SWLW #513: Be critical or be corrupted, Interview engineers to assess ability to deliver impact, 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

​​How I Interview Engineers to Assess Ability to Deliver Impact
7 minutes read.

Siadhal Magos shares a great framework to go deeper in interviews to assess the impact level the candidate seeks to achieve and is capable of. The framework can be used to drive existing employees to be more impact-driven, so steal it away and share it with your teammates.

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

Product [sponsored]

 Promote your product on SWLW and reach over 30,260 leaders 

Culture

Joining a Startup as a New Grad
1 minute read.

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

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


Be Critical or Be Corrupted
5 minutes read.

CJ Cenizal is spot on observing Goodhart's law in action: "But by definition, the purpose of the rotation was to resolve users' issues. An engineer on rotation had one job: resolve as many issues as possible. This approach was so simple and effective that the organization never adopted the rotation as a driver for change. Ironically, treating users' problems as mere symptoms of an underlying problem and then solving the root causes would have reduced the number of problems in the long-term." -- one way I learned to deal with it is by figuring out KFIs (Key Failure Indicators) to balance KPIs.

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


“If You Don’t Make It Beautiful, It’s for Sure Doomed”: Putting the Vault in GitHub’s Arctic Code Vault
5 minutes read.

This is a mind-boggling project by the folks at GitHub: "Our hope is that by storing and indexing millions of repositories we have captured a valuable cross-section of the world of modern software."

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


Rewriting the Story of Compensation
5 minutes read.

Companies trying different compensation methods, especially when they cross a certain size (as a public company like Shopify), open up ideas for many other companies to experiment with. Many times legal and finance teams don't want to risk it. This take by Shopify might trigger more ideas that will benefit employees everywhere.

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

Jobs [sponsored]

Staff Engineer, APIs @ Forter
Our APIs process over $250B of the largest e-commerce merchants in the world every year, isolating fraudsters and abusers and protecting customers. Join us to help us build the Trust Platform for digital commerce.
 

 Looking to hire for your team? Promote your open positions on SWLW! 

Peopleware

The Leader’s Journal: Become an Inspiring Leader in Ten Minutes a Day
5 minutes read.

"While a developer can push code to Git and receive instant feedback from his peers, there’s no PR process for a leader’s decisions, insights, or creations. Our impact isn’t easily measured." -- Ofir Sharony covers how he uses journaling to iterate on his impact as a manager and find a better balance to avoid burnout.

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


This Is the Best Definition of Focus by Jony Ive With a Lesson From Steve Jobs (Video)
2 minutes read.

Saying no is (relatively) easy. Saying no to things you are desperately looking to do and cannot stop thinking about - now that takes some serious focus and discipline.

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


Guiding Principle: Think Big, Work Small
3 minutes read.

"Think Small, Work Small is a typical mistake for Agile novices." -- Jason Yip captures so well the common pitfall of the planning <> execution most teams and companies fall into. Thing Big (Roadmap, Milestones, ADRs) and Work Small (usable releases) is easy to say yet hard to execute, but a muscle teams should learn to develop.

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

And finally, inspiring tweets...

@funcshawnal: 24 but instead of defusing a bomb Jack Bauer has to figure out why his unit test fails only in CI, only ~20% of the time. His next meeting starts in 7 minutes.

@alexkyllo: One important lesson I've learned working in data is: do not listen to the "storage is cheap" people. They do not understand the cost of sorting through massive piles of unmodeled, poorly organized data when you need to query it.



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.