SWLW #464: Composability is the only game in town, Always do extra, and more.

Heya,

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

This Week's Favorite

​​Composability Is the Only Game in Town – Roam, Shipping Containers, Lego and Twitter.
6 minutes read.

I'm thinking a lot lately about Software Composability to enable Organizational Composability. Artur Piszek's post inspired me to look deeper, seek more examples, and think on a longer time horizon about how it can influence my work: "Composability is a framework for putting new layers of abstraction in a predictable manner."

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Culture

Augmented-Reality Glasses Put a Smile on Everyone's Face...
1 minute read.

My humble effort to help you start the weekend with a smile on your face, even in this difficult time. This time, it puts a smile on everyone's faces.

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Share it via Twitter or email.


What Is Your Labor Worth? Tech Compensation in 2021
6 minutes read.

I wanted to share this post as I think it holds many helpful tips on compensation in the market today. Do your research as things often change (quickly!) per geography, and heads up: we tend to value ourselves a bit higher (e.g. we think we're better drivers than most). That's okay, just set expectations with yourself accordingly. re:"At private companies, I treat grants as essentially a lottery ticket, and value them at $0" - I suggest that you'll ask (a) How much the company grew in the past year in the relevant "currency" (revenues or DAU/MAU)? (b) What's the net dollar revenue if the company aims for revenues, and (c) what did you launch in the past 12 months that you're excited about? What is planned for the next 3 months? 6 months?

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What’s One Tactic You’ve Found to Be Super Effective for (1) Sourcing or (2) Closing Candidates? Two I’ve Seen Work: 1. Love Bombing Them With Emails From the Team After Sending the Offer. 2. Everyone They’ve Talked to During the Interview Surprising Them on the Final Zoom Call. (Thread)
4 minutes read.

I got many interesting ideas from Lenny Rachitsky's thread, and I'm sure you'll pick up a few as well. Worth sharing with your peers and see which ideas you can experiment with to improve your sourcing or closing rate.

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How to Safely Think in Systems
5 minutes read.

Safety in mental models (or thinking in systems) comes from understanding the possible tradeoffs and knowing that you can still benefit from the model even if there are substantial downsides to it. We try to simplify the world as it helps us reason about it, build a vision of where we want to go, the language that aligns us as a team, and the impact we're seeking.

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Peopleware

Always Do Extra
5 minutes read.

What a wonderful framing by Ben Northrop, distinguishing between "More" and "Extra" when you want to over-deliver. "Doing More would be completing those two screens and then taking on a third screen that's just like it. [...] Extra is finishing those two screens, but then researching a new library for form validation that might reduce the boilerplate code. Or it's learning ways to protect against common security vulnerabilities from data entry."

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Ancient Sysadmin Wisdom: An Incomplete List of Things We Have Learned From Decades of Outages. (Thread)
4 minutes read.

Corey Quinn is both funny and insightful, as always. Pay attention. This one is extremely important and rarely executed: "Don't use external domains for internal things. You really want the thing you provide to the world not to power your internal systems; ideally you want outages that take down outside things or internal things but not both at once."

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What Makes a Great Leader?
3 minutes read.

Tomasz Tunguz with an interesting question that will make you pause and think. It's a question that you need to answer often in a particular context: is it wartime or peacetime? What's the stage of the product? The company? How's the team structured, and which leader complements them the best? What do you think makes a great leader in each setup? What is unique about you? What will others say?

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And finally, inspiring tweets...

@cdixon: Composability is to software as compounding interest is to finance.

@AlexAndBooks_: If you’re overthinking, write. If you’re underthinking, read.



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Keep reading, keep learning.
-- Oren Ellenbogen.