Developer Tea

This episode focuses again on the fundamental principle that your systems are perfectly designed for the outcomes you are experiencing, regardless of whether those systems were intentionally or accidentally created.Here are the key takeaways from the episode:Uncover how your systems, whether intentionally or accidentally designed, are perfectly configured for the outcomes you experience. The implication of design means choices have been made in setting up a system, but your intent is less important than the actual outcomes produced.Learn why your intent is less important than the actual outcomes when evaluating your systems. If your intent was the sole factor, everyone would achieve their desired results. Instead, systems should be judged by the outcomes they generate.Discover the concept of "accidental design," where unseen factors influence system behaviour. This can be inspired by Goodhart's law, where a measure becomes a target and changes behaviour, or by environmental factors, such as how your workspace

This episode discusses why perfection is a dangerous and fragile goal, explaining how striving for 100% leads to unsustainable outlier states. It highlights how setting perfection as a bar can cause commitments to break and plans to fail due to a lack of slack, and offers strategies like building redundancy and planning with slack to achieve goals more effectively without relying on perfection.Uncover why perfection is a dangerous and fragile goal, as it often requires exorbitant, unsustainable effort and creates outlier states that are unlikely to be maintained, referencing the "Wedies effect" where things tend to regress to the mean.Learn how planning for 100% utilisation or setting perfection as a commitment can lead to fragility, causing plans to fail when unexpected changes occur or leading to giving up altogether once a "perfect" streak is broken.Discover practical strategies to avoid fragile perfectionism, such as planning with slack to accommodate change and building redundancy into your systems and p

This episode introduces the potentially controversial principle that your system is perfectly designed for its current outcomes, urging listeners to embrace greater responsibility for systemic issues. It explores how to redefine system boundaries to holistically integrate all influencing factors, like talent and organisational processes, ensuring that interventions are effective and targeted.Uncover the principle that your system is perfectly designed for the results you are getting, prompting a re-evaluation of what constitutes a "good" system when outcomes are undesirable.Learn why arbitrary system boundaries often lead to critical factors, such as talent, being excluded, and how to consider a system's full scope regardless of traditional lines of responsibility.Discover how incorporating talent and other seemingly external factors into your system design can lead to more efficient and effective solutions, rather than simply patching symptoms.Explore the distinction between judging decisions by their outcom

This episode explores the fundamental mindset of building your vocabulary, extending beyond literal words to conceptual understanding and mental models, and how Large Language Models (LLMs) can be a powerful tool for expanding and refining this crucial skill for career growth, clarity, and navigating disruptions.Uncover why building your vocabulary is a fundamental skill that can help you navigate career transitions, disruptions (such as those caused by AI), and changes in roles.Understand that "vocabulary" goes beyond literal words to include mental models, understanding your own self, specific diagrams (like causal loop diagrams or C4 diagrams), and programming paradigms or design patterns. This conceptual vocabulary provides access to nuanced and powerful ways of thinking.Learn how LLMs can be incredibly useful for refining and expanding your conceptual vocabulary, allowing you to explore new subjects, understand systems, and identify leverage points. They can help you understand the connotations, origins,

This episode delves into the use of substitute questions—simpler queries we use to answer more complex ones—and the crucial concept of cohesion between these substitutes and our true objectives. You'll learn how to leverage counterfactual thinking to scrutinize your assumptions and enhance the effectiveness of your decisions. Discover two powerful counterfactual techniques: asking "what else could be true?" to reveal alternative explanations, and employing thought experiments to, for example, precisely define your desires and career aspirations. The discussion offers practical applications, from refining hiring processes by identifying high-cohesion interview criteria to avoiding confirmation bias in debugging. By adopting counterfactual thinking, you can significantly improve your analytical skills, make more informed choices, and build robust strategies.Uncover how cognitively taxing questions lead us to use substitute questions as heuristics, and why understanding the cohesion between these is vital for ac

This episode explores why maintenance tasks, despite their fundamental importance, are often neglected or deprioritised in our daily lives and professional work. It delves into the psychological biases that make consistent maintenance challenging, such as hyperbolic discounting, where immediate gratification is valued over future gains, and the construal level theory, which highlights how psychological distance makes preventative work less impactful. The concept of the "maintenance paradox" is introduced, explaining that when maintenance is done well, its benefits go unnoticed, diminishing the sense of reward. The episode encourages listeners to adopt a maintenance mindset, making these tasks a standard habit rather than relying on typical prioritisation structures, as they are crucial for enhancing the quality of overall experiences and preventing future, more urgent problems.People tend to discount future gains or devalue them relative to immediate gratification, a concept known as hyperbolic discounting. T

This episode introduces a profound yet simple principle: knowing your baselines. This concept is crucial for effectively detecting and measuring change in your life and career.Uncover the fundamental idea that to recognise when something has changed, you must first understand what things were like before the change occurred. Often, people haven't been measuring their lives, making it challenging to spot shifts because their baselines are unknown.Learn to identify your personal baselines across various aspects of your life. This includes understanding typical daily habits, such as whether you tend to skip lunch, or how many hours you usually work (e.g., 6, 8, or 10 hours). While general data might suggest optimal working hours (e.g., 35-45 hours for most benefit, rarely more than 55 hours), your personal baseline is unique, and the goal is to empower you to make conscious decisions about your habits.Explore other crucial areas for baseline measurement, including simple health metrics like your typical body wei

This episode explores the complex landscape of receiving advice in your career, particularly during uncertain times. It offers insights on how to critically evaluate feedback and external information, prepare for potential negative outcomes outside of your control, and adapt your focus to thrive in a changing industry.Explore why the vast amount of advice you receive throughout your career, including feedback from bosses and peers, platitudes, anecdotes, data, opinions, and facts, will shape your thinking.Discover that even people you trust and consider authoritative may give advice you shouldn't listen to. Sometimes, all the positive signals and feedback you receive may not predict negative career events like layoffs or not getting a promotion.Learn not to stop listening to feedback, but instead listen for themes and common threads that resonate with your gut intuition.Understand the importance of contextualising people's assertions, testing them, and putting them through the wringer. However, even when foll

This episode addresses the fear surrounding industry changes, such as AI and potential outsourcing, and offers actionable advice for engineers, managers, and leaders to navigate these challenges. You'll learn why shifting your focus from just developing skills to embracing ownership and responsibility is crucial for long-term career resilience and agency.Understand the fear and concern that traditional skills may lose value due to industry changes, including AI and potential layoffs.Discover the critical shift needed in your career focus from solely developing skills towards embracing ownership and responsibility.Learn why responsibility and ownership are becoming increasingly valuable and are difficult to outsource or export, contrasting with skills which may become more fluid.Explore how human agency, including judging success, setting goals and direction, and translating inputs into action, complements or supervises work potentially done by machines or outsourced teams, with the human taking ultimate respo

This episode provides tactical ways to own your time, reduce meeting load and obligations, and regain agency, especially when feeling burnt out. You'll learn how to use a simple two-part model focusing on Pliability and Volatility to evaluate your tasks and meetings and make intentional choices about how you spend your time.Learn how owning your time is a critical first step in combating burnout, tiredness, and feeling worn out, helping you evaluate whether you feel agency over your time.Understand the principle that not all time is equal, whether it's sacred personal time or different times of day at work, and why you shouldn't treat it equally.Discover a simple two-part model using the characteristics of Pliability and Volatility to evaluate your obligations, such as meetings and tasks.Learn the definition of Pliability – how easily an obligation can be moved, changed, or cancelled, representing its flexibility.Understand the definition of Volatility – the risk, downsides, and potential compound negative ef

This episode explores the dichotomy between iterative planning and target state planning in software development, discussing the benefits and drawbacks of each approach and providing decision factors to help you choose the most appropriate method for your situation.Understand the core difference between iterative planning, which emphasises agility and responding to change with short planning horizons, and target state planning, which involves laying out a more defined long-term direction.Discover that while iterative planning is often considered the "right way" for software development, target state planning can be valuable for setting a general direction, which can be updated as you learn.Learn why addressing problems atomically in an iterative fashion can be valid, but that evaluating multiple potential improvements together with a target state in mind can lead to better coordination, efficiency, and consistency.Explore the decision factors that might lead you to favour iterative planning, such as high unce

This episode delves into practical principles for navigating the unexpected in your life and career. Rather than attempting to predict specific events, the focus is on cultivating resilience and optionality by identifying vulnerabilities in your systems and adopting a proactive mindset to transform potential challenges into strategic advantages.• Discover the three core principles of preparedness: first, build for change by investing in low-cost, high-upside options to prepare for many potential futures. Second, understand the weak points in your current systems (career, personal life, finances, etc.) to create mitigation strategies. Third, think like an engineer by identifying bottlenecks and single points of failure and pressure testing your life's resources.• Learn how to invest in optionality by pursuing low-cost, high-upside opportunities such as maintaining your professional network and reading books. These investments provide flexibility, improve negotiation power, and enhance your psychological positi

This episode introduces a simple yet highly effective communication habit that can be adopted by anyone to significantly reduce the risk of misunderstandings and enhance connection. It explores how this practice, which requires thoughtful communication but no special skills, can benefit individuals at all career levels.Discover why misunderstandings pose a significant risk to your career and how our natural inclination towards low-effort communication contributes to this risk.Learn the core of this high-leverage habit: restating what someone is telling you in your own words to ensure clarity and mutual understanding. This involves summarising or rephrasing the other person's message using your own terminology.Understand the multiple benefits of this technique, including demonstrating that you are actively listening, encoding the information more effectively for yourself, and most crucially, giving the other person the opportunity to correct your understanding.Explore how this habit provides a critical opportu

This episode introduces a valuable meta-tool for understanding the generic shapes of models, focusing specifically on the concept of logarithmic relationships and how they manifest as diminishing returns in various aspects of our lives and work. Understanding these patterns can help us make more informed decisions about where to invest our time and resources. Uncover a meta-tool for understanding generic model shapes, specifically focusing on the concept of logarithmic relationships, which operates at a layer above specific mental models. Learn about logarithmic complexity as a concept often encountered in algorithmic analysis and graphing math, characterised by a curve where the slope continuously decreases. Discover how diminishing returns serve as a colloquial way to understand logarithmic relationships, where each unit of input effort yields progressively smaller returns in value or output. Explore examples of where diminishing returns are evident, such as increasing the reliability of a system throug

This episode introduces the concept of dimensional reframing as a tool to gain new perspectives on problems and facilitate decision-making by considering a new dimension.• Learn how adding a new dimension to a problem can overcome limited perception and lead to new insights.• Discover how applying the dimension of time to bug management can help prioritise and address a manageable number of bugs within a specific period.• Explore how considering your energy levels can inform your approach to personal tasks, matching tasks to your available energy.• Understand how frameworks like Getting Things Done (GTD) use the dimension of context to make tasks more actionable.• Learn how the KonMari method employs the dimension of joy to fundamentally change how you decide what items to keep.• Understand that the key to effective dimensional reframing is choosing a dimension that you care about and that helps you make decisions.• Discover that dimensional reframing can be applied to both individual items and lists of items

This episode explores the concept of Chesterton's fence, a principle that advises against removing or altering something without first understanding its original purpose.• Understand the core message of Chesterton's fence: before getting rid of an existing system, process, or code, take the time to understand why it was put there in the first place.• Learn about the common thought process that leads to wanting to remove things without understanding them ("Why on earth would anyone ever do it this way?").• Discover the parable of Chesterton's fence: the more intelligent reformer questions the removal of a fence until its use is understood.• See an analogy in code review where a senior engineer might question the removal of code or tests without understanding their purpose.• Understand the cognitive bias of illusory superiority and the Dunning-Kruger effect, which can lead to overestimating one's own abilities and underestimating the reasoning behind existing systems.• Recognise the mistake of assuming that pre

This episode discusses how to reframe areas of growth identified in performance reviews with your manager, turning potential weaknesses into strategic strengths. It emphasizes focusing on excelling in your existing strengths rather than spreading efforts thinly across all areas of improvement. Understand why it's misguided to immediately convert a list of growth areas into a to-do list and the importance of collaborating with your manager on this. Learn to identify the growth areas you are interested in and determine what has kept you from excelling in them, such as time, opportunity, or self-confidence. Discover why focusing on becoming extraordinarily good in your already strong areas can lead to unique opportunities for you and your company. Explore how to strategically discuss your growth areas with your manager, focusing on a limited set of areas for improvement and suggesting compromises or delegation for others. Challenge the conventional wisdom of balancing skills and instead consider how to beco

This episode provides a tactical question to elicit useful feedback by taking responsibility for seeking it out and framing the request in a way that encourages advice rather than judgment. Understand that your manager giving you feedback is your responsibility, which means you should actively seek it out rather than waiting. Discover how a simple question can shift the dynamic with your manager to get better feedback, focusing on advice for the future rather than dwelling on past behaviours. Learn the tactical question to ask your manager: "What do you think will hold me back from growing?" or a modified version like, "What do you think will hold me back from getting X promotion?". Explore why framing your feedback request as seeking advice is more effective because managers generally enjoy giving advice and it focuses on future improvement. Understand that the intent is not to analyze past behavior but to identify potential roadblocks to future success and growth.

This episode introduces a simple quadrant tool to visualise different working modes that a team or individual task might be in, based on levels of autonomy and definition. Understand how the quadrant is built using the X-axis of dependency (high to low) and the Y-axis of definition (high to low) to visualise different work modes. Explore how the bottom left quadrant represents work that is highly exploratory and highly dependent, often requiring collaboration across multiple departments. Learn how a "spike" usually fits into the bottom right quadrant, signifying autonomous exploration. Discover how the top left quadrant is for work that is highly dependent but highly defined, such as a migration project or adopting a new tool. Understand how the top right quadrant represents work that is the most defined and the most autonomous, typically a singular task assigned to an individual. Recognise that many development frameworks focus on optimising work to fit in the top right quadrant to improve flow by redu

This episode introduces product lifecycle governance, offering practical techniques for engineering managers to tackle challenges like backlog prioritisation and leadership misunderstandings, helping turn potential problems into strategic advantages. Uncover how to use product lifecycle governance to expose vulnerabilities in your product development process, by understanding where decisions are made and who makes them. Learn how to move beyond simply managing a product to governing its lifecycle, turning unexpected issues into opportunities for better alignment and strategic advantage. Discover why understanding your governance model is crucial for ensuring that everyone is working on the most important tasks, and how to iterate on it for better clarity and effectiveness. Explore why focusing on a clear governance model and identifying decision points can be more useful than simply executing processes without understanding the bigger picture. Learn why surfacing tech debt and integrating it into your ba