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How To Become An Engineer With People Skills
My mother told me when I was young that people get hired for their technical skills, and fired for their people skills (specifically a lack thereof). And I’ve seen this play out in the real world repeatedly. Assessing whether someone can code a sudoku solver is a lot easier than assessing whether someone can maintain their…
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Relationship-building counts as work
“Relationship-building counts as work.” That’s a great quote from in the latest article from First Round Capital Review: 23 Tools to Make Feedback Meaningful. As Phin Barnes writes: A lot of people skimp on the time they spend in one-on-ones or feedback sessions. They might dash off a few notes if they’re solicited, or think…
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Entrepreneurship: The Coin-Flipping Biathlon
Entrepreneurs are participating in a coin-flipping biathlon – they just don’t know it. I was listening to an old Marc Andreessen presentation at Y Combinator’s Startup School in 2008, and I love that he talked about Nassim Taleb’s Fooled by Randomness (see my review here). He mentions that you could account for Warren Buffett and…
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To solve real business problems, know how their kids are doing.
“But we’ve got great free lunch here every day!” Occasionally that’s the response I get when I ask a new colleague to go out for an offsite lunch. And it’s true, there’s a fabulous, healthy, cooked lunch served daily here at Indeed in Austin. But I’ve only actually tried it once so far. That’s…
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Be Vulnerable
Shame on me. I haven’t watched Jack Dorsey present before (live or on video), and I had made certain assumptions about him because of his business success (co-founder of Twitter, founder and CEO of Square) and because he was (in)famous for working full-time at both of them for a bit. Well I was surprised and…
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Hire people you would be willing to work for
The Y Combinator Startup School 2013 videos are online! I started with Paul Graham’s interview with Zuckerberg. There’s not a ton of new info in that video IMHO, but there are a couple of gems, such as: “One of the reasons I think great stuff gets built is because it’s kind of irrational at the…
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Tours of Duty: The New Employer-Employee Compact
Is there an alternative balanced between between permanent employment and contract employment? Reid Hoffman (CEO of LinkedIn) proposes the tour of duty in this month’s Harvard Business Review: “firm but time-limited mutual commitment with focused goals and clear expectations.” When possible, a tour of duty should offer an employee the possibility of a breakout entrepreneurial opportunity.…
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The one cost engineers and product managers don’t consider
I love this article from Chris Gale, VP of Engineering at Yammer – The one cost engineers and product managers don’t consider – which is about reducing complexity… On the product side, your best tool for eliminating complexity cost is data. Studies show that most product ideas fail to show value, and many even remove value. If…
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Are coders worth it?
An interesting long form piece in Aeon Magazine by James Somers – titled “Are coders worth it?” – aims to examine whether web developers are worth the six figure salaries that they currently command in their first year of employment. I am a web developer, and there has never been a better time to do what I…
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How Google Sets Goals
There’s a surprising lack of public information on OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) – the goal setting and tracking philosophy used by Intel, Google and others. This past month Google Ventures Startup Lab released a great presentation video by Rick Klau on how Google does goal setting and tracking: “How Google sets goals: OKRs” Some takeaways:…
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