SWLW #482: The QRF team model, Your next Staff Plus role, and more!

Heya and happy Friday,

As always, below you can read my best findings for the week. If you want to support my work or join SWLW community in Slack - scroll down to the bottom of the email to see how.
 

This Week's Favorite

​​Putting Ideas Into Words
4 minutes read.

"Putting ideas into words doesn't have to mean writing, of course. You can also do it the old way, by talking. But in my experience, writing is the stricter test. You have to commit to a single, optimal sequence of words." -- Writing is thinking. Very much like TDD helps you design software more than testing it. Paul Graham will inspire you to try out to write more.

Read it later via Pocket or Instapaper.
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Culture

We've All Done It: The Test Is Flaky!
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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Engineering Org Structures— The QRF Team Model
13 minutes read.

Joseph Gefroh shares a model for QRF (Quick Response Force) as a long-sustaining team that can handle interruptions. He answers all the immediate questions you might have on this model near the end of the post. Like all models, it's about tradeoffs, so pick what you believe will work for your and your company, or as Joseph puts it: "Context matters. Ultimately, a blog post on the internet can’t fix your problems for you — at best it can give you a mental model that you can apply and possibly mold after evaluating your own context and needs. It’s quite possible a QRF model will solve your problem, but the opposite can be true as well: you’ll know best."

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I’m Building a “Company Building” Curriculum - What Are the All-Time-Great Pieces of Content on Company Building? (Thread)
4 minutes read.

Patrick OShaughnessy started a great discussion with many helpful resources. Skim over the recommendations brought up and see what you'd like to explore now, given the dilemmas or challenges you deal with.

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A Neuroscience-Backed Approach to Team Building
5 minutes read.

Darryn King made me stop and think about the type of bonding activities we're doing as a team in a remote setup. Optimizing for happiness becomes even more important in this 2D experience. Being curious to ask about our teammates' preferences to build a remote experience is incredibly difficult — something to work on this year and a skill worth learning for the decades to come.

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Jobs [sponsored]

Engineering Manager @ HiMama (Toronto)
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Director of Engineering - Payments @ Phorest (Remote to GMT+2 / Remote)
You will work with the CTO to build out and operate a payments stack that is processing billions of euros each year. You will be responsible for all things payments and change how the hair and beauty industry adopts fintech.

 

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

Peopleware

Your Next Staff Plus Role
6 minutes read.

Nidhi Sadanand provides helpful tips when joining a new company in a (very) senior role as Individual Contributor. Read everything Nidhi wrote under "Impact" section multiple times. Put reminders in your calendar to delve deeper and take notes when talking with your teammates to understand the business and organization dynamics better.

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Extended Annotations on Shreyas Doshi's Time Management (Thread)
5 minutes read.

Shawn Wang captures Shreyas Doshi's frameworks on time management and adds his insights to it. This thread and references to Shreyas's thread are packed with many gems. Take notes. What would you like to experiment with nex week? Deep work time? L/N/O framework?

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Coder’s Creativity
8 minutes read.

"When you talk to others, you get (at best constructive) feedback on your own ideas. Plus new ideas. The same effect you have on the person you are talking to. So this develops the thinking of both, assuming a receptive interlocutor. Effective communication also increases motivation, which also helps creativity." -- Waltteri Turunen covers why creativity is important (as part of our problem-solving skills) and how to nurture it.

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And finally, inspiring tweets...

@adrukh: Planning for your org to grow? Think about 2x the current size. If you only think about the next 2 hires, you're bound to local optima.

@jackbutcher: The recipe for anxiety: (1) overexposed to things out of your control (2) underexposed to things under your control



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 by becoming a SWLW Patron. Thank you ❤️




Keep reading, keep learning.
-- Oren Ellenbogen.