Betterment

If you don’t realize that you have power, you might not be able to exercise it. The power to speak up, to participate, to invent, to lead, to encourage, to vote, to connect, to organize, to m…

One way to look at power is “you get to tell people what to do.” But an alternative is that the most powerful institutions, brands and people are the ones who are in alignment with thei…

Could you tell the difference between someone who’s genuinely friendly and someone who’s being nice to you so that they can manipulate you?  Manipulators are incredibly hard to spot, especially […] More

In some pockets of the industry, an axiom of software development is that deploying software quickly is at odds with thoroughly testing that software. One reason that teams believe this is because a fully automated deployment process implies that there’s no opportunity for manual quality assurance. In other pockets of the industry, the axiom is quite different: you can get both fast deployment and manual quality assurance by using feature flags to decouple deployment (shipping the code) and release (enabling new functionality).

For everyone on the team… Do you care enough to do great work? Can we agree on what great work looks like? When the world changes, do we have a process to redefine great work? Do you have the…

I’ve just started reading Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life by the historian of science Theodore Porter, and so far it’s fantastic. The first chapt…

Why isn’t this enough? There are plenty of good ideas, easy to learn from and copy. There are countless projects, well executed, with the steps on display. Any entrepreneur could find a local…

In Seth Godin’s “Tribes” book, he shares a story about a nonprofit who conducted a vaccination campaign in Rwanda. It spent its resources creating

The writer Kyle Chayka recently had a piece in The Guardian called “The Tyranny of the Algorithm: Why Every Coffee Shop Looks the Same.” The article is, as the title suggests, about the way online algorithms have homogenized culture.  One part of the piece that particularly stood out is an exchange Chayka had with Trevor Walsh, who does marketing […]

Over the past few months I've been having many conversations with people who all have a particular set of skills but whose job titles are all over the place. I believe that we form a more coherent group than we realise, that this novel role exists for a good reason, and that we would benefit from making that known.

Why the 10,000-hour rule, popularized by Malcolm Gladwell, does not provide practical value in the pursuit of mastery.

Back in November, Econtalk’s Russ Roberts did a great podcast interview with the MIT Research Head, Andrew McAfee, to talk about his new book, "The Geek

No need to create a fancy and modern website with hundreds of pages to make money online.

You want the safety, comfort, and stability of a long-term relationship without a reduction in the excitement attendant to new love. You want a high-paying job without having to work long hours. You want to educate your kids at home without them missing out on the social development they’d get at school.  You want to […]

Learning is complicated. While we’re doing it, it’s easy to imagine that those around us are completely sure of themselves, moving forward in a well-lit space. In fact, if you visit a g…

It’s easy to believe that in some moments, the world is out to get you. This is unlikely. The world hardly knows you exist. There is injustice and trauma and systems of caste. There are tiny …

There are two ways to process this: The selection committee saw me, understood me, and then decided to reject me. or The selection committee didn’t get what I had to offer. I wasn’t rej…

As a Postgres reliability consultant and SRE, I’ve spent many hours being a rubber duck. Now I outperform even the incisive bath toy. “Rubber duck debugging” is a widespread, tong…

One of the filmmaker Woody Allen’s most critically acclaimed movies is the late-1970s masterpiece, “Manhattan.” It’s a film about a bunch of fairly

Marketers like to talk about the story we tell. And non-marketers imagine that we’re referring to Goldilocks and other ‘once upon a time’ moments. Because stories are the basic bu…

Supply and demand are always in a dance, with one outpacing the other from time to time. In the last three years, the green tech revolution has accelerated dramatically. Countless companies are bei…

Finnish economist and parliamentarian Osmo Antero Wiio framed these rueful principles of human communication in 1978: Communication usually fails, except by accident. If communication can fail, it will. If communication cannot fail, it still most usually fails. If communication seems to succeed in the intended way, there’s a misunderstanding. If you are content with your message, communication certainly fails. If a message can be interpreted in several ways, it will be interpreted in a manner that maximizes the damage. There is always someone who knows better than you what you meant with your message. The more we communicate, the worse...

As anyone who follows British current affairs will know, the people are REALLY angry at the moment. It turns out hundreds of UK sub-postmasters were

In a We Are All Weird universe, there are two sorts of cultural disappointments. The first has been around since the dawn of cable: We don’t all watch the same thing. We don’t all talk …

Dreams have consequences Hisham Matar Time passes, decisions are made, we face the consequences or enjoy the benefits. A few books for this moment, about navigating our days, and the possibility of…

One of the recurring debates about senior engineering leadership roles is whether Chief Technology Officers should actively write code. There are a lot of strongly held positions, from “Real CTOs code.” at one end of the spectrum, to “Low ego managers know they contribute more by focusing on leadership work rather than coding.” There are, of course, adherents at every point between those two extremes. It’s hard to take these arguments too seriously, because these values correlate so strongly with holders’ identities: folks who believe they are strong programmers argue that CTOs must code, and people who don’t feel comfortable writing software take the opposite view.

“If you don’t ask, you don’t get.” That’s problematic advice. Taken to an extreme, it turns us into hustlers. The alternative is to realize that the best asks are actu…

We could make our only law and norm be just “do the right thing”. (Or, maybe, the most economically efficient thing.) Then when someone was accused of acting badly, the relevant judge or jury would consider if their actions were unusually bad, all things considered. But this seems a quite noisy, expensive, and corruptible system So we usually instead try to agree ahead of time on more specific local norms and laws, to give us each a better idea of what is expected of us, and to better hold our judges and juries accountable.

I could use the rain as an excuse, but that would be a cop-out. I did go out often, and there were opportunities to capture images. The rain itself gave me so many opportunities. Even when I did fi…

What if your boots don’t have any straps? Bootstrapping is logically impossible. You can’t pick yourself up into the air by lifting on your boots, no matter how hard you try, because gr…