Software Lead Weekly Software Lead Weekly

The 90% Agreement Rule
4 minutes read.

"We spend 90% of our time, talking about the 10% of things we disagree on" -- print the diagram and hang it on your meetings room(s). The reason people often avoid meetings or try to avoid conflicts is due to these types of non-effective conversations. Provide them the tools and mindset so conflicts can be utilized to improve the product and team work.

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Always Wear Your Coolest Socks to the Datacenter, I Say
1 minutes read.

My humble effort to help you start the weekend with a smile on your face.

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Learning at Work
4 minutes read.

Julia Evans shares how she keeps learning and improving her skills at Stripe. I'd follow closely Julia's tips on "Watch more senior people operate" and "Take the time at work to learn". Use the fact that you're working with smart people to ask them hard questions and then ask for the time you need to read more about the subject.

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Engineering Personas
3 minutes read.

Casey Rosenthal (Engineering Manager at Netflix) provides useful engineering personas to figure out the type of people you currently have and the type you'd need to hire to your team. This can be super helpful as you can build the interview format around it: questions, structure, people they should meet etc.

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How to Interview Engineers (Why It's Broken Today and How to Fix It in Your Company)
11 minutes read.

There are very few companies that are as methodological as TripleByte about interviewing software engineers: "I am arguing that a noisy signal paired with the need to avoid bad hires results in a high false negative rate, and this harms people. The solution is to improve the signal." -- Take Ammon Bartram's suggestions and apply them in your company to reduce false negative (i.e. missing out on great hires).

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Our 6 Must Reads for Scaling Yourself as a Leader
7 minutes read.

First Round content is always spot on. This time, it's one of those posts that the content itself is incredible, as it takes out the main takeaways of 6 different articles, but I found myself reading the raw material as well. My favorites were: "Challenge the 'when' to make speed a habit", "Avoid decision debt — create process and structure that doesn't need you." and "Understand and engineer your calendar around your energy."

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The Best Career Advice I’ve Received (Served Me Well as a Senior Software Engineer)
8 minutes read.

Nicholas Zakas shares a lot of his lessons learned from his career, all highly applicable to software engineers who want to increase their impact within the team and the organization. My favorites were: ask what is needed from you in every meeting you attend and never work in a company that needs you to be a "short-order cook."

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Trending Developer Skills, Based on My Analysis of "Ask HN: Who’s Hiring?"
6 minutes read.

Fascinating analysis of current trends in the industry. Even if it won't change your tech stack, it's helpful to understand where it would be easier to hire in the future and where you'd need to fight hard to attract talent.

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@jongold: I play escape the room games sometimes. I call them "meetings" though

@jewelia: I have to remind myself: You don't need to optimize/refine/perfect something you do a few times a year. Sometimes bad process is okay.