Those given the greatest authority in the firm turn out to be the most powerless to effect positive change in the production process. The actual means by which decisions get made in the firm are a rats' nest of bypasses often held up by the force of will in singular individuals.

Many of these individuals (such as staff engineers) also have a crisis of meaningness when and if they realize their vast skills are essentially wasted being a glorified "glue stick" holding together a system which is perverse, and for no real purpose.

https://hbr.org/2019/12/can-you-know-too-much-about-your-organization
If you looked closely, would you see a deliberate strategy or the results of years and years of patches, workarounds, political truces, and shadow systems? They came to see peripheral roles, in which they stood apart from the complex system that required redesign, as a place from which they could add more fundamental and long-term value to the organization.

'Schlep Blindness'
http://paulgraham.com/schlep.html
A company is defined by the schleps it will undertake.

'Chesterton's fence' is the principle that reforms should not be made until the reasoning behind the existing state of affairs is understood.

There is a tremendous amount of spit and polish that goes into making a major website highly usable. A developer, asked how hard something will be to clone, simply does not think about the polish, because the polish is incidental to the implementation.

Five questions to look under the hood of the interview

1. How will I fail?
2. How do you incentivise your team?
3. Can you share an example of something the team did that didn’t go well, and what did you do to course correct?
4. What does the shipping look like internall`,
5. How much attention do you pay to reducing friction for the engineering team?

It can be challenging to express your thoughts clearly. Alan Alda recommends three rules of three for effective and empathic communication.

1. Make no more than three points

Research suggests that short-term memory is far less robust, maxing out at a meager three to five items.

2. Explain difficult ideas in three different ways

3. Make important points three times

In some close-knit relationships, spaced repetition is a phenomenal tool. Teachers, parents, psychiatrists, or team managers can use it to return to and reinforce difficult ideas across many conversations.

Why they don’t read it

I’m a bit of a perfectionist. Several years ago, I believed the best documentation should be nicely formatted, concise, well-illustrated, and written in clear language — and this is not wrong. But all these features make little sense if the documentation isn’t regularly used by those for whom it has been created.

If the team doesn’t react to anything you publish, I have bad news: this documentation (specs, reports, guidelines, etc.) might be already “dead.” Here are several typical scenarios of what may have gone wrong:

1. “Approved and forgotten” — design guidelines were created without team involvement and then approved by stakeholders. After the official presentation, someone checked them out, while others didn’t. Since the guidelines were comprehensive, they looked like a huge reading that would take a lot of time.

2. “A perfect monolog” — amazing design knowledge base inspired lots of team ideas and questions, but commenting was either absent in the tool or disabled. As a result, the discussion occurred elsewhere, in Slack or MS Teams, and soon this chat became a more valuable “source of truth” than the knowledge base itself.

3. “Lone warrior” — design system documentation was detailed and well-structured but didn’t include any links to what other team members (engineers, QAs, UX researchers, etc.) were doing. As a result, it remained just the designers’ resource, and designers had to answer the same repeated questions in the chat or team meetings.

Documentation is a digital product no less than the actual product you are designing and being paid for.

A guide for your daily "professional" interactions

That’s not my job

I’m not the correct person to assist with this but I am happy to connect you with [insert name] who will be able to help

You are not my boss, stop trying to assign me work.

Have you connected with [manager name] in regards to me taking this on? As it has not been communicated to me that I’ll be working on this.

Use this complete guide to hire a UX designer. Learn how to find, interview and recruit a designer with this step by step guide.

The Working Backwards product definition process is all about is fleshing out the concept and achieving clarity of thought about what we will ultimately go off and build. It typically has four steps:

1. Start by writing the Press Release.
2. Write a Frequently Asked Questions document.
3. Define the customer experience.
4. Write the User Manual.

Levels at big tech, the most common career paths, and what comes after making it to Staff

Here is not a bad article from HBR about “unleashing overlooked talent,” and I’ll just direct you to the part that matters before we get into this more deeply:

https://hbr.org/2022/07/unleash-your-organizations-overlooked-talent?ab=hero-subleft-1

WHY does talent get ignored?

• Most managers are busy, with “busy” supposedly meaning “productive” (it does not, truly) and usually “busy” also meaning “I get a lot of email, most of which I could delete, but I don’t delete it so I can complain about the volume of email.” You just say “It’s the busy season!” or “Everything is so crazy right now!” and you’re good. That allows you to not notice talent.

• Everything about white-collar work is tied to tasks. All that matters to most managers is people completing tasks. Tasks tasks tasks. Most places are barely “strategic” whatsoever. When you are largely being judged on tasks, it is nearly impossible to be seen for talent. Your managers can only look at you as “x-amount of deliverables this cycle,” etc.

• Talent actually scares a lot of managers, because it represents someone potentially coming for their perch, and that’s terrifying to them. It’s oddly in the incentive structure of most managers to suppress new talents in the name of personal relevance and income earning potential, even though the company claims to care about “innovation” and “world-shifting ideas.” Funny, no?

• It’s easier and more comfortable to put people in boxes. A security guard is a security guard. He’s not a docent. That’s fucking crazy, Janet. Go get me a burrito for lunch.

• Staff/Lead Engineer – No direct reports but provides technical leadership and mentorship across an entire team. You work with your team on multiple features and/or projects. You should be proposing technical and infrastructure work for the team to implement. You will be writing much less code than a senior engineer but your influence is across your team, related teams, and possibly areas outside engineering.

https://jvns.ca/blog/brag-documents/

Advocate, Advocate, Advocate!

You have two points where self advocacy should be built into the process:

• 1 on 1s with your manager
• Reviews

ASK

And now we circle back to the beginning. If you want a promotion you need to ask for it. Ask what you need to do to get one. Ask what time frame you should be working towards. You aren’t going to get what your manager doesn’t know you want.

Given a positive sorted array a = [ 3, 4, 6, 9, 10, 12, 14, 15, 17, 19, 21 ];
Define a function f(a, x) that returns x, the next smallest number, or -1 for errors.
i.e.
f(a, 12) = 12
f(a, 13) = 12

Why Binary Search?

Binary search is one of the most difficult “simple” coding problems. The algorithm looks trivial, but it’s a devil to implement. Jon Bentley, a former CMU professor, wrote in his book Programming Pearls that only 10% of professional programmers are able to implement it correctly, including PhD students.

@david_perell: If you're feeling stuck in your professional life, start writing online. Here's how it can accelerate your career:

1. Building a Network: Writing shrinks the world.

2. Building Expertise: Quality writing begins with clear thinking.

3. Team Truth-Seeking: If you write well about an industry, your readers will respond with ideas of their
   own.

4. High-Level Conversations: Many of the most important ideas aren't shared in public.

5. Build a Personal Monopoly:

The ultimate goal of writing online is to become known for having rare and valuable expertise.

It’s the secret to high-performing teams — and strong marriages.

The average ratio for the highest-performing teams was 5.6 (that is, nearly six positive comments for every negative one). The medium-performance teams averaged 1.9 (almost twice as many positive comments than negative ones.) But the average for the low-performing teams, at 0.36 to 1, was almost three negative comments for every positive one.

Only positive feedback can motivate people to continue doing what they’re doing well, and do it with more vigor, determination, and creativity.

Success continues for Openly, the premium homeowners insurance platform for independent agents, as it today announced an impressive 700% growth in in-force premium and 250% growth in the number of agents selling policies with the company year over year.

This growth is also supported by 113 new employees hired over the course of 2021 in all areas of the company. Openly has robust hiring plans for 2022 and expects to add over 100 additional employees this year.

Mistake-proofing or Poka-Yoke is a process analysis tools that either makes it impossible for an error to occur or makes the error immediately obvious once it has occurred.

More broadly, the term can refer to any behavior-shaping constraint designed into a process to prevent incorrect operation by the user.

"Idiot-proof"

You were hired to write code. Many developers make the mistake and think that their job stops there. That’s not true. In fact, you have two jobs:

1) Write good code.

2) Be easy to work with.

“Easy to work with” means that you act professionally at all times. You disagree respectfully. You seek to understand before looking to be understood. You communicate clearly. You value your commitments.

Mostly, it means that you understand the value of relationships, and build them as carefully and intentionally as you build frameworks and libraries

During the pandemic, I didn’t do a ton of actual writing. I barely blogged. I don’t think I did more than 1 or 2 publication, popular or academic. Even worse, I didn’t do a ton of actual reading. At first, I thought it was the pandemic itself. This is stressful stuff, my work life had been through into complete chaos, and my daily living routine was in tatters.

Over the past year or so, however, I slowly realized it was something bigger: I was having trouble concentrating, especially for the 3 or 4 hour blocks of time it took to write well. Or to blow through a book. Or to really study bridge defense. At first I thought I was just getting old. Doesn’t this happen to everyone when they hit their mid-40s? But the more I examined it, the more I started to believe it was a function of how I was consuming information. I was massively multi-tasking, almost full-time. And the two biggest culprits were my email inbox and my twitter feed.

Workers now inherently multitask, because they build their work world around their inbox, which is constantly delivering them different streams of work.

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As a software engineer manager, I’ve reflected on the unique behaviors I prioritize. This post will cover the gestalt of my successful onboarding experiences within the first 90 days.

Starting with Having Good Tact

Good tact is the ability to deal with others to maintain good relations and avoid offense. To say and do the right things at the right time, to behave in a way that promotes cooperation and reciprocity.

My go-to’s are to make myself available, never criticize a previous decision, and avoid being standoff-ish.

Be Explicit About Change

I have been known to repeat an expectation numerous times in front of the team. In a room of ten people, I say the “thing” ten times for one person to “get it.” Being specific about change means being explicit. One of the lessons I’ve learned as an engineer manager is being implicit or nuanced is considered cruel to the team.

Change Means Documenting