➰ SWLW #404: Thoughts on Conway's Law and the Software Stack, The Thing About Burnout, 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.

This is issue 404 of SoftwareLeadWeekly. To respect http status code 404, I was considering to send a blank email this week. But I'm weak. Instead, I thought to make today's email a bit more lightweight. To make you smile, you should check this crazy achievement by SpaceX and enjoy the music.

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

This Week's Favorite

​​How to Spot and Magnify the Powers of Your Engineering Superheroes
11 minutes read.

Lloyd Tabb asks candidates "Tell me something that happened at work in the last year that made it a truly great day" to figure out what motivates them. Knowing that they enjoy it, he assumes they did enough iterations to become excellent at it (10K iterations > 10K hours). It's their superpower now. Lloyd uses that to figure out which type of work would fit them and how to avoid pitfalls that will decrease their morale. To do that, he offers a few personas ("heroes") to make it easier to remember. It's a dangerous place to go, as we have enough (too much?) hero mentality in our industry to build more on top of that. Used with care, like any personality test (e.g. Myers–Briggs), I still think it's useful as a reference point.

Read it later via Pocket or Instapaper.
Share it via Twitter or email.

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Culture

Debugging Engineering Velocity and Leading High-Performing Teams
7 minutes read.

"Some teams (e.g. infrastructure) have a very wide scope, and such teams often hear consistent concerns that a certain set of users are unsatisfied which can be extremely demotivating to engineers. This is a typical prioritization problem. It is better to have 10 delighted users than to have 1000 partly-satisfied users, and this applies whether your users are internal or external." -- I enjoyed Smruti Patel's post and ideas for figuring out engineering bottlenecks. Highly recommend sharing with leaders inside your engineering group, as it holds many patterns worth noticing.

Read it later via Pocket or Instapaper.
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What’s the Best <$100 Purchase That’s Made Your Unexpected Work-From-Home Life Better? (Thread)
4 minutes read.

Jack Appleby started a thread that might give you a few ideas to improve your WFH setup. I can recommend Roost (laptop stand) and an excellent keyboard that is a bit over $100 (ErgoDox EZ) :)

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Thoughts on Conway's Law and the Software Stack
4 minutes read.

"There are people thinking an interface or feature is secure when it is merely a window dressing that can be bypassed with just a bit more knowledge about the stack. " -- Jessie Frazelle shares one of the toughest problems when dealing with complexity. It's hard to understand where it starts and where it ends, and we create holes all around us due to the inherent limitations - It's too hard for humans to reason about so many moving pieces. What should we do about it? I don't know. Maybe make it more visible so that others can make better (not perfect) decisions. Perhaps acknowledge our limitations and practice more concepts from Resilient/Choas Engineering to see where our intuition breaks.

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Peopleware

The Thing About Burnout (Video)
12 minutes read.

A friend recommended me to watch Ashley McNamara's talk. It's great to watch as I can imagine it would be relevant to many - with tips to prevent getting to a point where you're completely burnout. I try to do things in a way that is sustainable for the long run: the people I meet, how I exercise, how I read, where and how I work, my side-projects (e.g. this weekly). COVID-19 makes it extra hard.

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What’s One Thing That a Manager’s Done to Skyrocket Your Growth? (Thread)
3 minutes read.

Neha started a wonderful thread with many stories people shared (including me). Go over it and see if you can take some ideas that will inspire you to help others grow.

Read it later via Pocket or Instapaper.
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Managers Who Used to Be Engineers: What’s One Thing You Wish You Knew/Did Before Switching? If You Could Redo the Experience, What Would You Change? (Thread)
4 minutes read.

Sarah Harvey asked a great question that I enjoyed thinking about and reading some of the replies. This one is spot on: "(1) We need less managers than engineers, thus, your job opportunities may shrink over time. (2) If you want to join early-stage companies (10 peeps), as a pure manager this will be challenging (they need makers). It’s a true career change, and I missed this fact in the beginning."

Read it later via Pocket or Instapaper.
Share it via Twitter or email.

And finally, inspiring tweets...

@Julian: When you think "I just have to do it myself" when working with a team, PAUSE. That's the sign you have a task whose delegation is high-leverage. The problem is you don't think it can be delegated. It can. You’re being lazy. Write in-depth instructions. The ROI is worth it.

@rakyll: I spent two days writing my perf self-assessment, now have to take two weeks to make sure it fits to the character limits.



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Keep reading, keep learning.
-- Oren Ellenbogen.