Developer Tea

Every decision is a tradeoff. If you are looking for the "right" decision, you can reframe this to the "optimal decision based on my desired outcome." This could have the effect of aligning your biases to work in your favor.

Is your performance review judging the luck or random events of a person's career? What about the times they made the right decision in a bad situation? The outcome may not be desirable every time, even with good decision-making.

Feedback loops shape everything around us. We make a change or adjustment, watch for what happens, and repeat. This happens with people in the most unexpected ways. Tuning in to this adjustment loop can help us use it as a tool, rather than reacting to it.

Almost every complex problem can be broken down and solved. Thinking from the other side - learning general solutions and how to compose those will give you the ability to build against the broken down complex problem.

Today, we'll dismantle a few common excuses often provided for not setting goals. We also briefly discuss the SMART goal-setting framework.

Your time is full of intent, but if you reflect back - how often do you do what you intend?Our actions are usually trying to reach some outcome, but are haphazard and habit-driven. What if we made that outcome explicit, and made our calendars reflect specific processes instead of vague outcomes?

Change is inevitable, but it's not always what we think it will be. Our framework for change should be ready for change we don't expect as much or more than for change we do expect.

The flow of change is inevitable. Are you building with it, or ignoring it in vane?

What if status meant something different? Your status meeting overload is probably a symptom of a more important problem: you're not sure what you're measuring against.

Lower cognitive load by picking your tools, and then using them. Avoid the constant evaluation of tooling; it's an intuitive response to the amazing leverage you experienced when you first picked up the tools you have, but now your highest leverage activity is focus.

Lower cognitive load by looking at your primary activities and modes, and creating cues that help you shortcut to those modes. This importantly gives you a better signal and a spike in cognitive load when something comes up that doesn't match your primary activities and modes.

Cognitive load will destroy your productivity. In this mini-series, we talk about ways to reduce your cognitive load. In this episode we talk about limiting work, and everything else, in progress.

Cognitive load will destroy your productivity. In this mini-series, we talk about ways to reduce your cognitive load. In this episode we talk about the unexpected effects of surprise on cognitive load, and what you can do about this in your work.

The systems that play a role in producing your thoughts are a huge leverage opportunity in your work and life. If you pause and examine those systems through a lens of systems-thinking, you are likely to identify opportunities for improvement, even if only as a byproduct of that investigation.

If you only look at your experience, you fall prey to anecdotal evidence and a whole host of other biases. But, we should be learning through iteration and empiricism. So how can we? Seek the outside view, without abandoning your experience.

Your organizational efficiency is directly related to how you manage information, and information is lost when your organization is chronically lacking transparency.

Once you have the right meetings with the right people, it's time to look at the content of the meeting itself.In this episode we discuss possible red flags that may show up in your meetings, and what kinds of problems these flags may signal.

Defining your audience is critical to a good meeting. If you haven't defined your audience... who is the meeting even for?

Better meetings are not a myth, but it starts with deconstructing how you got to where you are today. A hectic calendar and meetings showing up like popcorn.What can you do to improve this? Managers and individual contributors can start by focusing on what the goal of the meeting is. If the goal of the meeting is to solve a problem, that's a yellow flag.

Competency is not the only way you can grow your career.If that was the case, then every engineering manager would be technically more proficient than their reports, and I can guarantee (from many experiences) this is not only not the case - it's not even the norm.