/Management

How Not To Disagree

- Andrew Bosworth tl;dr: “Imagine a simple scenario. Your manager is proposing changes to your roadmap. Those changes would negate months of work by your team. You lead the team and don’t agree with the new direction. Following a robust discussion your manager makes the change over your objections. How do you proceed?”

featured in #561


Learning To Learn

- Kevin Li tl;dr: “In the past 3 years, I’ve run over 300 interviews... I especially like capping interviews with an open-ended question that really lets great candidates shine. One of my favorite now-retired questions is: “What’s something you’ve learned that you believe gives you an edge - something that you’re almost surprised more people don’t know about?”

featured in #561


Design Your Organization For The Conflicts You Want To Hear About

- Dave Kellogg tl;dr: “I have two rules for organization design: (1) Design for conflict. Specifically, design your organization for the conflicts you want to hear about. (2) Ensure value-add. Don’t put thing B under thing A unless the executive in charge can add value to both.”

featured in #560


Engineering Managers' Guide To Effective Annual Feedback

- Péter Szász tl;dr: “As we’re entering the last quarter of the year, the time has come when many tech companies start their yearly feedback cycles, providing formal feedback on the performance of their employees. While time-consuming, if done well, this is a great tool for Engineering Managers to make a difference in the professional life of their reports, so to help, I summarized what I’ve learned about this process during my career.”

featured in #560


The Future Of AI, LLMs, And Observability On Google Cloud

tl;dr: Learn about the current and future states of AI, ML, and LLMs on Google Cloud. This guide distills the top 7 insights and actions from a fireside chat with Google’s Director of AI, Dr. Ali Arsanjani, and Datadog’s VP of Engineering, Sajid Mehmood. It covers everything from upskilling teams to observability best practices to help technical teams keep pace with the rapid advancements in AI.

featured in #560


The Future Of AI, LLMs, And Observability On Google Cloud

tl;dr: Learn about the current and future states of AI, ML, and LLMs on Google Cloud. This guide distills the top 7 insights and actions from a fireside chat with Google’s Director of AI, Dr. Ali Arsanjani, and Datadog’s VP of Engineering, Sajid Mehmood. It covers everything from upskilling teams to observability best practices to help technical teams keep pace with the rapid advancements in AI.

featured in #560


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.

featured in #560


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.

featured in #559


Build vs Buy: A Guide For Notification Systems

- Sam Seely tl;dr: A complete guide to evaluating a build vs. buy decision for products transactional notification system. This piece covers the challenges faced by teams evaluating whether to build or buy a notification system, what notification systems look like at scale and the requirements they share, how to use a framework to assess any build vs buy decision, how to apply that framework against the build decision for a notification system.

featured in #559


The Impact of Generative AI on Software Developer Performance

tl;dr: BlueOptima's study of 200,000+ enterprise developers uncovered surprising insights on the reality of Generative AI: (1) Only 12% of developers commit GenAI code without modification, suggesting limited real-world integration. (2) Modest productivity gains of only 4%, indicating marketing claims are premature. (3) A decline in quality with high AI usage.

featured in #559