SWLW #430: Leading without managing, Short fat engineers are undervalued, 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

​​Short Fat Engineers Are Undervalued
4 minutes read.

"Intangibles, by definition, are hard to put a price on. But if you're investing in someone for the long haul—especially if that someone is yourself—and you care more about where you're going than how fast you get there, always favor breadth over depth." -- Jeff Schwab's thoughts on magnitude (depth) and direction (breadth) in your career vector are spot-on. Changing this balance between them every few months can be fun and engaging.

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 26,650 leaders 

Culture

All Tests Passed
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 Problems With MVPs in Legacy Replacement
6 minutes read.

I highly recommend reading both parts by Meaghan Waters as they can help you avoid the MVP trap when coming up with a new solution to replace a legacy (already in production) system: "Given what you generally have is a fully functioning system, anything less than that is likely to be perceived incredibly negatively. You only get one shot at that first impression, if it’s not great you’re going to spend a lot of time overcoming the ‘noise’ of people being much more vocal about their losses than their gains and it will make subsequent releases harder."

Read it later via Pocket or Instapaper.
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10 Software Engineering Laws Everybody Loves to Ignore (Thread)
4 minutes read.

An excellent thread by Jan Schaumann of mistakes we all make (more than once :)) at some point in our career. We need to create a team Anki version (spaced repetition) of these rules to be more aware of the signals and act differently.

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Engineering Productivity Can Be Measured - Just Not How You'd Expect
6 minutes read.

Antoine Boulanger offers ways to measure your team's effectiveness and happiness by looking at the team level instead of the individual, looking for blockers and focus time. It's a mix of collecting inputs automatically (from tools you use) with surveys to collect qualitative measurements. This is not a sponsored post, and I'm not a customer of their solution. We can all start with asking the questions suggested by Antoine and see where we stand with free tools (e.g. Google forms).

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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

To the Brain, Reading Computer Code Is Not the Same as Reading Language
5 minutes read.

"Understanding computer code seems to be its own thing. It's not the same as language, and it's not the same as math and logic" -- Looking at problems such as how to structure code (for readability) and how to teach people to write code is not trivial. If you think of it as a hard cognitive problem, such as solving a puzzle, maybe we can think more about nurturing intrinsic motivation (focus on value creation as the goal) and using breadcrumbs (clues) and stories to explain architecture and code.

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I Just Read All of Jeff Bezos's 23 Letters to Amazon Shareholders. And Here's a Thread With Just One Key-Takeaway From Each of These Letters. So if You're an Artist or an Entrepreneur Looking to Get Some Insight Into the Mind of This Genius, Read This Right Now. (Thread)
4 minutes read.

Sumit Grrg shares his insights from Jeff Bezos's letters to Amazon shareholders in an easier way to digest. Go and read the letter from the year you liked the takeaways or want to get more context around it.

Read it later via Pocket or Instapaper.
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Leading Without Managing
7 minutes read.

A must-read by David Golden for both managers and individual contributors who want to lead without forcing their authority: "Think about whether your leadership is in service of your wants or the wants of others or your organization. Don’t forget the metagame – you may be more successful and perceived as more valuable by helping others achieve their wants than by fighting for your own."

Read it later via Pocket or Instapaper.
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And finally, inspiring tweets...

@darylginn: Life is 10% what happens to you and 90% how you react to it.

@david_perell: A formula to improve at any skill: practice analytically, perform intuitively. Break down your craft when you’re away from it. Critique yourself, set a strategy, and hire a coach when you need to. But once it’s time to perform, follow your intuition.



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.