Negative engineering is the time-consuming and sometimes frustrating work that engineers do to ensure small bugs don't take down systems.

There were no warnings or red lights, because the process simply hadn’t run in the first place. And so a new, time-consuming activity was added to the data analytics stack: manually checking the database each morning to make sure everything had functioned properly.

Negative engineering is “insurance as code”

Negative engineering is the time-consuming and sometimes frustrating work that engineers undertake to ensure the success of their primary objectives.

A new set of principles for better workflows when making digital products

“Ready for dev”

It’s safe to say that there is a natural tension between the fields of design and engineering. Traditionally, the role of design is to question, create meaning, and to argue for solutions that make for a better user experience. The role of engineering is to systematize, solve technical problems, and to argue for solutions that make for a simple, scalable, and future-proof implementation. The design process begins before we know what we want, and engineering usually happens when there is a clear notion of what is being built.

"Unfortunately, these projects often do more harm than good if the organization uses the design system as yet another initiative to centralize the decision-making process..."

1. Flatten your waterfalls
2. Make code the design product
3. Operate like an open source project
4. Increase visibility through automation
5. Plan like a farmer

​ ​ ​ Hey [FIRST NAME GOES HERE], Have you ever noticed how some people seem to get all of the press and attention even when other people have built something similar? It can be...

If you work in a 500-person company, even if you’re junior, you can gain attention by writing. You just need experience and ideas to write about, but you don't need authority or influence. Let your ideas speak for themselves.

Write about what you’re learning or strategies your team can pursue, and share it. People can comment on what’s interesting, or even disagree, but either way, you’ll increase your attention and influence.

Writing automatically elevates you from the sea of other people doing the same thing.

David shares a compilation of the best links from his newsletter Friday Finds. Read here.

A summary on how to pass the Amazon leadership principles behavioral interviews, and get a job at Amazon.

It’s somewhat shocking how often people buried in large companies don’t mentally identify their customer as the final external customer. Their customer is their boss, sales, marketing, etc. They are so focused on doing what they’re told, so focused on building what they’re asked, without taking a big step back to understand who uses their product.

What good design managers do
A good design manager focuses on 5 key responsibilities to build a healthy and happy team:

1. Ensure a steady stream of challenging and meaningful work for you & your team
2. Show where the quality bar is, by doing exemplary work yourself
3. Protect time and focus of your reports so they can do their best work
4. Communicate timely & clear feedback to every team member
5. Create a personalised growth path for every member in the team

_The perdocent exploits the claim of not having been taught how to do something, as a means of not understanding, of taking control, or to avoid doing any actual work.

As a management professional, no matter their appeal to credential, never let a perdocent take control. Always seek to maintain familiarity with the perdocent's tactics…_

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.