SWLW #538: Culture viruses, When our persona becomes our prison, and more.

Heya,

As always, below you can read my best findings for the week.
 

This Week's Favorite

​​Culture Viruses
7 minutes read.

"Your culture is a living thing - it changes and adapts to new teammates, external forces, and the broader environment. And sometimes it gets sick; sometimes your culture gets a virus. [...] It’s important that your approach to fighting culture viruses is always-on. Approaches that don’t remove that virus give it a chance to adapt and learn how to shape shift. While much of leadership is a game of moderation, fighting culture viruses is the one place you must have no chill. You must require people leave the conversation not agreeing to have different points of view. You must be clear there is no other acceptable point of view, and you’re willing to back that up with your reward system. It’s important, however, that you enforce these cultural values evenly, without malice or anger. You have to be willing to hire and fire based on them, but you need to avoid doing it in a way that is culty or problematic." -- I like the analogy of Culture Virus and viruses-types covered in this post.

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Culture

I Put Some Famous Logos Through ControlNet
1 minute read.

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

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The Cost of Architectural Complexity
6 minutes read.

I still wonder if this type of research only proves how impossible it is to measure productivity. A useful area is the correlation between architecture complexity to developer turnover. That has a significant cost on the organization (finding a replacement, training, losing knowledge, and effectiveness).

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Mental Model for Quality vs. Speed
3 minutes read.

Looking at the confidence level of understanding the problem and thinking your solution solves it, sets the right mindset of when to optimize for speed.

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How Product Strategy Fails in the Real World — What to Avoid When Building Highly-Technical Products
16 minutes read.

"MBA-style reports about market size are great. But when you start to see the conviction from your design partners, you get a picture not just academically of how big a market is — you start to feel it viscerally. It’s a little art and science." -- Nate Stewart shares his lessons from taking CockroachDB to market as a technical product (database). As an engineer, I feel that learning how to build the product, set the right differentiators (at the right time), and understand your distribution channels is often far more challenging than building the technology side.

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Peopleware

When Our Persona Becomes Our Prison
4 minutes read.

Tobias van Schneider writes it so well: "To get ourselves in the door, we have to flatten ourselves to one dimension. And once we’re inside, it’s hard to get back out." -- Tobias's post can apply to the brand you build online and the brand you build within the company.

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The World’s Most Popular Book on Habit Change: Atomic Habits. I've Spent the Past 100 Days Summarizing and Visualizing the Best Ideas in the Book. Here's What I Learned:
3 minutes read.

Andrew Nalband with a remarkable summary (best takeaways) of the Atomic Habits book with beautiful graphics. I want to print at least 6 of them and put them around me as a good reminder of where to focus on.

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Project Management for Software Engineers
14 minutes read.

Share this post by Kevin Sookocheff with every software engineer who wants to lead huge projects with multiple people working alongside them, and every manager who needs to guide and teach their teammates on how to lead projects successfully.

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And finally, inspiring tweets...

@bhalligan: Is it just me or do black swan events happen all the time now…

@angjiang: Most mistakes are good actions taken in wrong contexts: (1) quick when you need to be patient; patient when you need to be quick (2) details when you need big picture; big picture when you need details (3) moving when you need to be still; being still when you need to move



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.