SWLW #559: What is your ‘High-Order Bit’, Root cause is plural, and more.

Heya,

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

This Week's Favorite

What Is Your ‘High-Order Bit’?
3 minutes read.

"So the lesson is “know your high order bit” and literally avoid using that when trying to drive change or response to something. You’re own high order bit is not a secret — everyone knows it and will always add it to the end of everything you say no matter what. [...] In fact what I really learned was that it is good to leave out your high order bit, but it is even better to include the high order bits of other people. They might be non-issues to you or even annoying, but to others, well, it’s their high order bit." -- Steven Sinofsky made me pause and think a lot about my "High-Order Bit" (what a great framing!) and how much I fall into this trap of repeating a statement that doesn't help much. Asking others for their High-Order Bit or paying attention to it can help you speak their language and drive better alignment.

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Culture

Developers Tweaking Their Editor Settings and Themes but Not Actually Shipping Anything
1 minute read.

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

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Navigating Extra Work in Programming Teams
4 minutes read.

Read Amin Rashidbeigi's post and discuss with your team what "Doing Extra" stands for in your view. How can you set time to allow such work? How do you ensure you get things done first and then do the extra work to better balance time commitments and reduce pressure? Figure out a strategy you can communicate and agree on with your relevant stakeholders.

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A Small Team That Knows How to Work Together Should Be Fiercely Protected. Even Adding a Single Semi-Misaligned Person Can Drag the Team Into Endless Delay and Steep Deceleration. (Thread)
2 minutes read.

Suhail shares two critical reminders: alignment is costly and complexity has to go somewhere - "If you are urged to grow headcount, remember that you are buying resources at the expense of greater coordination cost. Adding a bunch of people who need to be bought in on strategic matters can easily lead to moving slower than before." -- In software, we often see how complexity shifts when a team moves from a monolith to microservices, thinking it will only get better to realize that many things become x10 harder. For humans, it might be x100 more impactful.

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Root Cause Is Plural
5 minutes read.

"But if your “root cause” amounts to a single failure, you have stopped your process too soon. Like the word data is plural, the phrase “root cause” should be as well. [...] The action items or other tasks required following up an incident will be to eliminate as many branches as possible, preferably the leaf nodes or one level up. Eliminating the root of the tree is the same as your current process – it doesn’t ensure that these other contributing root causes won’t impact operations somewhere else in the future. Addressing as much of the problem surface as possible will maximize learnings and improvements, while minimizing the recurrence of issues." -- This post by Cody Wilbourn should be a must-read by anyone building and operating production systems.

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Peopleware

Emotions: A Code Book
4 minutes read.

Kent Beck shares his takeaways from the book "The Language of Emotions" into a list of emotions and one sentence to trigger an action. This is an excellent exercise to try out.

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Let's Talk About Decision Making! We All Make Big Decisions All the Time. And We All Make Wrong Choices! These Are the Frameworks I Use to Make Better Decisions (Thread)
3 minutes read.

"You always overpay the first time: Decisions are based on information. You'll often make decisions in new areas: rent a flat, buy a house, buy a car, hire a contractor, etc. The first time you'll overpay ... most likely. Just accept it as a learning experience." -- Understanding that will help you take more risks and make better decisions, as striving to be efficient can kill your ability to learn how to be effective first.

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Use These Tips to Improve Your Executive Presence
4 minutes read.

Jade Rubick shares excellent tips on improving how you communicate and are perceived in the organization. I love how he captured ideas in a nice simple drawing (e.g., "? + 10s") to frame these tips so he'll remember them. One of the best pieces of advice I copied from one of my former colleagues was preparing for meetings, so I recommend reading how Jade approaches it.

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And finally, inspiring tweets...

@SahilBloom: “Well done is better than well said.” - Benjamin Franklin

@ValKatayev: You’re probably really good at something, but most of us spend too much time focusing on our weaknesses and failures. Just focus on your strengths and use that to your advantage.



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.