/Management

What Async Communication Behaviors Lead To Better Outcomes For Software Engineers?

- Lizzie Matusov tl;dr: “Researchers conducted a 10-day field experiment with 260 elite software engineers. Participants were randomly assigned to 52 globally distributed five-person teams on a crowdsourcing platform. Each team collaborated asynchronously to solve a real-world software problem — designing an algorithm to optimize medical kits for spaceflight. The researchers analyzed communication patterns and outcomes to identify which behaviors predicted the most success outcomes.”

featured in #610

Hiring Great People

- Mike Fisher tl;dr: “So if you too believe that curiosity is important in great individuals and leaders, how do you identify that trait? One way, as my coach friend did, is to see what questions someone asks. If during an interview if the person asks no questions, are they really curious? I’m not even interviewing for your role and I’m curious about how you find the culture of your company, what techniques have you found to be successful, what excited you about joining your company? I could go on and on.”

featured in #610

Managing Underperformers

- Jack Danger tl;dr: “There are two fully unrelated causes of underperformance: Refusal to Align and Failure to Execute. Underperformance is when a person or a team is not bearing their share of the organization’s load. Their colleagues are either relying on them and getting let down, or they’ve learned not to rely on them at all.”

featured in #610

Leading From The Front

tl;dr: “Most people will not lead from the front. They won’t learn what’s needed to be useful when they get there. They won’t block the time to be able to show up. Or when they get there they’ll be a distraction. Or after being woken up twice at 3am in a month they’ll say “this really just isn’t for me. But those that do will earn the respect of their team. They’ll motivate their team to be better than the sum of their parts. And they’ll deliver outcomes that are outsized to their resourcing.”

featured in #609

Managing Underperformers

- Jack Danger tl;dr: “There are two fully unrelated causes of underperformance: Refusal to Align and Failure to Execute. Underperformance is when a person or a team is not bearing their share of the organization’s load. Their colleagues are either relying on them and getting let down, or they’ve learned not to rely on them at all.”

featured in #609

Innovations In Evaluating AI Agent Performance

tl;dr: Just like athletes need more than one drill to win a competition, AI agents require consistent training based on real-world performance metrics to excel in their role. At QA Wolf, we’ve developed weighted “gym scenarios” to simulate real-world challenges and track their progress over time. How does our AI use these metrics to improve our accuracy continuously?

featured in #609

7 Phrases I Use To Make Giving Feedback Easier For Myself

- Wes Kao tl;dr: “Having the right words can be the difference between doubting whether to speak up at all, or voicing your point of view confidently. With that, here are 7 phrases I often use when sharing feedback that makes it easier for me to speak openly and quickly, and encourages my recipient to take action.“

featured in #609

7 Phrases I Use To Make Giving Feedback Easier For Myself

- Wes Kao tl;dr: “Having the right words can be the difference between doubting whether to speak up at all, or voicing your point of view confidently. With that, here are 7 phrases I often use when sharing feedback that makes it easier for me to speak openly and quickly, and encourages my recipient to take action.“

featured in #608

Twenty Tiny Leadership Lessons

- Subbu Allamaraju tl;dr: “Most leadership learning is experiential. We observe, learn, and emulate from others, often subconsciously. Yet, the core of such learning starts shallow, leading to behavioral and decision-making mistakes, learned and uncorrected bad behaviors, and dysfunction. Some get better with experience and scope, but more often than not, we wing it, frequently repeating the same behaviors and mistakes for years.” Recognizing this, Subbu enrolled in the Psychology of Leadership at Penn State University. He shares the top twenty from those studies.

featured in #608

Developers Don’t Need More Documentation

- Dennis Pilarinos tl;dr: Docs get written, but answers stay hard to find. The problem isn’t the docs themselves. It’s that the context developers need is scattered, outdated, or missing entirely. Why does this keep happening? And what’s the alternative?

featured in #608