Dates covered: June 3-9, 2019 (week 23 of 52)
Business
How to Survive a Recession and Thrive Afterward (via Harvard Business Review)
- Deleverage as much debt as you can; when revenue is tight, it’s difficult to make principal and interest payments
- Decentralized decision making seems to help companies fare better because they can be more adaptive to local conditions
- Prefer work reductions, furloughs, and performance pay to layoffs. Morale, cost of rehiring, and unemployment benefits make layoffs costly in the long-term.
- Invest in technology to help your operation be more transparent, flexible, and efficient.
Why You Should Create a “Shadow Board” of Younger Employees (via Harvard Business Review)
This concept pairs well with mentoring and coaching. Give people an opportunity to try things out and be involved in a low-risk way.
The Investor Revolution (via Harvard Business Review)
This post was a combination of “things I don’t use in my job” and “outside my skillset”, but I believe it’s useful to know the takeaways. Environmental and social responsibility is shifting from nice-to-have toward must-have for investors and the companies they invest in.
Career
Undervalued Software Engineering Skills: Writing Well (via Software Lead Weekly)
New title: “Undervalued Skills: Writing Well”. Communication is the backbone of doing meaningful work with people. Having a solid grasp of the fundamentals and staying sharp with the various forms of communicating is worth the investment. If you have a Pluralsight subscription, I recommend the Communication for Technologists learning path.
7 absolute truths I unlearned as junior developer (via Software Lead Weekly)
I enjoy these “busted myth” posts. This one covers several topics developers will encounter in their journey: experience, tests, new-shiny, quality, documentation, technical debt, and seniority.
Communication
Don’t feel like an expert? Share anyway. (via Software Lead Weekly)
You’ll find some good inspiration here for sharing even if you haven’t earned all the experience. Sometimes using the beginner’s perspective will help more people than being a seasoned expert. I’d offer some personal caveats… I prefer to add value that’s not instantly found elsewhere (i.e., don’t be just another X), you need some reasonable amount of experience to not waste people’s time.
Culture
Why People Hide Their Disabilities at Work (via Harvard Business Review)
Not everyone has a outwardly visible disability — e.g., ADHD, diabetes. Many fear their team or boss will think they are less capable. To address these issues, people with disabilities can…
- Look for signals of support, starting as soon as the interviewing process
- Get to know your manager
- Identify an ally
- Join or start an employee resource group (ERG)
Why Do Employers Lowball Creatives? A New Study Has Answers (via The Software Mentor)
The gist is that artist passion is exploited; the article describes several industries and the form this exploitation takes. It’s unfortunate that many artists are overworked and underpaid.
TODAY test drive: Does wearing a nametag make you nicer? (via Gillie Hunt)
This is a really neat concept! If you make it easy for people to know your name, they may consider you more approachable.
When Customers Want to See the Human Behind the Product (via Harvard Business Review)
Despite technological advances, consumers value a human connection. Businesses can look for ways to connect their people to their products.
Why Managers Design Jobs to Be More Boring Than They Need to Be (via Harvard Business Review)
I couldn’t agree more with this statement: “From a psychological perspective, when work is well-designed, workers have interesting tasks, autonomy over those tasks, a meaningful degree of social contact with others, and a tolerable level of task demands: reasonable workloads, clear responsibilities, and manageable emotional pressures.” This also assumes the company you work in allows leaders to change the work.
Leadership
If Your Managers Aren’t Engaged, Your Employees Won’t Be Either (via Harvard Business Review)
- Think coach, not boss
- Platinum rule for training — give them what works best for them, not what works best for you
- Exceptional managers help create exceptional employees
Every New Employee Needs an Onboarding “Buddy” (via Harvard Business Review)
- Context for behavior and communication is a precious commodity for a new-hire
- Buddies help get new people productive more quickly
- New employee satisfaction is higher
- Make sure the buddy has time to truly help
- Let both parties know about the time limits; something finite seems more manageable
- Have a buddy that reports to the same supervisor
- The buddy benefits as well
Process
Story Points Revisited (via The Software Mentor)
From Ron Jeffries, one of the founders of Agile, this interesting post talks about how we’re misusing story points. Instead, (1) think about what the next most important functionality is, (2) think about a close-in deadline that you feel you could have some good capabilities built by then, and (3) think of thin slices (e.g., a day’s worth of work).
OKRs from a development team’s perspective (via The Software Mentor)
If you already have a backlog of work, it’s possible to have a “tail wagging the dog” problem when assigning which Objective and Key Result (OKR) to assign to those backlog items. Consider resetting your backlog or having the OKRs drive your development cycle and ceremonies instead of the backlog items.
I follow James Clear’s blog, so I was interested in what he had to say about habits. Unfortunately I didn’t pick up anything helpful or new from the book; many times I ended up completing his sentences. This book is a branding effort to re-package his blog posts about habits into a book, where he can also promote his website and other merch. Some of the research is half-baked, but there are some nuggets in there if you’re looking for a starting point. I’d categorize this book as “Step 1 is easy and feels like progress, but the steps that follow are vague and left as an exercise to the reader.” It also definitely fits into the theme of “it’s not okay to be enough” — fit enough, wealthy enough, successful enough, etc. 2 out of 5 stars.
Technology
We’re Not Scientists, but We Should Be (via The Software Mentor)
This set of eight behavior that scientists routinely employ would benefit the field of software development as well. My two favorites were “a Scientist doesn’t equate how easy a new idea is to understand in 5 minutes with that idea having desirable long term consequences” and “a Scientist knows what evidence would convince them of an opposing position.”