If you only read one thingRound Rects Are Everywhere! (8 minute read) Steve Jobs talking to the developer of QuickDraw: âWell, circles and ovals are good, but how about drawing rectangles with rounded corners? Can we do that now, too?â When the developer says, âWe donât need itâ, Steve takes the developer outside and shows him that rectangles with round corners are everywhere. Now every drawing program has this feature. What can we learn? First, the CEO talking to a developer, hot layers upon layers of peopleâand yes while the company was small back then, Steve also talked to the developer of the keyboard of the first iPhone much later. Second, Steve goes outside to convince the developer round corners are a feature that is needed. Steve knows the market (many startup CEOs donât!) and goes the extra mile - outside - to explain the world to the developerâas a manager should. We can also see the default developer response âit would be really hard to do, and I donât think we really need itâ (see in my book the rule âStart with a yesâ). And all this from 1981. Forty years later most product organizations and startup CEOs are still not on that level - funny, because everyone wants to be Steve Jobs. https://www.folklore.org/Round_Rects_Are_Everywhere.html Stories Iâve enjoyed this weekWalkie Talkie architect âdidnât realise it was going to be so hotâ (26 minute read) Speaking of round design. An architect designed a building. The building had a concave glass facade. The facade creates a heat ray on the street below with 91°C to fry eggs. The answer from the architect? âI didnât think London was that sunnyâ (âI didnât think that would take down the siteâ). Everyone thought this was a good idea. No one stopped the architect from creating a concave mirror. On top: Some years before, the architect designed a hotel with - again - a concave glass facade, that created a âdeath rayâ as employees called it - that burned hotel guests at the pool. No one stopped the architect from doing the same thing AGAIN. And the architect either didnât care (my 5¢) or was ignorant about his work. I feel like a lot of development orgs today exhibit this behaviour. People making stupid decisions, no one stops them. Developers who donât learn from their mistakes. Why blame them? People donât stop other people building houses that have death rays to burn people in the street. An Interview with AMD CEO Lisa Su About Solving Hard Problems (54 minute read) First things first. The CEO of AMD Lisa Su is an engineer. The CEO of Nvidia Jensen Huang is an engineer. Steve Jobs was a tinkerer and software developer. Zuck is a programmer. Larry Page and Sergey Brin are developers. Jeff Bezos is an engineer. Pierre Omidyar is a software engineer. Daniel Georg Ek is a software engineer. See the pattern? Startup CEOs want to copy everything from Google, Amazon, eBay, Nvidia, Apple. Except one thing. The CEO is an engineer. Is your CEO an engineer? But wants to become the next Apple or Google? Good luck with that. The interview is also about hard problems. Too many startups I look into just work on simple problems. Problems that engineers are not challenged with (so they get bored and do stupid things). I wonder if this has to do with the CEO not being an engineer vs. the CEO being an engineer. Proof me wrong! https://stratechery.com/2024/an-interview-with-amd-ceo-lisa-su-about-solving-hard-problems/ Experts vs. Imitators (10 minute read) Also on the topic of judging people: How to distinguish imitators from experts? Lots of good advice, but this one thing: âImitators get frustrated when you say you donât understand.â seems key for hiring experts and root out imitators. Also: âExperts can tell you all the ways theyâve failed.â I didnât hire a lot of imitators who fooled me during interviews, but some over the decades of my career-it was always a pain later to deal with them. Much easier to find them in interviews. I wish Iâd had that guide. Must read. https://fs.blog/experts-vs-imitators/ Iâm switching from Laravel to Rails (10 minute read) What are you using? Two battery-included frameworksâbut different? Interesting insights in this longish article. I think both are fine, they are batteries included, and you have therefor to write less code. The author laments that Lavarel changes its opinions every release; itâs not clear how to use it in the best way possibleâwhich makes hiring hard because everyone writes Lavarel differently. To the author, Rails stays more on track. If that is the case, go with Rails. The fewer problems, the better (what is the current state of type support in Ruby?) https://old.reddit.com/r/rails/comments/1dkcegr/im_switching_from_laravel_to_rails/ Almost half of Dellâs full-time US workforce has rejected the companyâs return-to-office push (25 minute read) Backfired! âThose who chose remote are no longer eligible for promotion or able to change roles. [..] Close to 50% of Dellâs full-time workers in the US have opted to stay remoteâ* How self-defeating. You want people to stay with the company, which means they need a perspective inside the company. Not promoting remote workers just means they jump ship when they feel they need a promotion. And it doesnât even work-it seems-with 50% of workers staying remote. Second order thinking not applied. https://www.businessinsider.com/us-dell-workers-reject-return-to-office-hybrid-work-2024-6 What is a Personal User Manual? (10 minute read) I didnât know this one. âPersonal User Manuals are short descriptions of your background, values, and communication style. All team members should complete and exchange a Personal User Manual to help teammates better understand each other.â I love how new things pop up to make remote work better for everyone. Lots of people do not get this. They look at the current state and say âThis canât workâ. But things evolve and people adapt. And new technologies pop up. I studied philosophy at university and loved Popper. Who said you canât look into the future, because new things will always pop up. Who could imagine the internet? The iPhone? ChatGPT? Not in an abstract Sci-Fi way, but a real thing that massively changes the world around us? In Sci-Fi, Terminator 1, the protagonist runs around trying to find a public phone. WEIRD! Donât be surprised by the future, stay vigilant. https://futureforum.com/2022/07/15/personal-user-manual/ What happens to latency if service time is cut in half (3 minute read) Queuing theory, everywhere in software development, poorly understood. An article with lots of formulas. Mathematics. I do feel we need more mathematics and facts in software engineering. If you want to impress your developers, read this. Also, queuing theory is unintuitive. Service time cut in half, 11 times improvement in latency. As I did say, unintuitive. https://pveentjer.github.io/misc/2022/04/18/service-time-cut-in-half.html Programmers should stop celebrating incompetence (5 minute read) From the famous DHH: âYouâre not a clueless dog banging at the keyboard with no prospects of ever improving. Youâre a human of tremendous capacity to become good at what you do. Embrace that.â Yes, yes, yes, yes. https://world.hey.com/dhh/programmers-should-stop-celebrating-incompetence-de1a4725 Wells Fargo Fires Over a Dozen for âSimulation of Keyboard Activityâ (10 minute read) Employees âdischarged after review of allegations involving simulation of keyboard activity creating impression of active workâ. I wonder what kind of company you are, when people can fake their jobs with a keyboard activity device. AND what kind of company you are, to check for keyboard activity of remote workers. On the other hand, I have been scammed by employees who had a second job. Sometimes not easy to detect, just a slow worker, or do they have a second job? Do you have slow developers? Perhaps they have a second coding job. One reason I believe weâre going to end up with pay-per-feature for developers. This is from Yahoo. I once had a purple Yahoo credit card. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/wells-fargo-fires-over-dozen-133711267.html Fired employee hacked into companyâs computer system and deleted servers, causing it to lose S$918,000 (23 minute read) Again, again, again. You do have all your backups (and Terraforms) with a second cloud provider, where DevOps canât easily (or not at all) delete them in anger? Otherwise, you might be in for a surprise when an angry remote worker deletes all your data and backup. It happens! Higher costs for a second backup? Yes. But the CEO will happily pay for this. Join the CTO newsletter! | |
