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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Gene Kim
Started reading
May 6, 2020
Kurt has been operating this entire time without any real leadership air cover. He could get fired for going rogue,
People need to see me as impartial.”
I’ll keep lobbying Steve,” Chris replies with a tight-lipped smile.
Software is like a city, constantly undergoing change, needing renovations and repair.
Can I show you what I’m thinking?”
She likes finishing things, not just starting things.
Amazon ideal of the “two-pizza team,”
where features can be created by individual teams that can be fed with two pizzas.
We’ll need a whole truckload of pizzas to ship thi...
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“Technical debt is a fact of life,
Technical debt is inherently neither good nor bad—it happens because in our daily work, we are always making trade-off decisions,”
choice between working on a feature or developer productivity, they should always choose developer productivity.
“The opposite of the Third Ideal is someone who values process compliance and TWWADI,” he says with a big smile. “You know, ‘The Way We’ve Always Done It.’ It’s the huge library of rules and regulations, processes and procedures, approvals and stage gates, with new rules being added all the time to prevent the latest disaster from happening again.
“You may recognize them as rigid project plans, inflexible procurement processes, powerful architecture review boards, infrequent release schedules, lengthy approval processes, strict separation of duties
“That’s not servant leadership, it’s transformational leadership,”
“When something goes wrong, we ask ‘what caused the problem,’ not ‘who.’
mother hen
I’d like to have a word with you. Right now, please.”
not just to do the right things, but to do the right things right.
“We’re in a relay race, and we need to get the baton handed to you,”
“Your work is important, and my job is to help you get whatever you need to succeed. Thank you in advance for all your hard work, and please let me know how I can help.”
She was amazed at how gifted of a communicator he was, making everyone not only feel comfortable, but appreciated and part of something special.
This isn’t over. You somehow managed to find a patron, but she won’t be able to protect you forever. You think you’re better than us? You think you can come in here, put on airs, and automate everyone’s job away? Not on my watch. I’ll make sure we bring you down.”
They break up the writing responsibilities between all the writers, and each writer works on their part of the script in isolation, typing away in Word for weeks at a time.
right before the script needs to be finalized, all fifty writers get together in a room to merge all their work back together into a single story.
Merging code is equally difficult.
like the scriptwriters, they create private working branches of the source code, their own private copy.
developers may work in isolation for weeks, sometimes even months.
“I’ll ask for forgiveness later if we need to,”
doctors aren’t allowed to touch the patient. Well, except if there’s a P1 ticket open.
Jared isn’t a doctor. He’s probably just an administrator, just adding and removing users and making sure things are backed up.
Each year, we used anything that went wrong as an excuse to create more and more rules to ‘make developers more accountable,’ which just slowed us down even more. What makes me so excited about the Rebellion is that we’re trying to undo all of that.”
developers will eventually be responsible for testing their own code, with QA taking a more strategic role, coaching and consulting.
she scrolls through pages and pages of features. It’s difficult to know what the features really are from the ticket name or reading their contents. They’re long on what and how, but not on why.
who the heavy hitters are who can give us some air cover as we move Data Hub out of Phoenix.
“None taken.”
LARB’ stands for Lead Architecture Review Board,” Dwayne explains. “It was a committee created decades ago after a whole bunch of bad things happened in technology, long before I joined the company.
“If you’re on the LARB, why haven’t you made the process easier?” Dwayne says, “It’s a committee. They all think their job is to say no.
Mindset of ARB and Ops.
This is one of the great things about using Docker containers, Maxine thinks. Containers are immutable, unable to be changed after they’re created, so if it works in Dev, it will almost certainly work in Test.
“Sarah. Take it from me, there is no one more effective at busting down inconvenient barriers than she is. She’s like a chainsaw, great at cutting down trees.”
Ops delegation says, “I don’t have anything against Tomcat. I’m just not comfortable with our ability to support this given our current staffing levels. We’re stretched thin as it is, and while I appreciate that this technology isn’t bleeding edge, we still need people to operate and maintain it …”
“But we still got our asses kicked, right?”
This idea bounced around in the marketing and project management organization for almost two years,
“Only 2.5 percent of the time required to go from concept to customers actually using the feature is spent in Development?”
“Long before the feature ever gets to Development, it goes through the funding approval process, which often takes over a year. And then once the feature is created, most of the time isn’t spent in-work, it’s waiting for a product manager to respond to a question. It’s the Square again.
don’t have things ready to be worked on. And when they do finish a feature, it takes forever to actually get things into production so that our customers can use it. And often the only feedback we get are the annual focus groups.
If you still want to be a product manager, I’ll figure out how to clear your plate and get those other responsibilities assigned to someone else. “Don’t give me an answer right now,” Maggie says. “Think about it and let me know first thing Monday morning.”
Maggie does not mess around,
Hopefully any valuation estimates will be anchored before any disasters. (You never want to talk to bankers when you really need them. They can always smell fear.)
reality is much, much messier. It was the “world as imagined” colliding violently with the “world as it actually is.”
