SWLW #441: Decision Making vs Decision Understanding, Self-Organizing Engineering Teams, 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

​​I Could Build This During the Weekend
4 minutes read.

This is a painful lesson you learn with time: "It's easy to oversimplify problems and try new, leaner technologies that optimize for our use cases. However, when scaling it to the rest of the organization, we start to see the dragons. People that didn't build their software the right way. Entire tech stacks depending on libraries that teams can't update due to reasons™. Quickly, we start realizing that our lean way of doing things may not serve most situations." -- It's a costly one, as it affects people (how we make decisions) and code (what needs to be refactored now). Excellent writing by João Alves.

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

Product [sponsored]

Learn What LaunchDarkly Can Do For Your Organization
LaunchDarkly enables companies to gain a competitive edge with better feature management. Move fast without breaking things and learn how your team can reap the rewards of CI/CD without the risk.

 Promote your product on SWLW and reach over 27,300 leaders 

Culture

Bringing Production Back Up After a Crash, but Not Solving the Underlying Issue
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.


Decision Making vs. Decision Understanding
7 minutes read.

This post by John Cutler should be included in the onboarding plan of new employees. We need to learn to respect and appreciate the friction in working together on complex problems. This is how you discover conflicts and blind spots, practice putting your thoughts in writing, take the time to form an opinion and change it a few times, and overall - learn faster.

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


The Paradox of Genius: Why Long-Term Thinking Wins
6 minutes read.

James Currier shares many nuggets worth thinking about as the company matures, and you're trying to build a sustainable business for decades. Some of my favorites were: "The problem is the new innovation is always in a territory where there are low profits. The excellence that they’re all working toward, the optimization and the efficiency, is not useful here." and "I am really interested in companies and individuals who are the only, who’ve become the only. And that to me is a much better place to be than just merely the best."

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


The Art of Self-Organizing Engineering Teams
8 minutes read.

I think this post by Tom Sommer can be beneficial for new Engineering Managers who seek to build a team that works well together. Share it with managers and tech leads in your company, as they can use it to analyze areas worth investing in.

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

Jobs [sponsored]

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

Senior Developer Evangelist @ Pluralsight (Remote - USA)
Pluralsight is building a team of developer evangelists to engage the broad developer community. If you love learning and love to talk, write and speak about code, this is the job for you.

Senior Software Engineer, Data Infrastructure @ Doximity (SF/Remote)
Doximity's Data Infra team is hiring! Join us as we innovate with Python, EMR, Snowflake, Airflow, and make an impact on physicians' and patients' lives.
 

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

Peopleware

Forget Multi-Tasking. It's Context-Switching That Matters
7 minutes read.

I'd read twice the section about "Hone your position fixing skills" as every over-achiever will feel they don't get enough done. It's learning to define the "good enough" and appreciate the power of doing that every day as it compounds.

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


10 of My Founder Friends Are Forces of Nature. Their Startups Are Now Worth $400M+ Each. 4 Behaviors I've Observed (Thread)
3 minutes read.

"Momentum is about rate of iteration and persistence, not brilliance. I don’t know one force of nature founder who isn’t strongly biased toward taking action." -- this is probably the most significant leverage I see in great leaders. Sounds easy or obvious, but very few do it well. The entire thread by Julian Shapiro is spot on.

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


35 Principles for 35 Years
6 minutes read.

I enjoy everything Shawn Wang writes. An impressive set of insights for you to think about during the weekend. You might want to experiment with a few of them, for example, "Build Tools For Yourself." I launched downleft.com and managerreadme.com to scratch my own itch.

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

And finally, inspiring tweets...

@johncutlefish: Something I've learned (and keep learning) as "product person" - your appetite and tolerance for uncertainty may be *way higher* than other people. But it is on you to figure that out, not them

@shl: Read before sleeping, write after waking.



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.