Interesting to learn again how even small changes test organisations. Launching a simple website lets you find out about your team mates, priorities, yourself.
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Author: Aleks Kudic
Bed bound for the last 2 days and when not reviewing PRs I read Good Strategy / Bad Strategy book from 2011 FT short list, and I am starting to realise that I don’t now what our strategy is.
Could it be that I wasn’t paying attention? Or we need to work this out? I reviewed a few series A pitch decks and clearly many haven’t worked what their strategy is.
Some ideas from the book can be found on slides here.
The NY Times article says: Project Aristotle’s researchers began searching through the data they had collected, looking for norms. They looked for instances when team members described a particular behavior as an ‘‘unwritten rule’’ or when they explained certain things as part of the ‘‘team’s culture.’’ Some groups said that teammates interrupted one another constantly and that team leaders reinforced that behavior by interrupting others themselves. On other teams, leaders enforced conversational order, and when someone cut off a teammate, group members would politely ask everyone to wait his or her turn. Some teams celebrated birthdays and began each meeting with informal chitchat about weekend plans. Other groups got right to business and discouraged gossip. There were teams that contained outsize personalities who hewed to their group’s sedate norms, and others in which introverts came out of their shells as soon as meetings began.
After looking at over a hundred groups for more than a year, Project Aristotle researchers concluded that understanding and influencing group norms were the keys to improving Google’s teams.
Hard to disagree with this collection of valuable insights. Keep coming back to it https://github.com/i0natan/nodebestpractices
Dare we say we are happy using Blueprint, a ReactJS components library, from Pantir after only 2 months of build.
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Why write software
I keep reminding my self almost daily that the only reason we write software is to create business value. We don’t write software because it serves some higher purpose. It’s very simple. Business aims to solve customer’s problem or reduce friction in its operations. Software solves those problems and business captures created value.
Hiring, hiring, hiring. I’ve been hiring for the last 6 months non-stop. Before leaving my job I had to hire new CTO and a team of 6 in India as part of my handover.
At my new startup, I am setting up a team and I started hiring even before I started. I talked to freelancers from Upwork, super contractors in London, AWS solution architects, many outsourcing agencies from 20 to 200 staff in Serbia, Ukraine, Belarus, Holland, South Africa., LinkedIn contacts, Twitter followers, CTOs from London, Israel and Belgrade… and many recruitment consultants.
I posted jobs on job boards from LinkedIn to local job sites in Eastern Europe. I interviewed many candidiates in the first to final rounds, reviewed not as many CVs (engineers don’t know how to write CVs), built submitted code, performed many coding tests, talked to many managers. The key to success is to forget your ego and find value in candidates for the particular role you are hiring for. Forget your ego.
When manging remote teams I find useful to agree for engineers to perform regular code submissions. I should also note, from my experience on both ends, that when someone — myself included — isn’t making regular pushes or pull requests., they’ve usually “checked out.” That is, they’re not actually working. And more importantly, they’ve stopped caring.
So, as long as you’re actually doing work, and as long as writing code is a daily responsibility of yours, you shouldn’t be afraid to push code every day. If you find that difficult, you might be in the wrong job! And, that’s something both your manager and you should want to see the early signs of!
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What’s technology
Technology is something you need to explain to your parents.
For millennials internet is not a technology but AI is.
For the generation X, internet is a technology but the TV is not.
Technology is always invented in your lifetime.
A change in perspective is worth 80 IQ points. Alan Key