SWLW #510: Betting on Unknown Unknowns, Do We Need an Office?, 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

​​The Product Culture Shift
5 minutes read.

"Your engineers should spend time supporting their products. If they are not regularly answering questions, they are missing a chance to appreciate the pain that customers are facing when trying to use the systems. Be careful about making this optional, or leaving it to only junior engineers. Your senior folks will not build the kind of humane products that you need if they are incapable of interacting with the users in a polite and helpful way, no matter how brilliant they might seem." -- So many great gems in this post by Camille Fournier that you can apply to your infrastructure (products) team.

Read it later via Pocket or Instapaper.
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Culture

Learning Data Structures and Algorithms
1 minute read.

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

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Do We Need an Office?
12 minutes read.

Nikita Zhuk will get you thinking about how the work environment should be designed in a world where most companies will try some hybrid model. I agree with Nikita: "Regardless of whether the future of work is office or remote, I certainly hope that the future of work is deep."

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Sony Was Founded in 1946. Its First Product Was an Electric Rice Cooker. Here Are Some Early Products From 11 Other Well Known Companies. (Thread)
3 minutes read.

An inspirational thread that serves as a good reminder that many of the largest companies today started with something very different. Learning to iterate and adjust over time is how you build a lasting brand.

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Betting on Unknown Unknowns
7 minutes read.

"You can only bet on unknown unknowns near the frontiers of human tenacity and creativity. Towards the tail distributions on both traits, unexpected tail events start to happen that dominate everything else. " -- This is the biggest takeaway I took from Alexandr Wang's post. This is why learning to attract and retain creative and positive people is a key differentiator and can serve as a moat to protect.

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Peopleware

Developing Number Sense
4 minutes read.

I think of Ana Fabrega's approach to teaching software engineers math they need to understand about user experience (e.g. time taken for the human eye to notice a change) or interacting with other services or databases (reading from memory vs. reading from disk vs. reading over the network etc.). Context is everything, and leveraging it when teaching math in absolutes or percentiles can make things easier to remember and understand.

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What Distinguishes Great Software Engineers?
6 minutes read.

Abi Noda summarizes Microsoft's "What Distinguishes Great Software Engineers" paper and adds his thoughts to it. I think it's a great way to be exposed to the paper and consider sharing it as part of career growth planning for the team.

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Good Interviewer/Bad Interviewer
5 minutes read.

Shahriar Tajbakhsh with a post I'd share with anyone who is part of the interviewing process (or wants to be). What would you add? Try this as an exercise internally to align people in your team to produce the best process and attract the best talent for your team. Getting the right people to join is the most important thing you can do.

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And finally, inspiring tweets...

@shl: Progress is measured in mistakes learned from.

@Julian: Most friends aren't friends. They're acquaintances. Friends phone you out-of-the-blue because they want to hear your voice. Friends would drive you to the emergency room at 3am. Friends are the family you choose, and they're key to happiness in old age. Invest in good people.



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.