SWLW #515: Build your career on dirty work, Learning from the incident you didn't have, 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 to Get Ideas & Measure - Stewart Butterfield of Slack & Adam d'Angelo of Quora (Video)
49 minutes read.

"If you can iterate faster than most companies, you can go through ideas faster." -- it's very easy to think that great companies and founders know exactly what to do. Same for choosing metrics - some think it's completely useless (like any measurement, so they don't try to measure the time it will take them to deliver some feature), while some follow it too strictly. I feel that Stewart Butterfield and Adam D'Angelo represent a healthy (and humble, down-to-earth) way to think about your ideas and how to test them in the real world.

Read it later via Pocket or Instapaper.
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Culture

Compliance Team Got Access to Production
1 minute read.

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

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Learning From the Incident You Didn't Have
5 minutes read.

"At Netflix, we started the OOPS project to encourage engineering teams to self-report when they encounter an operational surprise. This writeup contains a narrative description of the events that led to surprise, and identifies contributors, mitigators, risks, and challenges in handling, which is the same writeup structure we use for incidents that we investigate." -- Understanding the shortcoming of Surveriship Bias (only learning from negatives) is a powerful mindset when we think about getting better as a team. Looking at surprising behaviors, good or bad, gives us more room to explore and learn.

Read it later via Pocket or Instapaper.
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Struggling to Connect on Your Remote Team? We’ve Built a 68 Person Remote Team That’s Driving $32 Million in Annual Revenue. Here Are 10 Ideas for Building Great Culture in a Distributed Team (Thread)
4 minutes read.

So many of us are working now in hybrid mode, figuring out ways to connect people together. There are many ideas to borrow from ConvertKit and play within your company. "Create an automated email sequence for new team members" and "Create a private team stories podcast" are probably my favorite to experiment with.

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Build Your Career on Dirty Work
5 minutes read.

"Often people look at these difficult business domains as intractable problems. One signpost for high-value dirty work is persistent proposals to hire a team that will make the problem go away (often in someone else’s department!). [...] A warning: do not, in any circumstances, normalize the pain you’ve accepted. You must fight tenaciously to fix the issue. Embrace the dirty work, and then be the leader who solves it comprehensively and scalably." -- This is such a solid advice to focus and get your entire team 20% more productive (which makes your impact 1.2 * number of people). It reminds me of Choose Boring Technology Club (google it up if you didn't read it so far) when it comes to stop and think how to make better decisions on where to invest.

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Peopleware

How to Outperform a 10x Developer
12 minutes read.

"Focusing on the product trumps coding skills every time, not the least because sometimes not writing new code is the best decision for the product." -- I've learned so much from Denilson Nastacio's writing. Share it with every software engineer you know to compare notes and takeaways.

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Larry Page on Thinking Big (Video)
2 minutes read.

This short video provides a great insight that people often confuse with reading too many Agile or Lean Startup books. The focus is not only on the start small and iterating quickly but also on being able to articulate a destination worth iterating towards. If you're working on internal products where the customer is friendly, available, and, let's be honest - has a vendor lock-in - you should be cautious thinking about the job to be done and how you envision it x10 times better than today.

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Finding the Joy in Feeling Tired
4 minutes read.

"I had the space to be tired, so I let myself just surrender to the tiredness." -- Jean Hsu with a good reminder that sometimes you need to rest. It doesn't need to be dramatic (I have to drop everything I do!) or small (I'm not allowed to slow down). Go easy on yourself.

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And finally, inspiring tweets...

@kenegozi: Microservices are very successful in promoting solutions to the problems they created

@cambaughn: If you want to build a great product, think of if like a secret sauce. It’s a specific combination of a handful of ingredients. Too many ingredients make it a mess. Too few and it’s not unique. Most people (myself included) definitely err on the side of too many. I find I have to force myself to add fewer ingredients.



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.