/Management

Why I Quit Google’s WebAssembly Team, And How It Made Me Sick

- Katelyn Gadd tl;dr: "This is a partial story of what went wrong with the process and how it permanently damaged me. My hope is that this story will help people recognize toxic cultures in their own workplaces, or help new hires have a better career at Google."

featured in #316

Preventing Burnout: A Manager's Toolkit

tl;dr: 12 strategies, including: (1) Encourage time off, prompting employees to take some if they don't have any planned. (2) Lower the pressure by lowering expectations on OKRs and asking about them less frequently. (3) Be more positive about teams, and reports. 

featured in #315

Practical Guide to Secure SSH Access

tl;dr: SSH is a powerful tool that often grants a lot of access to anyone using it to log in to a server. This tech paper by Teleport covers three practical approaches to securing SSH access. Learn more.

featured in #315

Team Meeting Audit: 3 Tests For An Effective Meeting OS (And 4 steps To Fix It!)

- Shishir Mehrotra tl;dr: 3 tests: (1) Balance: how much time does the team spend in meetings vs free time? (2) Flow: how much free time is uninterrupted? (3) Effectiveness: how effective does your team feel meetings are? Shishir also provides steps to improve meetings. 

featured in #315

How To Chart Your Engineering Career Path: IC, Manager or Technical Founder?

- Amber Feng tl;dr: Underrated traits of the best engineers: (1) Crisp writers and communicators. (2) Aim for the broadest impact. In this post, Amber "guides other engineers up and down the org chart as they weigh their next career moves, leaning on the frameworks and lessons she’s pulled from in her own career."

featured in #314

Building Bridges With Difficult Co-workers

- Sally Lait tl;dr: Proactively avoiding difficult situations, especially as a new manager, can be done by asking the following: (1) If we were going to have friction, how do you think it’d be most likely to happen? How can we proactively avoid that? (2) What are the biggest risks of us working together? (3) How do you like to move past problems? And more.

featured in #314

Startup Getting Started? Think Pragmatic Security

tl;dr: There is an assumption that security should be the main priority for a founder when getting your startup going. Think again. Security is a tool to protect your customers and your business, and a founder’s main concern is growing that business. That’s a good thing -- here's how.

featured in #314

IBM's Asshole Test

tl;dr: "They called it the "group test"; around 8 of us were led to a room and asked to solve a puzzle together. Each of us was given an information pack, there was a white board, and a timer ticking down from 60 minutes."

featured in #314

Flawless Teamwork

- Ed Batista tl;dr: Questions worth asking when considering if a team is achieving full potential: What kind of team we are? Are the right people here? Does everyone know their role? How do we make decisions? Have we built a sense of cohesiveness? Do we know what effectiveness looks like? What happens when we disagree?

featured in #313

Enable A Framework, Create Discipline

- Paulo André tl;dr: Frameworks are "frames of reference that help people concentrate on what truly matters." Without discipline, the best frameworks are useless. This is the essence of leadership, and Paulo provides examples of how to develop such frameworks. 

featured in #313