SWLW #428: Talent is largely a myth, Systems Design explains the world, and more.

Heya,

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

​​Talent Is Largely a Myth
5 minutes read.

"[I]f we accept that intelligence is adaptive, it should be clear any measurement of current skill is less interesting than the adaptive potential of the individual.[...] But this kind of new model has no chance of taking root in an industry that it currently optimized against it - we need a radical shift in management mindset." -- Avishai Ish-Shalom will make you think about who you hire, which questions you're using, and where you (should) find them.

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

Product [sponsored]

Effective Feature Management by O'Reilly
Learn how you can use feature flags to reduce risk, iterate faster, and gain more control in your dev cycles with this book written by LaunchDarkly CTO/Co-founder, John Kodamul.

 Promote your product on SWLW and reach over 26,550 leaders 

Culture

Commuting in Covid Times
1 minute read.

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

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


The Career Story Interview: Give the Best Interview of Your Life
6 minutes read.

You can use Rich Paret's framework for how to interview for competencies based on past-behavior questions. The biggest takeaway is that you need to come prepared with a list of questions and what you're trying to learn from them (including good/bad answers). Most people don't spend more than 1 hour picking questions and then using them on hundreds of candidates. Write down what you want to ask, what you want to learn from it, how great answers (and why!) look like, and how bad answers look like. Share it with a few people in your team who interview as well, and see if these are useful questions to use, or you can iterate on them.

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


Fulfilling the Promise of CI/CD
6 minutes read.

"The time elapsed between writing and shipping is the room temp petri dish where pathological symptoms breed and snowball. Longer lead times lead to larger code diffs and slower code reviews. This means anyone reviewing or revising these nightmare diffs has to pause and swap the full context in and out of their mind any time they switch gears, from writing code to reviewing and back again." -- Worth reading this post by Charity Majors and the post from last week, "When costs are nonlinear, keep it small," to think about your deployment strategy.

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


What Makes A Strong Product Culture?
7 minutes read.

Ken Norton shares questions you can use for your current company or future ones, asking the interviewers these questions. Most companies can do better is the third bullet, forming "Empowered Product Teams" as the company scales. Easier said than done. Keep this pot in your bookmarks. Worth reading every few months and see if there is a positive trend.

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

Jobs [sponsored]

Ruby on Rails Tech Lead @ Nebulab (Remote)
Join our distributed team and build high-volume eCommerce applications in a workplace made by developers for developers.
 

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

Peopleware

Systems Design Explains the World: Volume 1
16 minutes read.

Grab a cup of coffee and enjoy this masterpiece by Avery Pennarun: "With systems design, the key insight might be a one-sentence explanation given at the right time, that affects the next 5 years of work, or is the difference between hypergrowth and steady growth."

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


Writing Is One of the Best Things You Can Invest In, as a Software Engineer. The More Experienced People Become, the More They Tend to Realize This. Here's a Thread on the 6 Best Writing Resources I've Found - Both to "Convince" You to Write More and to Help You "Level Up" (Thread)
4 minutes read.

I've shared Gergely Orosz's thread with a few friends and teammates who want to work on their writing skills. Trust me on this one; you'll find yourself reading all the links in this thread and sharing many of them with your teammates.

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


Tools for Effective Delegation in Engineering Management
7 minutes read.

"What are the things that my title or position uniquely enable me to do?" -- Jason Wong's approach is a good template worth sharing with new leaders (IC or managers). They'll want to understand how to start and deal with conflicts when things are moving away from their direct control.

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

And finally, inspiring tweets...

@DavidSHolz: Many of my brilliant friends are paralyzed by their intellects. Thinking overwhelms doing. Many of my successful friends are less reflective, but quick to action. They are always focused on moving forward. Making as many 'probably correct actions' as…

@rands: Leaders. Share your calendar. It calms everyone down.



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 and my work by becoming a SWLW Patron. Thank you ❤️




Keep reading, keep learning.
-- Oren Ellenbogen.