Skippers — Number one

Skippers are a curated set of articles I found interesting. I originally shared a similar set of articles with some commentary among the leaders in our R&D team (aka “The Skippers”). To goal was to help us become better leaders and managers, or at a minimum be thought provoking.

Blaming

Blame, Language, Sharing is about how to avoid blame, and how to create good feedback loops. This blogpost reminded me of the story of Astro Teller. Those of you who read Practical tips every engineer needs to know about managing a project, know the story already. It is the story about doing the retrospective in advance.

Time Management

The Sanctity of the calendar discusses how creators require large chunks of time:

One rule of thumb I love, proposed by Facebook design manager David Gillis, is that makers should aim to have at least six chunks of three-plus hours of uninterrupted work time on their calendar every week. This averages out to one three-hour block every day (either an entire morning or afternoon), plus a no-meeting day with two such blocks.”

The article provides some tips to cure “meeting-itis”.

You should attend a meeting when: a) you believe your presence will change the outcome in a leveraged manner, or b) you will be much more effective as a result of being there.

Scaling

Lazy Leadership should sound familiar, (except for the part of coming to the office at noon).

Lazy Leadership isn’t really about being lazy. It’s about spending time on what matters and what you’re good at, then leaving everything else to your team. Giving up on the idea that you have to drive yourself into the ground in order to run a successful company, and thinking about your business as a machine that you design and optimize, instead of becoming a worn out cog within.

“I choose a lazy person to do a hard job. Because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it.” — Bill Gates

The article also discusses Meta-Lab’s values. I like the one about No assholes allowed, and about No Jargon.

No jargon or buzzwords: We think jargon destroys companies. It’s designed to make one person feel superior, while the other feels less than and nods along. We use simple terms that everyone understands, and we do the same with our clients. Our work speaks for itself, there’s no need to dress it up.

Hiring

If you wonder what the technical hiring process is at other companies, Medium’s Engineering team did a nice job documenting it.

• A low GPA is not a disqualifier. Focus on the project descriptions to find the diamond with a lower than 3.5 GPA.
• I liked screening for Code fluency

We have a healthy sense of urgency. We need the candidate to be able to translate their solutions into code without much friction and quickly grok other people’s code (when working in their language of choice). We want Code Reviews to be focused on the validity of the approach, not basic coding issues.

• As pointed out in the article, be careful with scoring based upon confidence during the interview.