tl;dr:“My own mental resistance to dealing with these items is often the biggest barrier to getting them done, rather than the actual complexity of the items themselves. Long days with lots of context switching can seriously deplete my mental capacity. In order to better manage my capacity and energy, and also leaning on creative ways to use LLMs, I've been trying a new approach to deal with this problem, which I call "the bag of worries”.”
tl;dr:“Since starting my new CTO role, I've been sharing a weekly update with my team. It's how I continually open up my thoughts to the team with a long-term goal to reduce any mental alignment gap between us. I like to think that the more I share, the more they can understand what I believe is important and why, and the more that my style of working and thinking can propagate through the team.” James shares how he executes this mind meld.
tl;dr:James discusses “what leadership should do from the perspective of the productivity of teams and organizations, and consequently how we should think about spending our budgets to make that happen. There are plenty of hot takes out there on AI. This is not intended to be one of them.”
tl;dr:“The short answer is that it depends exactly on what you mean by coding. I think that there is a big difference between being in the code and writing code. All managers should be in the code, but not all managers should be writing code.” James elaborates.
tl;dr:“This article will be about more than just the software tool that I use, even though it is central to it. Instead, I'll focus on the way using this tool allows me to categorize the way that I work into tight loops of gathering, deciding, and executing. This is a mental model that I've found to be very effective in managing my day-to-day work, and enables me to keep the pace high for myself and my team.”
tl;dr:“Not since the smartphone boom period in 2007 have I seen so much change happening so quickly. We've seen the culture and growth of our companies changing due to the macroeconomic climate, a proliferation of LLM-based tools and technologies, and, fundamentally, as leaders, we've had to change how we think about our roles and our output.”
tl;dr:“Tech companies are opting to keep their size fixed as they ride out the current economic phase that has higher interest rates and less cheap investment available. As a result, managers are now expected to have more direct reports, less layers, and to be more hands-on with their teams.” What exactly can you do in order to be in the details? And is it possible to do this without micromanaging? James shares techniques.
tl;dr:“I’ll pitch the takeaway up front, and it’s this: hold yourself accountable for making decisions and progressing discussions as quickly as possible, by whatever means necessary. Be restless while a decision hasn’t been made. Dead time is your enemy. Be creative about ways of shaving minutes, hours and days from a decision point.” James gives several examples of how to approach this.
tl;dr:“When you are faced with no obvious way to solve a staffing challenge, it can be helpful to think about the problem differently. One way to do this is to think about the situation in terms of concentric circles. What I mean by concentric circles is imagining that the team asking for more people is at the center of a series of circles.”
tl;dr:“But this isn't an article about how bad we are at estimating, nor does it offer any solutions for you to getting better at estimating. In fact, I want to focus on why dates are pretty dangerous things to be throwing around in the first place, and what an alternative might look like that could save you a lot of pain.”