➰ SWLW #405: How to achieve Career Growth, Designing and evaluating metrics, 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

​​Someone Asked Me Today What It Takes to Successfully Onboard Someone Remotely. Here's My Wish List as an Employee Who Has Been Onboarded 100% Remote a Couple of Times (Thread)
4 minutes read.

Justin Garrison shares great tips (I'm going to use it for sure) about onboarding remote employees - which is almost everyone now that we have COVID-19. It also started an interesting discussion with more tips and ideas for you to consider. Share it internally with relevant leaders, I'm sure many will benefit from it.

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

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Culture

Aloha, Welcome Back From Space
1 minute read.

My humble effort to help you start the weekend with a smile on your face, even in this difficult time. The music fits so nicely, elevator music is indeed underrated.

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


How to Achieve Career Growth: Opportunities, Skills & Sponsors
11 minutes read.

Damian Schenkelman provides a framework you can follow to understand better where and how to invest your energy and skills. I'd bookmark it and go over it once or twice a year to map out new opportunities and sponsors that can be relevant.

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


Emotional Resilience in Leadership Report 2020
60 minutes read.

COVID-19 made all of us a bit more lonely, worried, and depressed. This report is a long read, so feel free to skim and find topics you're interested in now and come back for others later.

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


Designing and Evaluating Metrics
9 minutes read.

Sean Taylor's post is one of the best I've seen around how to pick metrics and evaluate them. The "Lifecycle of a metric" is powerful to read and understand. This should be shared with your product team as they'll often try to come up with proper goals and KPIs to measure.

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

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Engineering Manager @ Olo
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Senior/Staff Software Engineer @ Even
Help people break the paycheck-to-paycheck cycle. Build w/ Go, React Native, GraphQL, Postgres, Bazel. Remote encouraged.

 

 Looking to hire for your team? Promote your open positions on SWLW! 

Peopleware

Getting Better Sleep in Difficult Times
11 minutes read.

Mat Velloso is serious about his sleep. I think you'll enjoy his process of learning and experimenting with various methods and accessories. For me, a completely dark room and cold temperature are critical for a good night's sleep. Learning to shut down my brain is still a struggle for me. Yet, I'm following a similar process to what Mat covers in "Teaching yourself to fall asleep" - consciously feel my muscles relax and going over thoughts I have acknowledging them thinking "I can handle it tomorrow, it's okay."

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


Starting a Career in Tech
5 minutes read.

"I’ve given this sort of pep talk to a bunch of newly joined womeng at Square, to the point where I’ve just decided to sit down and write all that stuff in one document" -- You'll probably want to share Sarah Harvey's post with friends you know who started recently in the industry and trying to find their way.

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


I'm No Longer a Manager (And That's a Good Thing)
5 minutes read.

"As part of my love of learning, I'm always picking up better ways to do things. One of the things I've picked up over the years is tracking the things that make me happy. Or that do the opposite. I've been doing that ever since, and I feed it into my regular reflections and planning." -- David Daly shares his story of taking the role of a manager at MongoDB, and going back to serving as an Individual Contributor after realizing this is what makes him happy. I think that moving between the EM and the IC paths can be powerful. It helps you become better once you transition to the other path, as there are new insights to take. Maybe David will miss being a manager in a few years. Maybe not. Being happy and with high energies is a life worth optimizing for.

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

And finally, inspiring tweets...

@naval: The overscheduled life is not worth living.

@shreyas: 3 key properties of content: (1) Novel (2) Useful (3) Memorable. Their effect on the audience: Novel + Useful → Enlighten me. Novel + Memorable → Engage me. Useful + Memorable → Empower me. Useful + Memorable + Novel → Transform me. First, decide the effect you want. Then, craft the content.



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Keep reading, keep learning.
-- Oren Ellenbogen.