SWLW #514: Why I’m coming out as an Impatient Optimist, Notes on executive dashboards, 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

​​An End to Doomerism: Or Why I’m Coming Out as an Impatient Optimist
7 minutes read.

“I saw cynicism in other people and mistook it for intelligence. To look smart, I tried to do the same. [...] It’s why I often feel embarrassed to admit that I’m an optimist. It knocks me down in people’s expectations. But the world desperately needs more optimism to make progress, so I should stop being so shy about it.” -- Hannah Ritchie with one of my favorite posts this year.

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Culture

Developers: It's a Simple Feature, Users Will Understand It. Users:
1 minute read.

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

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Some Notes on Executive Dashboards
8 minutes read.

Tom Critchlow made me think about output metrics and input metrics. I tried to take it a few levels down when we look into R&D as a business. "I think the basic working model for people is that metrics measure the business, when in fact input metrics help you learn about the business. By iterating and refining your input metrics you actually become a stronger operator - you learn more specifically which levers actually get results." – For example, measuring maintenance time for a team or a group is an output metric. The number of tickets, pagerduty alerts, and production incidents, are a few input metrics that can teach us about our R&D. Maybe we should reduce our product space (or kill some features)? Maybe improve or eliminate poor (flaky or not-business driven) alerts (or tests)? Maybe we should better enable our internal customers? Maybe "on-call day" can be a regular work day if we solve a few bugs that are 90% of the tickets, e.g., invest in a monthly analysis of the team's tickets and send a summary with Action Items.

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My 2-Step Rule for Having Hard Conversations at Work
4 minutes read.

"Being curious and asking questions can help defuse negative emotions and keep tensions from rising. Pausing before responding and listening to what the other person has to say also shows the other person that you want to work together toward a solution and can move the conversation forward." -- learning to control our emotions and reactions is a skill we have to nurture if we want to increase our impact level in the organization. Writing (email or gdoc) and iterating on it until it's "clear, crisp and calm" is excellent advice to control our messaging and think carefully about the outcome we seek.

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Engineering - Personal Development Plan at Monday
5 minutes read.

Monday released their "Engineering path" (aka career ladder), and I love it. Use it to improve the career growth of your teammates and drive inspiration for areas of improvement for yourself.

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Peopleware

Aging Programmer
5 minutes read.

Jorge Manrubia wrote an honest and inspiring post on the qualities of becoming more mature and experienced in our industry as a programmer.

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Imagine You're Joining a New Role and See Something That Makes You Go "Wtaf Did They Think When They Did This?!" - What's the First Thing You Do? If Your Answer Is "Change It," Then Chances Are You're Wrong. To Explain Why, Let's Visit a Fence, a Deviance and a Window. (Thread)
4 minutes read.

Omer van Kloeten with a thread I think every new employee should read as part of the onboarding material.

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A New Path to COO
6 minutes read.

Reading Jessica Zwaan's post taught me a lot about the role of the COO (and the type of COOs), the skills needed, and how this role can help the company scale: "Be opinionated. Don’t be afraid to have opinions about what other teams are working on, and how it not just affects your team, but the business at large. If you’re successful in being opinionated it means you have your own work together and on track, and that you’re able to see how it nets out into the bigger picture."

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And finally, inspiring tweets...

@KevlinHenney: Just a reminder that all bug prioritisation schemes in practice degenerate to three scheduling categories: do it now, do it later, never do it. If you have a numbered system with many priority levels, what you actually have is a bureaucratic system of denial.

@hunterwalk: Companies make a VP sign off on expenditures above $1k, but someone can schedule a reoccurring 60m with a dozen people which costs multiples of that in salary/producivity. Meeting Time budget approvals should be a thing. Need VP approval for standing meetings!



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.