Issue #46, 4th October 2013

This Week's Favorite


What Makes a Good Engineering Culture?
16 minutes read.

Brilliant post by Edmond Lau, with 10 things you should strive to when building your engineering culture. Edmond's point regarding building the right software abstractions is spot on! It can become a huge unfair advantage when you combine it with shared ownership of code. Just Look at GitHub, Stripe, Twillio and Quora (and many others, of course). Highly recommended!

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Culture


What Everyone Should Know About How Talent Is Bought and Sold
18 minutes read.

A bit long, yet a fascinating read of how companies (and talent) are bought, and the psychology behind it. No matter if you're a founder or an employee, I strongly recommend you to read it.

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Our Journey to a Culture of Teaching & Learning
5 minutes read.

An interesting personal story from Jonathan Bush (CEO of athenahealth), on the importance of figuring out your company's culture. While some adjustment may feel as if we're cutting our own competitive advantage (letting go of talented individuals), it is the price of not making any decision (or change), that we should really be concerned about.

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10x Engineer
8 minutes read.

This post by Shanley created a lot of noise in the past week. Is 10x Engineer a myth? While you don't have to agree with her points, Shanley made us all think again about how should we measure engineers' quality. What values should we look for? Which habits or output? Also, I suggest reading this thread on twitter after you read the original post: https://twitter.com/brikis98/status/384208625725497344

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Peopleware


Writing It Down
2 minutes read.

Such an important and healthy habit - writing everything down. I love how Fred Wilson brings himself to share his thoughts online, both for his own clarity, and for us to learn from - " I toiled in the VC business for close to twenty years before I hit my stride and the reason I found my stride was my adoption of blogging."

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How to Deal With Negative People
10 minutes read.

This post reminded me of rands' post Triggers. "Let go of being right" is probably the best advice in this situation. Some wonderful tips from Siobhan Harmer that you should definitely read if you happen to work with negative people, and get the job done without falling apart.

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Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos Had His Top Execs Read These Three Books
2 minutes read.

When it comes to doing some solid curation work, there is no better than Jeff Bezos to tell you which managerial books you should read. Find someone at work who you can read these books with, and have a discussion. It's a great way to make sure you extract all the value you can get from these books.

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Inspiring Tweets


@bakadesuyo: People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel. - Maya Angelou

@paleofuture: lifehack: be nice to other humans

- 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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