Issue #301

tl;dr: People are driven by 3 distinct needs: a need for achievement, need for power and need for affiliation, and Ed discusses how that plays into power dynamics at companies. "Effective leaders consistently get out of their comfort zone to experiment with new behaviors, especially when such efforts feel awkward or inauthentic." Something Ed encourages us to try.

tl;dr: Raphael discusses "why and how a tech company can offer a career path to its engineering technical leaders," notably the different tracks for “deep ICs” versus “broad ICs.” Raphael acknowledges 2 "pressure points" within a growing org: (1) The need to grow increasingly skilled technical leaders. (2) An increasing misalignment between leadership responsibilities and existing responsibilities for anyone on the IC track.

tl;dr: When your reports are complaining that nobody can do code reviews or seem increasingly stressed in standups, these are signs that your team may be doing too much. "You’re stuck in a trap, and thrashing won’t get you out. You can escape by stopping your current approach, and doing something new. You’re going to deliberately overshoot, cutting down WIP, and then maintaining a healthy amount going forward."

tl;dr: The two iron rules of cloud pricing introduced by AWS are: (1) Prices never go up. (2) We will "absolutely soak you on data transfer charges", and last week Google Cloud published a recent post explaining how they were adopting the second rule and ignoring the first.