SWLW #503: Three part solution to leaders burnout, You own your communications bubble, and more.

Heya,

As always, below you can read my best findings for the week. If you want to support my work or join our SWLW community in Slack - scroll down to the bottom of the email to see how.
 

This Week's Favorite

​​Three Part Solution to Leaders Burnout: Fundamental Principles Don't Change
4 minutes read.

Teach, delegate and handle the toughest cases. Good framing to keep a sustainable career as a leader: "Delegation doesn’t mean abdication. Leaders should still handle the toughest of the cases. When done well, it does two wonderful things: Leaders are often detached from the daily activities of their units or companies; [...] The leaders will remain informed of the company’s activities by handling a few cases. By still handling cases a leader can keep their skill sharp and current. Leaders who solve the toughest cases lead by example. Others can learn from them. Other members know that the leader is still on the field playing and they take courage from their example."

Read it later via Pocket or Instapaper.
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Culture

If Spotify Playlist Was a VC Rejection Email
1 minute read.

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

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Scaling Pipedrive Engineering — From Teams to Tribes
7 minutes read.

Sergei Anikin shares an interesting model that worked for the team at Pipedrive. I like that he starts with the pains they were looking to solve first as the requirements for the transition. Each company is (very) different in terms of business needs and the talent they have. Org structure should fit the business, product, and people—worth practicing Inverse Conway's law to better understand your architecture and organizational needs.

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80/20 Is Half-Ass When Value Is Logistic
4 minutes read.

"Be careful with asymptotic thinking when value is logistic." -- Fantastic post by David Golden. Can you try to articulate and draw value over time for the task at hand? Start there, and then see where it will be a good point to stop. It's often why we quit too quickly as we don't see the value of our effort just yet.

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Metastability and Distributed Systems
6 minutes read.

Marc Brooker will expose you to concepts I believe we should discuss more when working on Distributed Systems. Not only to cover a set of practices and patterns when building the systems, but also to understand how the organization can react during the planning phase and production incident management: "Optimizations that apply only to the common case exacerbate feedback loops because they lead to the system being operated at a larger multiple of the threshold between stable and vulnerable states. For example, an improved cache eviction algorithm will reduce average database load, which makes it seem desirable to reclaim database resources. This kind of change is easy to measure and reward, but it will be a false economy if the system can no longer recover from cache loss. Incentivizing application changes that reduce cold cache misses, on the other hand, yields a true capacity win."

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Peopleware

A Staff-Shaped Hole
16 minutes read.

Chris Chandler wrote a post to help you observe and analyze your organization, identifying some missing elements worth your investment. Share it with your leadership team (tech and managers) and discuss your observations. Where do you want to put more focus on? How will you know it works better other than Chris's questions? What will you measure (to drive incentives)?

Read it later via Pocket or Instapaper.
Share it via Twitter or email.


Planning for Project Deadlines So You Can Sleep at Night
6 minutes read.

A good framework to consider when analyzing a project you need to lead. Trying to break down the project and putting not only a rough estimation but also some level of confidence (1 to 5) if you can parallelize it (e.g. putting two people on the task) is very helpful. You can also add another column to understand if you can effectively get help on the effort from a different team (while keeping ownership).

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As a Leader, You Own Your Communications Bubble
5 minutes read.

"You build a bubble around yourself by what you tolerate and what you expect. If people aren’t telling you the truth, it’s because you’ve set up your bubble so that the truth won’t get in. That’s on you. Always on you. Not on your people. As soon as you realize that, the better you can manage and lead your team. " -- Jarie Bolander with a post I feel every manager should read.

Read it later via Pocket or Instapaper.
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And finally, inspiring tweets...

@heyalexfriedman: Feeling overwhelmed? Take a shower. Feeling uninspired? Take a walk. Feeling lonely? Work at a coffee shop. Feeling sad? Call a friend. Feeling uncertain? Write it out.

@ValaAfshar: In the long-run the future is created by the hard working optimists.



p.s. if you're interested in joining SWLW's Slack channel, simply reply to this email and let me know. If you're leading a team, consider writing your Manager README (it's free) or getting my e-book and interviews Leading Snowflakes: The New Engineering Manager's Handbook. You can also support me by becoming a SWLW Patron. Thank you ❤️




Keep reading, keep learning.
-- Oren Ellenbogen.