SWLW #395: The certainty of failure, 5 engineering manager archetypes, and more...

I hope that you and your family are doing well, and you are able to find a new rhythm in this hard situation.

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

This Week's Favorite

​​One of the Biggest Things Lost in Remote Work Is Chance Meetings. These Are Very Important, but Hard to Quantify. If You Measure Productivity on Individual Projects, Everything Will Seem Fine. Yet When You Read Stories of How Things Happened, Chance Meetings Were Often Crucial. (Thread)
4 minutes read.

Paul Graham started a thread that most of us probably dealing with right now - how to nurture relationships? How to create momentum in big projects that require a lot of discussions? How to enable serendipitous interactions with low emotional tax? And above all - how to do it in a way that feels good for the culture we have? It will require us to adapt and change, carefully reconsidering our core assumptions.

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Culture

Debugging Tactics
1 minute read.

My humble effort to help you start the weekend with a smile on your face, even in this difficult time.

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The Certainty of Failure
4 minutes read.

I'd share Marc Gauthier's post internally and ask leaders in your company to review the way people perceive failure. Are they feeling safe to make mistakes? Can they share mistakes openly and offer insights from it? Do they get the support from their managers? If you accept failures like customers detecting bugs in production (or the need to deploy on Fridays), it's much easier to consider the tools and practices you need to reduce the friction or anxiety that comes with it.

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5 Engineering Manager Archetypes
7 minutes read.

"We can think of archetypes like software design patterns. Common structures you might see again and again. I think of archetypes like the character classes in a role-playing game (RPG) such as a mage, ranger, or warrior. In an RPG, one character class is neither better or worse than the other. Each offers a different combination of strengths useful in different circumstances." -- Pat Kua gives a framework we can use when building a team, starting a conversation with candidates where we try to assess their core strengths or expectations.

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Seek the Challengers
4 minutes read.

"Challengers teach you to be open to questioning yourself and changing your mind, and that’s how you grow." -- Shripriya reminds us that people who generate friction are also those who can help us accomplish the biggest achievements. Do you people like that? Did you thank them for being who they are?

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Peopleware

The Observer Effect: Marc Andreessen
12 minutes read.

Marc Andreessen's thoughts on "Goals and systems" were my favorite part: "You really have to uplevel and figure out what's important. I usually take a good hour to look at what I've been doing. It’s basically figuring out the threshold for ‘yes’ versus ‘no’. I try to revise that about once a year. Also about once a year, I rewrite my personal plan. I just write from scratch what I'm actually trying to do and my goals and then line up the activities that are below that." -- I struggle here too. What do I want to see happening? Is it enough? Can we do more? Should I give it more time?

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Teaching Storytelling to Kids: Can I Teach That One Skill That Will Be in Demand Even After Two Decades?
5 minutes read.

Joseph Jude made me think a lot about my family. What should I teach my kids? Will that be relevant in a few years in today's ever-changing world? He also made me think about my teammates, using Jeff Bezos's framing: "What's not going to change in the next 10-20 years?" and indeed, the power of stories and great employee experience can take you a long way.

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Product Judgment: How Some People Can Repeatedly Create Product Success
9 minutes read.

Learning how to understand business and product needs can help you save time and energy: focus on the right offering, building what needs to be validated first, learning how to analyze and mitigate risks, etc. There is no better at it than Paul Adams, writing about this topic for so many years now based on experience in Facebook and Intercom.

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And finally, inspiring tweets...

@galjudo: One of the causes of procrastination is a state of overwhelm. Break your task into small, easy steps that don't look scary and complicated.

@Johnny_Uzan: Nothing is more intellectually difficult than evaluating new evidence that contradicts your views. To do it with a clear and objective mind is a mental superpower.



p.s. if you're interested in joining SWLW's Slack channel, simply reply to this email and let me know.

p.s.2 are you leading a team of engineers? Write your Manager Readme or get my book Leading Snowflakes: The New Engineering Manager's Handbook.

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Keep reading, keep learning.
-- Oren Ellenbogen.