Your mind is a mad monkey trying to understand life which is unfair and crazy. Get used to it.

Maxime Lagacé

Complain & Propose

• 😠 The Problem with Unadorned Complaints
  • Simply complaining without offering a way forward can be unproductive — it often fosters negativity, drains collective energy, and implicitly places the burden of resolution entirely on others.
  • It can leave individuals feeling like passive victims rather than empowered agents of change.
• 💡 The Core Guideline: Complain and Propose
  • The fundamental rule advocated is direct — if you identify and articulate a problem (complain), you should accompany it with a concrete suggestion for improvement (propose).
  • As Beck puts it, “Complaining by itself dumps the problem on someone else. Proposing demonstrates that you’re willing to share the load.” This shifts the dynamic from merely highlighting issues to actively seeking solutions.
• 🚀 Benefits of Pairing Complaints with Proposals
  • It empowers the individual by changing their role from that of a critic to a proactive contributor.
  • It fosters a more constructive and solution-oriented environment — making discussions more focused, actionable, and less about assigning blame.
  • The process of formulating a proposal often compels a deeper understanding of the complaint itself, including its underlying causes, constraints, and potential trade-offs.
• 🤔 Nature and Scope of a “Proposal”
  • A proposal doesn’t need to be a perfect, exhaustive solution — it can serve as a starting point for discussion, a suggestion for further investigation, or a small experiment to test a hypothesis.
  • The key is the intent to move forward constructively, rather than presenting a flawless final answer immediately.
• 🔄 Cultivating a Proactive Culture
  • Adopting this approach can help cultivate a team or organizational culture where problems are viewed as opportunities for collective improvement and innovation, rather than just sources of frustration.
  • It encourages clearer communication, as proposals inherently require more specificity than generalized complaints.
• 🧐 Critical Considerations and Nuances
  • One might question the universal applicability if power dynamics or information asymmetry make it difficult for some to formulate meaningful proposals. Beck's suggestion that a proposal can be "to figure out how to fix X" offers some leeway here.
  • The article doesn't deeply explore the purely emotional aspect of venting — sometimes, articulating frustration is a necessary precursor to problem-solving, and the immediate demand for a proposal might feel premature or add to existing burdens in such moments.

Here's a pretty neat and simple framework for proposals.

Principal Engineer Roles Framework

• 🤔 The Challenge of Defining Principal Engineers (PEs)
  • The role of a Principal Engineer often lacks a universally clear definition across the industry, leading to ambiguity in expectations, scope, and impact. Bukovec’s framework aims to bring clarity to this often “nebulous” role.
• 🌟 Introducing the “P3” Framework
  • The core of the article is the “P3” model for understanding PE contributions — Principled, Prolific, and Profound. These are not mutually exclusive categories but rather dimensions of impact.
• 🧭 Principled PEs — The Strategists and Standard-Bearers
  • These PEs focus on establishing and upholding technical vision, architectural integrity, and engineering best practices. They make critical, often difficult, technical decisions and trade-offs with a long-term perspective, ensuring things are built “the right way” and mentoring others to do the same.
• 🛠️ Prolific PEs — The Impact Drivers and Executors
  • Characterized by their significant, high-leverage output and their ability to drive complex, cross-functional initiatives to successful completion. Their impact is broad, tangible, and often involves unblocking others or delivering on critical business needs with exceptional execution.
• 💡 Profound PEs — The Deep Experts and Innovators
  • These PEs possess deep, often unique, technical expertise in specific, critical domains. They solve an organization's hardest or most novel technical problems, push the boundaries of existing technology, and often invent new solutions or paradigms.
• 🎯 Purpose and Application of the P3 Framework
  • This framework is intended to help — organizations define PE roles more clearly, evaluate candidates, guide career development, and enable PEs to articulate their specific value. It helps distinguish PE impact from that of other senior technical roles.
• 🧐 Observation: Beyond Static Archetypes
  • While the P3s offer distinct lenses, it’s implied that effective PEs likely demonstrate a blend of these qualities, perhaps excelling in one or two. The framework’s utility lies in highlighting different vectors of high-level technical contribution rather than rigidly categorizing individuals. A potential point for discussion is how an organization might balance or value these different P3 strengths within its PE cohort.

Fixing culture starts with calendars, not offices

• 🗓️ Calendars as Culture Embodied
  • The core argument is that an organization's calendars are not merely scheduling tools but a direct, tangible manifestation of its actual working culture — "Our calendars are our culture, in practice." If calendars are chaotic and meeting-choked, so is the culture.
• 😩 The Problem: Rampant "Time Confetti"
  • The article highlights how poorly managed calendars, characterized by excessive, often purposeless meetings and fragmented schedules ("time confetti"), directly undermine productivity, deep work, and employee well-being. This leads to a reactive, rather than proactive, work environment.
• 💡 The Calendar as a Lever for Change
  • Instead of seeing bad calendars as just a symptom of poor culture, the piece proposes that actively fixing calendars is a concrete and impactful way to initiate cultural improvement. It offers a practical starting point for broader change.
• 🛠️ Actionable Strategies for Calendar Hygiene
  • Key suggestions include:
    • Treating meetings as a "last resort," not the default.
    • Implementing "no-meeting days" or dedicated focus blocks.
    • Mandating clear agendas, essential attendees, and defined outcomes for every meeting.
    • Encouraging asynchronous communication as a primary mode of collaboration.
    • Empowering individuals to decline meetings that aren't a good use of their time.
• 🧑‍✈️ Leadership's Essential Role in Modeling
  • For calendar reform to succeed and genuinely shift culture, leadership must not only endorse these practices, but actively model them. If leaders continue to perpetuate bad calendar habits, attempts at change will likely fail.
• 🧠 The Goal: Reclaiming Focus and Intentionality
  • Ultimately, better calendar management aims to restore blocks of uninterrupted time for focused work, reduce constant context switching, and foster a more deliberate and productive work environment where time is respected.
• 🧐 Observation: Necessary but Potentially Insufficient?
  • While the article makes a strong case for calendars as a powerful lever, one might argue that for the changes to be truly sustainable, they must be coupled with addressing deeper underlying cultural norms — such as trust, psychological safety, or performance evaluation metrics that might inadvertently incentivize "busyness" displayed through meeting attendance. Calendar fixes might be a crucial first step, but perhaps not always the complete solution on their own if other cultural pressures remain.

Story Points Are Dead; Long Live Story Points.

• 🚫 The Widespread Misuse of Story Points
  • The article argues that story points, as commonly misapplied, are indeed “dead” — they are frequently treated as precise units of time, used to compare individuals or teams, or to make exact, long-range commitments, all of which are antithetical to their original purpose.
• 💀 Consequences of Misapplication
  • This misuse leads to numerous dysfunctions — such as story point inflation, teams spending excessive time debating exact point values, loss of trust when "estimates" aren't met, and a focus on hitting numbers rather than delivering value. It becomes a tool for “accounting and not accountability.”
• 🌱 The Original Intent — “Long Live Story Points”
  • However, the author champions the original intent behind story points — as a relative, team-specific measure of effort, complexity, and uncertainty (not time) for a given piece of work.
  • Their true value lies in facilitating team discussions, fostering shared understanding of tasks, and enabling short-term forecasting for that specific team.
• 🗣️ It’s About the Conversation, Not the Number
  • The emphasis is shifted from the numeric value of the points to the conversation they provoke. Story pointing, when done well, forces the team to discuss scope, potential challenges, and dependencies, leading to better-understood work.
• 🔄 Reframing for Internal Team Use
  • Story points are most effective as an internal tool for the team to gauge capacity and plan sprints, not as an external reporting metric for management or stakeholders looking for time-based commitments. The author states, “Story points were designed to remove time from the equation, not embed it.”
• 🧐 Critical Observation: The Ideal vs. Reality Gap
  • The piece strongly advocates for returning to the "pure" form of story points. A critical point for discussion, however, is how readily organizations entrenched in misusing story points can revert or be convinced to adopt this more nuanced understanding, especially if existing performance metrics or project management practices are deeply tied to the flawed interpretations. The challenge often lies in organizational culture, not just team-level understanding.

OKRs for Evil and Good

• 😈 OKRs for "Evil" — The Pitfalls of Misapplication
  • The article highlights that OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) can be used for "evil" when they are cascaded rigidly from the top down, used as performance review metrics, or when Key Results are solely output-based and easily gamed — turning them into a tool for micromanagement, pressure, and fostering a culture of fear or box-ticking rather than genuine improvement.
  • As Kerr implies, when OKRs become “a stick to beat people with,” they lose their power to inspire and align.
• 😇 OKRs for "Good" — The Potential for Alignment and Empowerment
  • Conversely, OKRs are used for "good" when they facilitate alignment and empowerment. This involves teams setting their own OKRs in contribution to higher-level objectives, focusing on outcomes rather than just outputs, and using them as a tool for learning, adaptation, and communication.
  • The “good” version emphasizes OKRs as a “hypothesis for how to achieve an outcome,” allowing for experimentation and learning.
• 🎯 Focus on Outcomes, Not Just Outputs
  • A key distinction for using OKRs for "good" is the emphasis on outcomes — the actual impact and change desired — rather than just outputs (e.g., features shipped, tasks completed). Good Key Results should reflect a change in user behavior or business impact.
• 🤝 Alignment Through Conversation, Not Dictation
  • Effective OKR implementation fosters alignment through rich conversations between teams and leadership about why certain objectives are important and how different efforts contribute. This contrasts with a purely top-down, dictatorial approach.
• 🔄 Learning and Iteration are Key
  • OKRs, when used well, are not set in stone. They are part of a learning cycle. Teams should regularly review progress, understand what’s working (or not), and be willing to adapt or even abandon KRs that aren't leading to the desired objective. The article suggests that “OKRs make failure visible, which makes learning possible.”
• 🧐 Interesting Observation: The Human Element is Crucial
  • The article underscores that the process and culture surrounding OKRs are far more important than the framework itself. Whether OKRs lead to "evil" or "good" depends heavily on trust, psychological psychological safety, and leadership's intent and behavior in implementing them. It's not the tool, but how it's wielded.

That’s all for this week’s edition

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See you all next week 👋