Software Lead Weekly Software Lead Weekly

Embrace Complexity; Tighten Your Feedback Loops
14 minutes read.

Fred Hebert shares his talk transcript with many important insights on the complexities of building companies. My favorite was: "Don't deliver more than you're equipped to." sharing how they approach on-call at Honeycomb and the tradeoffs they made that impact delivery vs. maintenance and sustainability.

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Dating a Tech Bro vs Finance Bro
1 minutes read.

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

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To Build a Top Performing Team, Ask for 85% Effort
6 minutes read.

Greg McKeown will make you think about how you work, how you create a sustainable working habits for yourself, and if you're a manager or a leader - how you influence your environment. Intensity and effort are incredibly hard to measure in software development. It's important to discuss the outcomes we seek and nurture a conversation around managing stress and whether we think we're in a healthy place. I expect the answer always to be "no, there is a lot of stress" if you're working for a successful company. But it's the controls you need to focus on - Do we openly discuss it? Do we try to reduce it? Do we make it okay to acknowledge it? Do managers adjust things over time to change stress levels? Do we get people to feel in control of where to push themselves harder and when to take a step back and relax? Do we talk about how they rest and sleep after work hours (not from a judgemental place, but to create awareness)?

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The New New Moats: Why Systems of Intelligence Are Still the Next Defensible Business Model
17 minutes read.

Jerry Chen wrote an updated view of his 2017 essay on AI and defensible moats, given the fast-developing field of AI. It's interesting to think about the "AI Cloud" (or AppStore) and the players that will set the tone there.

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What Is the Right Level of Specialization? For Data Teams and Anyone Else
5 minutes read.

"People are spending way too much time working on things that have nothing to do with their business. We have come a long way, but I still see people wasting way too much time debugging YAML, waiting for deployments, or begging the SRE team for help." -- Erik Bernhardsson discusses the tradeoffs when hiring tools-oriented versus goal-oriented people. No doubt that some tools introduce overall simplification for the users while they also increase complexity for the maintainers, which requires specialization. It's unavoidable. It's a worthy discussion to see where the balance is not serving the business and make adjustments to the tools you leverage and the people you need.

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Executive Compensation
12 minutes read.

This post can serve you well if you plan to hire an executive for your company or if you're interviewing for an executive position and need clarification on what you can and should negotiate for.

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Concepts and Their Consequences
3 minutes read.

"A concept is a brick. It can be used to build the courthouse of reason. Or it can be thrown through the window." -- Nick Travaglini wrote a beautiful post on how we use words to create concepts and reason, allowing us to create narratives and stories to change our world. Which bricks are you using now? Which do you throw out the window?

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Values Navigator: A Psychological Test to Understand Your Core Values
4 minutes read.

Values Navigator and similar tools are helpful as a tool to create a mirror in time - things often change when our life circumstances change. The fact you pause for a second and ask yourself these questions is good for self-reflection for the person you are now. You can act upon that to alter your environment to fit better what you seek now. Do it every few years to make the adjustments you need to feel you live by your values.

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@AdamMGrant: The saddest form of success is realizing that the goals you achieved weren't yours at all. In the short run, pursuing other people's dreams earns approval. In the long run, it's a recipe for regret. A meaningful purpose doesn't maximize your status. It matches your values.

@markimbriaco: Too many startups getting built to make things more complicated, too few getting built to make them simpler. Simpler is much harder, but that's not an excuse. If you're going to talk about changing the world, it seems only fair to consider whether it's for better or worse.