Software Lead Weekly

The Days Are Long but the Decades Are Short
6 minutes read.

"Don’t spend time trying to maintain relationships with people you don’t like, and cut negative people out of your life. Negativity is really bad. " -- Sam Altman shares his lessons learned in the past decade, and I found it to be inspirational and relatable to my journey.

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Ever Tried Compiling Some of the Code in Silicon Valley? There's a Lot of Easter Eggs.
1 minutes read.

My humble effort to help you start the weekend with a smile on your face, even in this difficult time.

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The 40 Best Questions to Ask in an Interview — How to Go Deeper Than “What’s the Culture Like?”
13 minutes read.

Culture is a complex set of incentives and relationships. These questions can help you better understand how it plays out in the company, as a candidate or a new employee. It can also help you when interviewing others, hearing from them which type of dynamics they appreciated.

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Establishing a Product Organization Structure
14 minutes read.

Jens-Fabian Goetzmann shares helpful formats you can experiment with when considering your organizational structure. Every organization has different needs to fit the people they have and the challenges at hand, so adjust the structure (and potentially the format) based on the pains and requirements you experience. It will be painful (every change is) but it might put you in a better position to scale the organization.

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I'm Fascinated by Techniques for Skipping Small Talk and Getting to Know People Quickly: (1) Don’t Ask “What’s New?" Ask, "What Excites/Worries You This Month?" (2) Hang Out in Groups of Three to Keep Conversations Intimate (3) Learn Their Long-Term Goals and Help Brainstorm Them (Thread)
4 minutes read.

As an introvert, it feels very awkward and mentally draining to start small talk with someone else. Nobody cares about the weather or what happened today in some game. I like Julian Shapiro's questions as it helps to navigate the conversation into areas of depth, where you can get to know the person. You can find mutual interests and feel that you're making a connection rather than filling up the time.

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See Your Career as a Product
9 minutes read.

Erik Torenberg wrote a post I wish I could have read when starting my career. It would have helped me figuring out how to pick companies to work at, people to work for, and companies to start: "[T]he biggest career mistake young people make is that they’re afraid to look dumb, so they follow safe paths to cap their downside, not realizing that they cap their upside too as a result. And said paths are often tournament-style competitions, perhaps not as safe as one would think."

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Search Linus's Notes on Startups and Life.
3 minutes read.

This is such a brilliant idea and execution (and notes!) by Linus Lee to make his notes public and searchable. It made me think a lot about my notes and how to organize them (vs. making it easy to search).

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@iamharaldur: Your brand is the feeling people have when they think of you.

@awilkinson: I never thought I'd say this... I miss business trips.