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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Michael Lopp
Read between
November 20 - December 27, 2019
We need to demonstrate to this customer that we are capable of exceeding their expectations. We need the people who depend on us to trust that their faith in us is not misplaced. We need the planet Earth to understand that we aren’t evil.
bringing anything new into the world is a disruptive act.
the people who grow the company are not the same people who founded it.
A healthy product company is, confusingly, one at odds with itself. It has a healthy part that is attempting to normalize and to create predictability , but it needs another part that is tasked with building something new that is going to disrupt and eventually destroy that normality.
A project manager is responsible for shipping a product, whereas a product manager is responsible for making sure the right product is shipped.
project = ship the product, product = ship the right product, and program = ship many interrelated products, usually at the same time.
You know what a good project manager does? They are chaos-destroying machines, and each new person you bring onto your team, each dependency you create, adds hard-to-measure entropy to your team. A good project manager thrives on measuring, controlling, and crushing entropy.
ownership means that a person is responsible for all decisions for the thing.
a good project manager owns the execution of the machine that makes sure everything is getting done.
An effective project manager instinctively creates artifacts of insight.
Your first conversation with your new project manager sounds like this: “I want to be able to measure X, Y, and Z, and I’d like to be able to measure them on a weekly basis.” The project manager will take this request and do their damnedest to find that data (and the people creating that data), efficiently mechanize its collection, and eventually present you the artifact.
A good project manager’s job is to decrease chaos by increasing clarity.
As a lead, you have three jobs—people, process, and product —and you get to choose how to invest in each of those roles.
but perhaps the situation is that you’re constantly talking with the people because the process piece is broken.
bored people quit.
figure out how to include them by taking time to understand what they need and doing your best to give it to them.
Boredom is easier to fix than an absence of belief.
They’ll say something innocuous like, “. . . and I really don’t know what to do next,”
What was “I’m bored” grew roots and became “I’m bored and why isn’t anyone doing anything about it?” and sprouted “I’m bored, I told my boss, and he . . . did nothing,” and finally bloomed into “I don’t want to work at a place where they don’t care if I’m bored.”
When exploration is complete, you often have nothing to hold up to your project manager to explain or justify the expenditure of time. Here’s what you tell them: “My job isn’t just building product; I also build people.”
A terrific way to accelerate the boredom clock is to promise productive and creative time that is then taken away.
progress is not measured in interrupt-driven minutes; it’s blocks of delicious, uninterrupted hours.
the simple act of saying, “I know where you want to be and I’m thinking about how to get you there” is a way to demonstrate you care about the growth of your team.
you need to keep building stuff.
Each week that passes where you don’t share the joy, despair, and discovery of software development is a week when you slowly forget what it means to be a software developer.
Your cultural bellwether is the person on the team who is going to tell you, “This guy is going to add, not detract.” Who you’re looking for in your bellwether is the person who best represents the soul of the team.
A strategic hire is someone who is going to push their agenda, their opinion.
A strategic isn’t going to be with your team long because you simply don’t move fast enough, whereas a tactical is going to be happy as long as you keep the work relevant and constant.
Go read their weblog. Find out if they’ve contributed to open source. Read their posts to mailing lists.
Stories are revealed over drinks, not lunch.
These are the ones who complete your sentences and they know your stories.
It’s not just the organizational chart, it’s the intricate personalities that have settled into a comfortable, complex communication structure.
We know that it is an inherent property of complex systems that they will contain both our best work and our worst guesses.
Discard the nerd extremes: the curmudgeonly pocket protector set is retired or retiring, and there’s a good chance that the slick, brown-haired guy sitting across the bar wearing the $300 Ted Baker shirt is a fucking Python wizard.
“Your job with your nerd is to bring calm to their chaos.”
When nerds see a knot, they want to unravel it.
your nerd’s default opening position when asked to build a thing is, “We can build it better than anyone else.”
When a nerd says “We can build it better,” he’s saying, “I have not devoted the necessary time to understanding the existing solution, and it’s more fun to build than to investigate someone else’s crap.”
Snark from nerds is a leading indicator that I’m wasting their time, and when I find it I ask questions until I understand the inefficiency so I can change it or explain it.
Perform consistently and efficiently around your nerds so they can spend their energy on what they are building and not worry about that which they can’t control.
“Mom, I can’t focus without all this noise.”
What separates a NADD sufferer from everyone else is that the context switch is transparent.
Anyone can multitask. NADD sufferers multitask with deft purpose. They’re on a quest of high-speed information acquisition and processing.
any good website or application must be designed not to answer the question “Do you want to learn” but rather “How long do I have your attention?”
NADD is the perfect affliction for managing this situation because it’s an affliction that reduces the cost of the context switch .
My cave is my intellectual home. My kitchen is where I eat, my bed is where I sleep, and my cave is where I think.
I think it’s great that someone is coming to clean the house, but I wish they’d stop touching my stuff.
Anything that you perceive as beautiful, useful, or fun came from someone stumbling through the zone.
Nerds are rewarded for structure. We get big bucks for reliably generating useful technology that works. Sure, we’re artists, but it’s an art of patterns, repetition, structure, and efficiency (I swear, it’s sexy).
Meetings are power struggles between those who want something and those who don’t want to give it to them.
