In February 2021, Dispo was the hot app defining a new generation of photo sharing. Then a scandal forced founder David Dobrik to step down.

These opportunities are everywhere. Notice them, pick them up, and all of a sudden, your description of yourself gains strength.

Highlighted practically all of this, but two I want to resurface for myself: You cultivate a culture of giving credit where and when it’s due. You allow and support your people to make their own decisions within the wide guard rails you’ve helped create, even when it’s not what or how you would choose.

“In research,” said Tom Rivers, “you often need a person like [Harry] around, you know, someone … to encourage people to see what the grass is like on the other side. In other words, a catalyst. Harry Weaver performed that function beautifully.” ​ But it seems to me that we’d be doing a better job fighting COVID-19 if there were someone qualified who believed it was their job to solve it.

I say ‘feasibly’ because often the upper end of career ladders for Independent Contributors (ICs) could be paraphrased as “we’ll know it when we see it”, which can leave those who haven’t sufficiently proven “it” in a frustrating limbo. ​ I’ve worked very hard to become an engineer and I want to stay here. ​ Developing prototypes to further explore and support ideas that come from that research.

Everyone knows you value them and their work, primarily because you regularly tell them so. You cultivate a culture of giving credit where and when it’s due.

The phrase is meant to convey authority, but it is also a plea for trust. Believe me, I can see more than you — so do as I say. ​ While these sights may amaze the neophyte air traveler, the window-seat view soon becomes routine — and yet it still manages to conserve its power in metaphor. ​ While everyone is invited to see things from 30,000 feet, not everyone is invited to stay there or make decisions from such an elevated position. ​ The expression enfolds a double maneuver: It shares a seemingly data-rich, totalizing perspective in an apparent spirit of transparency only to justify the restriction of power, the protection of a reified point of authority. ​ It’s not about flight at all: It is a vertical metaphor to negate horizontalism.

The leadership track shows up so that communication and decisions can be sensibly organized. ​ In Toxic Title Douchebag World, titles are designed to document the value of an individual sans proof. ​ A title has no business attempting to capture the seemingly infinite ways by which individuals evolve. ​ To allow leadership to bucket individuals into convenient chunks so they can award compensation and measure seniority while also serving as labels that are somehow expected to give us an idea about expected ability. This is an impossibly tall order and at the root of title toxicity. ​ the reality is that you are a collection of skills of varying ability. ​ Titles, I believe, are an artifact of the same age that gave us business cards and resumes. They came from a time when information was scarce. When there was no other way to discover who you were other than what you shared via a resume. Where the title of Senior Software Engineer was intended to define your entire career to date.

Managers should support 6-8 engineers. ​ Tech Lead Managers (TLMs). Managers supporting less than four engineers tend to function as TLMs, taking on a share of design and implementation work. For some folks this role can uniquely leverage their strengths, but it's a role with limited career opportunities. To progress as a manager, they'll want more time to focus developing their management skills. Alternatively to progress towards staff engineering roles, they'll find it difficult to spend enough time in the technical details. ​ Most folks find being oncall for components they're unfamiliar with to be disproportionately stressful. ​ An important property of teams is that they abstract the complexities of the individuals that compose them. ​ and avoid creating a two-tiered class system of innovators and maintainers.

As I do less development, I am thinking more as stakeholder and less as an engineer. ​ I also pay special attention to more introvert people and encourage them to share their opinion on the subject. ​ I am a believer that a great manager is the one that, if absent, no one will notice, because they have created such an environment where everyone can do a great job without being blocked by them. ​ I now tend to be careful when I ask something, by making sure the person understands the why.

My friend Lara Hogan published an email I had sent to her way back (“Advice for a new executive”) and it turned out to be super-helpful to a lot of people based on the engagement with h…

Everyone likes to talk about leadership—we are culturally conditioned to view success as a progression through leadership positions—but there is far less

“An athlete without a coach is incomplete. So, why don’t we think the same way about coaches for CEOs?” “Matt’s coaching methodology is to act as a shadow CEO one day a week, including sitting in on all the one-on-one meets with the senior team and on the leadership meeting. Matt’s initial focus was on improving my personal productivity with a set of tools like GTD and a series of audits of my time and processes.. Once I was convinced of the benefit, he moved his focus to my senior team and the rest of the organization.”

I often think of Pareto efficiency in terms of decision making. The closer you get to the Pareto frontier (of the space of possible solutions), the harder it is to make any decision Pareto efficient. Meaning for almost all decisions, you’re going to have to sacrifice something. For instance when you do a big refactoring of a system it’s easy to get hung up on trying to preserve all features while adding a few new ones. In reality this is going to be extremely hard or impossible. If you can do it possibly it’s because you forgot to include some other axis in your analysis, like code complexity. It’s like pushing a balloon into a box. loss aversion may sometimes be explained by people trying to make Pareto efficient decisions. My conclusion from this silly example is that you should really think twice before assigning the responsibility of a functional area to a single person. A simple model for why buying decisions are so hard is that it involves Pareto effiency – market economy will drive out all TV’s that are dominated, leaving only the TV’s on the Pareto frontier. That makes it a lot harder as a consumer because now every choice will become a trade-off. Whereas in something like clothing there’s a lot of dimensions, so you should expect a more fragmented market.

CocoaLove focuses on talks which don’t deprecate as soon as you leave. In 2015, Matt gave this talk. Matt lead teams that make software at Tumblr, and makes software himself with his partners at Lickability. His talk was about why you might want to step away from the keyboard and into leadership, and what happens when you do. It’s about the difference between managing programs and managing people.