Happy Father's Day, Papa Sharks! #papashark #happyfathersday

I feel like I have the this conversation at every company I am in. There are WILDLY differing opinions of what an EM should be doing, most of which are not going to benefit the team. People quit leaders and not every great IC can lead.

Confidence + humility > hubris. But golly, some of the people getting by on hubris... I figure that's an interesting way to be.

How do we as a culture get out of the parental investment arms race? It can't be actually net good for society, can it?

Junior marketer: "This is a problem. We should solve it." Senior marketer: "This is a problem. Can we get away with not solving it?" --- I used to think if there was a problem, we should obviously solve it. Then I realized: Every business has problems--and the problems never

PMs and exec leaders - if your engineering manager doesn't help you clearly see tradeoffs at this slide... they may need your help. Brooks' law has yet to be beaten. Hire ahead of your aspirations, but not ahead of your runway. Be mindful of your ROI window & opportunity costs.

{"userSophisticationLevel":"5. Advanced"} Maybe it wants to see extra obscene usage of their tools or integrations? Reuse blocks? Databases? Use external tools against their API? Some other nonsense. Now who is going to check what system behavior this value gates?

I'm sure some folks would drag me for it, but if not in an insanely performance critical application, I'll use an enum _all_ the time rather than a bool. Too many times the belief in just two values (T/F) is a failure of imagination.

The single most important thing I have learned about software development over my career is that if you do not aggressively fight complexity, it will eat you alive.

That's how you know you've encountered a mature engineer: They see stuff they don't understand, they acknowledge they don't understand it, and then they (re)learn it. That's it. The folks claiming this is "embarassing"? "You just have to know this"? Not ready yet.

I saw a comment from Shreyas Doshi that product management has gone from being too heavily based on gut sense and intuition to overly data driven & A/B testing heavy. A cause is that A/B testing has become a crutch that prevents teams from understanding how their products are used.

We’re not needing to outsmart nearly as many adversaries as we are trying to outrun complexity.

"Bus factor" is a rude term, but truly, anything understood by only one person is a huge liability. The variable cost of understanding is why developing green field is so fast and easy, and your team having to own and maintain code none of you know is like swimming uphill.

We build knowledge over time, but most of our system decisions are made at the start. That’s why we need to build systems that can evolve over time. well said ⁦David Boyne 🚀⁩ 👏