Posts

Here’s the reading list to accompany my Monktoberfest talk on just culture, blameless post mortems, and local rationality. The talk was very much inspired by Sidney Dekker’s fantastic book The Field Guide to Understanding Human Error. Here’s a short video where he explains Just Culture. There’s also a PDF of an old edition of the book available online. The rationale and methodology for post mortems at Etsy are explained in Blameless PostMortems and a Just Culture, written by John Allspaw in May 2012. ...

Kellan Elliott-McCrea, the CTO of Etsy for my entire time at the company, writes about the theories under which Etsy’s engineering team, as we know it, was constructed. It has traveled a whole lot further than he could have predicted: Five years ago, continuous deployment was still a heretical idea. The idea you could do it with over 250 engineers was, to me at least, literally unimaginable. Etsy has been the validation of many theories that still must seem heretical to many people, and I want to thank Kellan for the part he’s played in formulating them and seeing them tested in production. ...

If you are a person who is responsible for interviewing engineers, or more importantly, running an interview process for engineers, you should drop everything and read Ann Harter’s discussion of interviews through the lens of research psychology. It’s also useful for people who are the subjects of interviews and are surprised by the way their brains work in interview situations. As an industry we are shockingly bad at evaluating candidates for engineering jobs and the Dunning-Kruger effect is rampant. Let’s get better. ...

Here in management-land, the New York Times story on workplace culture at Amazon has been the talk of Twitter for the past few days. The story paints an ugly picture of hyper-competitiveness, unreasonable demands, and exploitation that have caused many people to recoil (and some others to applaud). I’m certain that the article isn’t comprehensive. It probably isn’t even fair. It’s a critique, and should be taken as such. I really liked Ellen Chisa’s explanation of why Amazon and Jeff Bezos should not take it personally. ...

I love Twitter, but I’ve been unhappy with the company since they made the decision to stop supporting third party clients that compete with their own native clients. There are still some good ones available, but Twitter has actively discouraged the development of new clients by not adding third party API support for many new features, and by limiting the supply of API keys to client developers. In the meantime, Twitter has let the native OS X Twitter application languish. Here’s Jason Snell: ...

I’m sad to see the site This Is My Jam shut down, I found it to be a pretty fun way to share a little music with people you know from Twitter and to be a good source of inspiration for new music to try. In shutting down, they are setting the standard for how social sites should be taken offline in an ideal world. The details: This Is My Jam will become a read-only time capsule in September. This means you won’t be able to post anymore, but you’ll be able to browse a new archive version of the site. You’ll be able to explore all the people and music that made Jam, and listen to everyone’s jams as Spotify playlists as well. Think of it as the best record collection you’ve ever walked through, like this, curated by some of the best tastemakers we know (aka you!). ...

Last fall, when I was interviewing intern candidates, one thing I noticed was that many of them told a similar story – when they needed to acquire a new skill, they watched tutorials and lectures on YouTube. One had an internship the previous summer working on a C++ project, and she told me that she watched C++ videos every morning before work in order to get up to speed quickly. ...

Despite this, "best" does not mean "impregnable". The FBI claims that iPhones are "bricks" containing no useful information and Apple claims that iMessage is "end-to-end" secure. Neither is the case. In iPhones, the FBI, and Going Dark, security researcher explains which threats an iPhone protects you from. As a device, it's secure, but how you use it determines how much information you expose. In short, the iPhone is normally used as part of a system with many potentially leaky components.

Fred Wilson wrote a blog post about employee retention that includes these sentences: >There are highly loyal teams that can withstand almost anything and remain steadfastly behind their leader. And there are teams that are entirely mercenary and will walk out without thinking twice about it. One of the big responsibilities for any manager is to keep their team together, and obviously cultivating loyalty is part of that. I agree with his three tips for retention – leadership, mission, and location are all important – but I hate the “loyalist” versus “mercenary” framing of the discussion. ...

In a piece discussing the horrible effects mean bosses have on the health and productivity of people at work, Christine Porath also catalogs a couple of excuses that these bosses use: I’ve surveyed hundreds of people across organizations spanning more than 17 industries, and asked people why they behaved uncivilly. Over half of them claim it is because they are overloaded, and more than 40 percent say they have no time to be nice. ...