SWLW #544: Insufficient forgetting, A career cold start algorithm, and more.

Heya,

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

This Week's Favorite

​​Systems Design 2: What We Hope We Know
16 minutes read.

"I’ve often found that when confronted with a new thing, it is better to look at the edges rather than directly at it." -- This is an excellent insight by Kevin Hill, after reading apenwarr's post on LLM and how it might influence our industry in the years to come. I love his writing style: "Perhaps summarization is not the ability to produce insight, but rather the ability to recognize what other people will experience as insight." -- What is insight? For some readers, a statement can be obvious, while for others, it can be an insight. Is there a way to normalize that?

Read it later via Pocket or Instapaper.
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Culture

Today I Got to Delete a Feature
1 minute read.

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

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Insufficient Forgetting
4 minutes read.

"Organisms pass due to the accumulation of entropy, because of their inability to escape their encoded past; institutions, if they manage to have persistence beyond the mean, must inevitably rewrite their lore and forget where they come from." -- Great post by Matthew Sweet about reinventing yourself by learning to unlearn as a way to build a better organization.

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Uptime Guarantees — A Pragmatic Perspective
5 minutes read.

"A system with 99.99% guaranteed uptime must be 50 times(!) as reliable as one with "only" 99.5%. [...] Evaluate the effect of downtime on the business before even starting to discuss the technical implications. It's a business decision, not a technical one." -- Both your product and business need to understand the investment they ask when setting goals around uptime. This post sets a good baseline to have an effective discussion.

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The Templeton Compression and the Sales Ready Product
13 minutes read.

SRP (vs. MVP) will open your mind into a different way to shorten your sales cycle when you launch a new product. This is very useful when you develop a new startup, but even more so when your company is launching a new product. The sections on "Create an Inventory of Objections" and "Build the Right Demo" (to get a few lighthouse customers) is what I took from it, as areas I need to consider investing more than I feel comfortable with when thinking with MVP lense.

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Peopleware

A Career Cold Start Algorithm
4 minutes read.

Entering a new domain and feeling the pressure to provide value is a real pain. It can happen when you join a new company or manage a new team, or as Boz writes, "I’ve joined a team whose work was already well under way, where I had a massive knowledge deficit, and didn’t have pre-existing relationships. None of those excuses relieved me from the pressure I felt to establish myself and contribute." -- follow his advice on structuring 30-minute meetings with relevant members to learn who else to talk with and the topics to cover.

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Lessons Learned From Being a CTPO
3 minutes read.

Alexander Grosse shares his learning as a Chief Product and Chief CTO (CTPO) role. Owning and leading the two disciplines and getting them to work well together is what separates the best technological companies from the rest. This feeling of being lonely in a role resonates so hard: "I was the only management team member (out of nine) representing about 60% of the employees while also representing Product in a product-led organization — most other disciplines depended at least partially on the product’s progress. This sometimes left me feeling alone during management meetings."

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The Four Hobbies, and Apparent Expertise
4 minutes read.

Figuring out the mix in the 4 quadrants helps structure a career path. Yes, practicing for most people is where they spend 60%-90% of their time. But creating visibility around it (by discussing it on various forums) can increase your leverage.

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And finally, inspiring tweets...

@JDaIey: Your energy is different when you’re genuinely happy.

@rakyll: When people claim LLMs will replace software engineers, it either indicates a lack of understanding of LLMs or a lack of understanding of software engineering.



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.