exceptional engineers share. Even the opening itself deserves its own highlight here: "You don’t design your engineering culture by writing blog posts, or printing posters, it’s shaped by the people you hire and the things they do, and the traits you reward and celebrate."

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Be Kind
4 minutes read.

Andrew Bosworth from Facebook with a great story and important lesson. This is culture to me. And no, it's not the "Be Kind" part, but rather how Facebook acted when people provide the feedback that while Andrew is a great engineer, they wouldn't like to work with him in the future. Culture is who you choose to promote and who you fire. It's how you act. It's great to see that Andrew took that and applied it to build relationships: "Being kind is fundamentally about taking responsibility for your impact on the people around you. It requires you be mindful of their feelings and considerate of the way your presence affects them."

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@levie: Adding software to a broken process doesn't make you digital. The biggest challenge is reimagining the process, not writing the software.

@rands: Starting on time. It matters.