Software Lead Weekly Software Lead Weekly

How to Help New Employees Be Rockstars, a New Approach
4 minutes read.

We often talk about Extreme Transparency as a company culture, but Luc's blueprint is a refreshing way to set up expectations early. What do you value most? Why? What do you expect to see if something goes wrong? Highly recommend you to try to write it down for yourself, even if you're not feeling comfortable sharing it with your teammates. It doesn't get more transparent than that.

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How to Communicate in a #NoManager Company
5 minutes read.

Wonderful explanation of how to implement (yes, the pragmatic parts) a culture where everyone can offer projects/ideas and execute them by selling them internally. Even if you're not a big fun of this move, it's still interesting to read from outside how they are able to keep things visible and effective.

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We Don’t Need a Rethinking of Management. We Need a Reworking of Work
7 minutes read.

This post came close 2nd to my favorite read for this week. Reading this post made me realize the unfair advantage we see behind companies such as Buffer, GitHub, Treehouse: they changed the way people at their companies work, instead of trying to change the way people at their companies manage work and other employees. Does it say something about the expectations we should set for our employees, does it say something about the expectations (or value) we set for our managers?

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What Is the On-Boarding Process for New Employees at Twitter?
5 minutes read.

I'm a sucker for on-boarding processes. I love how Twitter gave it so much thought and paid extra attention to the little details, such as where to sit on your first lunch, spending some quality time with the CEO, starting with a "slow Monday" to jell with the team etc. Plenty of useful tips you can apply at your workplace.

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Stop Repeating the Same Mistakes
4 minutes read.

Great post by Janet (from iDoneThis) on how to avoid making the same mistakes over and over. It's where I saw again Luc's blueprint, but also learned Elaine Wherry's "mistakes diary". As someone who's talking a lot about Code Review for your managerial decisions, I find such posts and practices a great way to add a few more tools into my retrospection skills. Write stuff down, it pays off.

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The Leader’s Anti-Asshole List
6 minutes read.

This post is by yours truly. How do you provide meaningful feedback to a co-worker, with brutal honesty, without feeling like a complete asshole? It's hard. My anti-asshole list served me along the years to make sure I am able to operate from a place of growth and genuine care, while also sleep well at night.

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One Hour Hire
7 minutes read.

How do you scale your hiring process? The team at Instacart (one of the hottest startups in the valley) shares their process. While it looks very efficient in terms of the number of hours they need to spend internally at Instacart, this kind of systems usually increase the chance of hiring experienced individuals on the expense of hungry ones, people who are eager to get better every day. Obviously it's not not a black or white cut, and sometimes you can find both, it's just harder to "feel" it while doing a remote test with no way to check for it before the tests beings. It would be great to see their thoughts about it in the culture-fit interview. Also, would love to use their internal tool (Manchuria) as it may reduce a lot of overhead for tracking candidates' progress.

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@mijustin: I think the reason a lot of people dream of doing something big is it shields them from the embarrassment of starting with something little.

@paulg: Spectral signature of a doomed startup: "We're rewriting everything, and we'll go back to focusing on growth afterward."