/Career Advice

Enabling Good Work Habits Through Reflective Goal-Setting

- Abi Noda tl;dr: Abi highlights a study on developers' productivity, revealing that reflective goal-setting leads to improvements. 84% of participants identified concrete goals through reflection, 80% saw positive behavior change, and 92% planned to maintain new habits. The key takeaway is that reflective goal-setting not only enhances awareness and productivity but also encourages lasting behavioral changes, empowering developers to gain control over their work.

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Some Tactics For Writing In Public

- Julia Evans tl;dr: Julia discusses various strategies and tactics to engage with comments and feedback on her writing, especially in the context of technical blogging. Key points include: (1) Talk about facts leads to fact-based comments and discussions. (2) Sharing personal stories encourages good discussions and helps in understanding the context and different perspectives. (3) Ask technical questions or mentioning uncertainties invites answers and makes the comments section more valuable. And more. 

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Should I Change Job?

- James Stanier tl;dr: "At every job, you should either learn or earn. Either is fine. Both are best. But if it's neither, quit." The article elaborates on this idea, explaining the symbiotic relationship between learning and earning. Learning increases earning potential by opening doors to bigger roles and opportunities. Earning more money can enable one to take financial risks for further learning, such as accepting a pay cut for a more senior position at a start-up.

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Manage Your Priorities And Energy

- Will Larson tl;dr: Will reflect on his shift from a 'company, team, self' framework to an eventual ‘quid pro quo' approach during his management tenure at Uber. His ‘quid pro quo' approach is: (1) Generally, prioritize company and team priorities over your own. (2) If you are getting de-energized, artificially prioritize some energizing work. Increase the quantity until equilibrium is restored. (3) If the long-term balance between energy and proper priorities can’t be balanced for more than a year, stop everything else and work on solving this issue e.g. change your role or quit. Will emphasizes the importance of remaining flexible and curious.

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Stopping At 90%

- Austin Henley tl;dr: It’s common to stop at 90% of a project’s completion since the project has concrete deliverables that can be measured. The remaining 10% is more difficult to track. Austin discusses common activities to get from 90% to 100%: (1) Present the work to other teams. (2) Broadcast an email with the takeaways so that the rest of your organization knows about it. (3) Put the code somewhere that your coworkers can make use of later. (4) Write a blog post about it. Post it on Twitter, HN, and Reddit. (5) Sketch out a next-steps document, even if you have no plans to continue, that explains what you would do next and why. (6) Look for adjacent projects that could benefit. (7) Find someone that can poke holes in your work, then go address them.

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What Is A Senior Software Engineer At Wise And Amazon?

- Gergely Orosz tl;dr: Gergely delves into senior software engineer roles at Wise and Amazon. At Wise, senior engineers lead significant projects, contribute to feature planning, and require good communication and problem-solving skills. At Amazon, the equivalent role deals with ambiguity, leads projects, communicates technical ideas efficiently, and ensures that the team's success doesn't solely rely on them. While definitions of 'senior' vary across the two companies, clear expectations across companies include project leadership, problem-solving skills, and effective communication.

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A Few Words On Taking Notes

- Werner Vogels tl;dr: Werner, the CTO at Amazon, explores note-taking. He values the Cornell Method for its structure and analog approach: each notebook page has 4 sections: (1) Title. (2) Notes. (3) Keywords and questions. (4) Summary. Werner discusses potential AI enhancements and believes handwritten note-taking increases comprehension and retention.

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Emotions: A Code Book

- Kent Beck tl;dr: Kent shares a personal journey of understanding emotions using an established framework. He views emotions as envelopes containing important messages, encouraging readers to decode these messages instead of suppressing emotions, giving a "cheat sheet" that defines what kind of message each emotion brings, e.g., Fear as a call to focus, Anger as a call to enforce boundaries, and Guilt as a call to change. This self-understanding helps navigate life's challenges and fosters personal growth.

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Frameworks

- Mike Fisher tl;dr: The user shared three frameworks to understand growth phases of companies: Kent Beck's 3X (Explore, Expand, Extract), Wardley's PST (Pioneer, Settler, Town Planner), and Thiel's Zero to One. They found these useful for identifying their personal fit within a company's growth journey, thriving best in the scaling phase. Understanding one's optimal growth phase can guide career choices.

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Before You Try To Do Something, Make Sure You Can Do Nothing

- Raymond Chen tl;dr: Raymond advises starting software projects with a 'do-nothing' component to establish a good foundation. The step-by-step approach lets developers debug and validate at each stage, making problem-solving easier. He encourages incremental complexity to keep projects manageable and on track.

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