tl;dr:“Recently I’ve been having a lot of conversations about how to structure and staff teams. One framework I’ve referenced repeatedly is to break down team leadership into a few different categories of responsibility.” Ben shares what these are and why he finds it useful.
tl;dr:“Trust is what lets collaboration scale.” Ben shares symptoms he’s noticed that can indicate a buildup of trust deficits in companies: (1) Too many decisions needing to be escalated. (2) Too many decisions requiring deep involvement from many stakeholders. (3) People having lots of FUD about whether projects they’re not involved in are on track. (4) Leaders frequently needing to do “deep dives” on individual topics. (5) Leaders needing to spending most of their time. Additionally, Ben shares tactics to invest more effort in trusting others.
tl;dr:“I used to think that behavioral interviews were basically useless, because it was too easy for candidates to bullshit them and too hard for me to tell what was a good answer. I’d end up grading every candidate as an “okay, I guess” because I was never sure what bar I should hold them to. I still think most behavioral interviews are like that, but after grinding out way too many of them, I now think it’s possible to escape that trap. Here are my tips and tricks for doing so!”
tl;dr:The chance to study what goes on in the "guts of boring, everyday systems" - how Git stores data or why pip install failed - is often ignored or circumvented. However, it's helped Ben. It's become easier to track tricky bugs, learn languages and libraries by pattern-matching, improved software design skills and provided confidence in understanding complexity.
tl;dr:"Being impatient is the best way to get faster at things. And across a surprising number of domains, being really fast correlates strongly with being effective." Being twice as fast doubles the growth rate of your output, which then compounds.