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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Michael Lopp
Read between
November 20 - December 27, 2019
No matter where you are in your career, you need to continually develop your network of people because it’s likely that one of these three people will assist in future employment or opportunity.
As long as you are sitting there busily being present, your team doesn’t believe that you are leaving.
Your shields drop the moment you let a glimpse of a potential different future into your mind.
What has happened recently or in the past that either supports or detracts from what I value?
I usually find a basic values violation that dug in, stuck, and festered.
In either case, your expectations of your company and your job were not met, and when faced with opportunity elsewhere, you engaged.
Every moment as a leader is an opportunity to either strengthen or weaken shields. Every single moment.
Everything else just happened thanks to proximity and serendipity.
Humans—engineers especially—significantly underestimate the cost of getting things done in groups of people.
Engineers have a well-deserved reputation for regularly being off by a factor of three in their work estimates, and that is partly due to the fact that we are really shitty at estimating the non-linear chaotic work (and fun) that exists in keeping a group of humans pointed in the right direction.
You need someone to keep the threads untangled and forming a high-functioning web rather than a big snarl of a Gordian knot.
There are leaders who have crap judgement and perform awful analysis and make precisely the wrong decisions.
A portion of every leader’s day is the detection, triage, and resolution of work we never planned.
The work isn’t hard because of the things you know; it’s hard because of the unknowable.
If you’re a manager and there are lots of surprises at these meetings, you might be out of touch.
No one is sure what beta means anymore.
someone who is checked out brings down the entire team with their incessant uselessness.
Grapevine — A content-rich source of false information.
HR (Human Resources) — Happy people who help you do very unhappy things.
Billions of dollars have been lost to NIH. I mean it. Billions.
Product Manager — Ideally, the owner of a product. This person is clear on what the product is and where it is going. They often have to deal with pesky engineers who believe they know what the customers want. Program Manager — The owner of the schedule. Program managers are pretty much useless in small companies, but essential in any large product development organization with multiple interdependent teams.
From the moment a req is approved, the average number of days to get a butt in a seat is 90 days.
Staff Meeting — A weekly meeting with all your direct reports. Failure to run this type of meeting on a regular basis will result in a breakdown in communication and much wasting of time. Status Reports — The weekly ritual where you justify your existence to managers; often a sign of corporate bloatification. You should fight the creation of these with all of your might.
Total compensation is the dollar amount you should use when comparing multiple job offers.
