Morgan Housel:

Reading is a chore if you insist on finishing every book you begin, because the majority of books are either a) adequately summarized in the introduction, b) not for you, or c) not for anyone.

Jason Cohen:

The trick—useful everywhere in life—is to estimate values using only orders-of-magnitude, a.k.a. powers-of-ten. No “low/high ranges,” no precision, not even any digits other than a 1 followed by a quantity of 0s.

Jacob Kaplan-Moss:

What’s a transition file?

It’s a document that you prepare for whoever ends up succeeding you in your role. It should contain all the information you’d want them to know to ensure as smooth a transition as possible. Done right, the document should help them step into your role with a minimum of disruption.

Cam Daigle:

I’m hoping this system helps you have better meetings – that the people running the meeting feel like it’s worth their time to run them, and that the people in attendance feel like their presence there matters.

Tony Stubblebine:

Many things at Twitter were broken to the point that they could bring the entire site to a halt. Greg’s strategy, now distorted through multiple retellings and my own foggy memory, was to focus on short-term triage rather than long-term fixes.

Suggestions for how to make meetings worthwhile.

Ben Adam:

Amazon effectively operates like a federation of smaller companies. There are (extremely) large organizations, which break into divisions, and then into small, functionally independent teams.

A look at some manager onboarding processes.

Kevin Fishner:

At HashiCorp, we’ve grown from a few hundred to over a thousand people, so the goal is to build scalable systems that enable employees to do their best work and contribute to the outcomes of the company. For us, that’s shaped up into three specific systems: strategic planning, knowledge management, and communications.”

Avishai Ish-Shalom:

To sum up: Variance is the enemy of performance and the source of much of the latency we encounter when using software.

Coda Hale:

Most explanations of organizational success or failure are crap.

…

an organization doing work is just an incredibly complex, dynamic, distributed, parallel process.

Kelly Sutton:

A Campaign is a long-running effort to enact global change safely within a sociotechnical system.

…

Campaigns work well to address:

Esther Derby:

Clarity enables patterns of coherent action across the organization. Contextual understanding supports initiative–people don’t have to wait to be told what to do. It speeds Decision Making as people closer to the work have the information to make more decisions in a reasonable way. Clarity reduces the need for supervision.

Malte Ubl:

As software engineers our job is not to produce code per se, but rather to solve problems. Unstructured text, like in the form of a design doc, may be the better tool for solving problems early in a project lifecycle, as it may be more concise and easier to comprehend, and communicates the problems and solutions at a higher level than code.

Rands:

Process is documented culture. How a team gets a familiar thing done should be broadly understood by the team. This is how we fix a bug. This is how we do a code check-in. This is how a feature is designed. This is how executive sign-off occurs.

Complex systems, cascades (from neurons up to people and then crowds), failures, too much efficiency, not enough slack, and toilet paper.

Dan North on how to break the rules when applying the Theory of Constraints.

Gergely Orosz:

Estimates matter because most people and businesses are date-driven.

Estimation is difficult but developing it as a skill is helpful for delivering software.

Roman Imankulov:

Rough consensus relies on the distinction between two types of objections:

1. “Not the best choice” feedback: “I don’t believe Solution A is the best choice, because XYZ. I believe Solution B would be better, but I accept that Solution A can work too.”

Peter Coy:

The purpose of quadratic voting is to determine “whether the intense preferences of the minority outweigh the weak preferences of the majority,”

We’ve repurposed the idea of a technology tree, popular in many strategy video games, and used that as a vehicle to communicate the Up product roadmap.

David Gasca:

“Silent Meetings” are meetings where most of the time is spent working and not talking. When done correctly most of the meeting is spent silently working together.

Matt Linderman:

Instead of working with a thing you love, think about how to work in a way you love.

This is totally my bag.

John D. Cook:

The rule of three gives a quick and dirty way to estimate these kinds of probabilities. It says that if you’ve tested N cases and haven’t found what you’re looking for, a reasonable estimate is that the probability is less than 3/N. So in our proofreading example, if you haven’t found any typos in 20 pages, you could estimate that the probability of a page having a typo is less than 15%.

An improvisational approach.

Looks like a useful visualisation for projects.

John Allspaw:

In my experience, when an architecture review brings attention to a problem and proposed solutions from multiple perspectives, decisions become less controversial. When a decision appears to be obvious to a broad group (“Question: should we (or should we not) take backups of critical databases? Decision: Yes.”) how a decision gets made almost disappears.

Dan North:

Over the last year or two I have been exploring OKRs—Objectives and Key Results—with several organisations, from a few hundred people in size to a couple of thousand. Some are well over a year in, some are just starting out. There doesn’t seem to be much out there in terms of experience reports or hands-on advice so I have tried to capture the advice I wish I’d had when I started out.

Jesper Andersen:

In any kind of process planning in a factory, people know the price of running the plant at 100% utilisation: it gets sensitive to small errors. So nobody does that.

Nice QA checklist for launching a website.

A collection of information about the PagerDuty incident response process. Not only how to prepare new employees for on-call responsibilities, but also how to handle major incidents, both in preparation and after-work.