/Leadership

Interviewing For Evidence

- Daniel Terhorst-North tl;dr: “There are 4 primary types of evidence I look for in an interview, which are, in order of general importance, experiential, hypothetical, opinion, and credential. (1) Experiential evidence: things the candidate has done. (2) Hypothetical evidence: what the candidate thinks they would do in a given situation. (3) Credential evidence: what the candidate is qualified to do. (4) Opinion evidence: what they think about things.” Dan gives example questions of each. 

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Simplifiers Go Far, Complexifiers Get Stuck

- Dave Kellogg tl;dr: “Strive to make things simple. Seek to understand them. Struggle to find apt metaphors for them. If you’re not burning real energy trying to simplify things for you audience, you are most like a complexifier. If so, the next time you’re about to explain to someone why something take so long, is so complicated, or requires 5 steps to be completed before the start, ask yourself — do I really believe this or I am making it complicated because I either don’t want or don’t know how to do it.”

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How To Deliver Bad News When It's Not Your Fault

- Wes Kao tl;dr: “As much as we don’t want to shoot the messenger, we often associate negative feelings with people who tell us bad news. Wes’ principles for delivering bad news are: (1) Avoid negative words, like "however” and “unfortunately.” (2) Avoid giving too many details. (3) Don't accidentally accept blame. (4) Get to your point quickly. (5) Remind the person of their own agency.

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Stop Avoiding Conflict On Your Teams

- Doug Turnbull tl;dr: “Can you give some space for everyone to have voice in the conflict? Can you create a space where you set up ground rules for conflict i.e. attacking the problem, not people. Can you maximize also “caring personally” dimension that gives air to the quiet voices? Can you encourage the employees who often come to complain 1-1, but struggle to speak up in group meetings?”

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Measuring Developers' Jobs-To-Be-Done

- Abi Noda tl;dr: “To provide better insights, Google researchers identified the key goals developers are trying to achieve in their work and developed measurements for each goal. In this paper, they explain their process and share an example of how this new approach has benefited their teams.”

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Antifragile

- Andrew Bosworth tl;dr: “Failures happen. In engineering we often face a choice between trying to eliminate failures or making our systems handle them more gracefully. Both approaches are important but in my experience fault tolerance is the more valuable. The reason is simple: we can only eliminate failures we can imagine while fault tolerance adds some resilience to failures we could not imagine. I have found the same to be true for groups of people.” Andrew discusses how to implement this in management.

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Why You Should “Design It Twice"?

- Eliran Turgeman tl;dr: “The core message is that you shouldn’t just go with the first design that comes to mind. Instead, come up with at least two different designs even if you have to force yourself. No matter how confident you are, you’ll make better decisions when you compare options side by side.”

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Be Plainspoken

- Andrew Bosworth tl;dr: Andrew discusses the superpower of being plainspoken. “Our desire to maintain harmony can cause us to be indirect about uncomfortable truths. Our desire to influence can cause us to pre-emptively address every arcane objection. Our desire to impress can cause us to use more language than necessary. And the expectations we have internalized about corporate communication often cause us to write in a way we never would to our friends.”

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Scope Management 101

- Kent Beck tl;dr: (1) Plan incrementally. The team, every week, must be prepared to decide what to do that week. Some planning processes are so painful, or require the sign-off of such overworked people, that contemplating planning weekly causes sweat to bead on foreheads. Learn how to plan lightly as to tactics & resolutely as to goals. (2) Deliver incrementally. The team must be prepared to support production while developing. This in turn requires rock solid reliable tidying & prioritizing the fixing & preventing of defects.

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The Impossibility Of Making An Elite Engineer

- Kent Beck tl;dr: “While all elite engineers face these contradictions, there are as many paths through them as there are engineers.” Kent discusses the pattern he’s seen elite engineers take on with the following: (1) Longevity and diversity of projects. (2) Success and failure. (3) Mentored and self-directed. (4) Urgency and slack. 

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