Polymath Engineer Weekly #29
Are you curious today?
Links of the week
“This is the downfall of OKRs. They’re hard, but sold as something that everyone should do, so everyone does them poorly, and most people don’t see any value as a result. You don’t have to do OKRs (unless you work for me, in which case, you might). If you’re not going to at least try to put in the work to write good ones, you shouldn’t do them! But if you do the work, they will force you to think more strategically about your goals, and ask hard questions about what the impact is that you are hoping to achieve with them and how you will measure that.”
How to deal with money in software
“There are all sorts of intuitive and unintuitive pitfalls that you will want to avoid. (This list of falsehoods is a good place to appreciating how complex of a topic money in software is.) Not all problems will become evident immediately, and some might even never bite you, but chances are you will run into each one at some point in the long term.“
How to get helpful, actionable feedback from your colleagues
“By continuing to request their valued feedback on the things that you’re genuinely working to improve, you’re demonstrating that you’re invested in your personal growth and trust their perspective. They may begin to feel more comfortable, eager, and ready to share feedback outside of the areas you’re requesting feedback on. This is a great signal that you’ve built a foundation of trust, and will hopefully lead to new insights about your own growth that you wouldn’t have had otherwise. And they may even ask for your feedback, too.“
“Aggregation Theory describes how platforms (i.e. aggregators) come to dominate the industries in which they compete in a systematic and predictable way. Aggregation Theory should serve as a guidebook for aspiring platform companies, a warning for industries predicated on controlling distribution, and a primer for regulators addressing the inevitable antitrust concerns that are the endgame of Aggregation Theory.“
“That meant there were three strategies available to media companies looking to survive on the Internet. First, cater to Google. This meant a heavy emphasis on both speed and SEO, and an investment in anticipating and creating content to answer consumer questions. Or you could cater to Facebook, which meant a heavy emphasis on click-bait and human interest stories that had the potential of going viral. Both approaches, though, favored media entities with the best cost structures, not the best content, a particularly difficult road to travel given the massive amounts of content on the Internet created for free.“
“Apdex provides a single number that attempts to quantify a user’s experience of requests to a web service. We first decide what we consider to be an acceptable response time from our service, in Apdex terminology this is called the T value. We then classifies requests as follows:
All error responses are intolerable.
All responses qucker than T are satisfactory.
All responses slower than T, but quicker than 4T are tolerable.
All responses slower than 4T are intolerable.“
Book of the Week
No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention
Do you have any more links our community should read? Feel free to post them on the comments.
Have a nice week. 😉
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