The Leadership Garden Newsletter – #35 and a half
The first snow falls in Berlin
When building a piece of IKEA furniture, don’t tighten all the screws to 100% right away. Start by tightening each one to 75%, and only bring them up to 100% once all the screws fit nicely together. This principle applies beyond furniture too.
As many of us, I’ve set up a Mastodon account after the Twitter dumpster fire started. Come and say hi – @ochronus@mastodon.social
Craft: Thoughts on Elevating Product Quality
"People hire services not just based on what they can do but how it makes them feel. Quality has a direct relationship to that. Quality products can take your users from 'I'm merely using this thing to accomplish a task' to 'this is something I love using and I'm telling everyone I know about it.'"
How to handle a reorganization as an engineering manager
If you’re a new manager who has discovered your group will soon go through a reorg, here are some ways to make sure things go as smoothly as possible for you and your team.
The Uncertain Mind: How the Brain Handles the Unknown
Our brain is wired to reduce uncertainty. The unknown is synonymous with threats that pose risks to our survival. In fact, fear of the unknown has been theorized to be the “one fear to rule them all”—the fear that gives rises to all other fears. This fear makes sense from an evolutionary perspective, but can be unnecessarily nerve-wracking in our modern world. How can we better manage it?
The ways we mess up tech hiring
My new project “Make Tech Hiring Work” just kicked off. In this intro article, I discuss some common ways we mess up hiring, from both sides.
The World Is Run By People No Smarter Than You
"My overwhelming lesson from the past few weeks is that even these heroes of tech are just mortals as well who make very very dumb mistakes. And if they can make those mistakes, so can you." The author elaborates on this viewpoint amongst recent examples.
The Senior Shift
In most tech companies, the first few levels of an engineering career ladder are pretty straightforward. You must grow from someone who needs a lot of oversight to an independent engineer.