Why Headcount Math Lies
In 1911, Frederick Winslow Taylor published and helped cement one of management’s oldest instincts. In simple terms, break work into measurable units, optimize for efficiency, a...
#Engineering Metrics
Posts on metrics, measurement, and what numbers can and cannot tell you.
Incentives Drive Everything
In early modern France, the monarchy kept running into the same problem. Wars were expensive, revenue was not steady, and every obvious solution came with a political price. New...
What Good Execution Looks Like
The other day I was talking with one of my directs. We ended up discussing something we’ve both learned over the years. When execution works, the environment is quiet. Not slow....
Balancing Act of Reliability
Software development involves both creating and maintaining systems. Once you put anything into production, reliability becomes critical. When your systems are not reliable, you...
Cracking Coding Bottlenecks
In software development, we obsess over component benchmarks and algorithmic complexity, chasing milliseconds latency and BigO wins. But, time and after time, I’ve found that th...
Why Metrics Don’t Equal Quality
In 1902, Hanoi was drowning in rats. The government was getting nervous about plague. Hence, the city put a bounty per rat tail. Suddenly, the system had a scoreboard, something...
Manager as a Service
What would a manager as a service look like? What kind of systems would a manager resemble? How can you describe a manager’s responsibility through various systems? Here’s my ta...