Issue #438, 16th April 2021

This Week's Favorite


Don’t Hire Top Talent; Hire for Weaknesses.
6 minutes read.

Benji Weber's post will become my "go-to post" when people ask me how to structure a strong team. This is a beautiful framing: "Why are you hiring? Are you hiring to do more, or are you hiring to achieve more?"

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Culture


Actual Video of Startups Selling Their First Enterprise Deal
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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Career Ladders for Tech, Open Sourced
10 minutes read.

Sarah Drasner shares a great resource that I think many can use and adjust to build an internal Career Ladder. Share it around at the office. Do you have a Career Ladder? Is it time to create one? Can you leverage this project to build momentum?

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Share it via Twitter or email.


Seniorless — 4 Tips for Effectively Onboarding Juniors
6 minutes read.

Hiring inexperienced engineers is easy; it's investing in their onboarding and career growth that we often neglect. Inertia creates pressure to execute without paying enough attention to sustainability. Gabriel Grinberg helps to set the framework for a successful onboarding plan.

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Why You Should Invest in Undervalued People
6 minutes read.

"Put another way, it’s ironic that an industry that tends to want to build everything instead of buying it chooses to buy the absolute most expensive thing on the market: talent." -- Joe Emison will give you something to think about during the weekend.

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Peopleware


EMPOWERED Review: I Needed This Book 4 Years Ago
5 minutes read.

I thought that reading Gergely Orosz's book review for EMPOWERED would make you buy the book and read it (or listen to it). Worth your time.

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My #1 Tip for New Managers: Protect Your Energy. (Thread)
4 minutes read.

Padmíní Pyapalí wrote a thread worth sharing with managers in your company. I love this one: "Don't fill up empty blocks of time just for the sake of it. If you have free time, use that extra time to come up with ways to create more free time. Revisit old documentation & processes. Plan for the future."

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Software Engineering Leadership Is Not (Only) About Coding Well
4 minutes read.

Guy Gadon's scale-up vs. scale-out analogy is a helpful framing to think about your impact (and investment): "Scaling up your skills stands for getting better in writing code, creating architectures and building them, solving complex problems and creating and executing engineering plans. [...] So, how can we scale ourselves better? By scaling out! Scaling out engineering skills stands for the ability to grow other people around you, to make them as effective as you."

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Inspiring Tweets


@rakyll: Him: Your GitHub gets less greener every other year. Me: If I autogenerate a commit for every meeting I attend, it’d look greener than ever.

@Suhail: Debug yourself: Optimism is more CPU. Focus is higher clock speed. Envy is a memory leak. Hurt is a segfault. Pessimism is a CPU core pegged at 100%.

- Oren

P.S. Can you share this email? I'd love for more people to experiment and improve their company's culture.

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