Developer Tea

In today's episode we'll discuss some counterintuitive advice for your interviews. This advice applies in interview settings, but also applies in 1-1 meetings as well.

After today's episode, your resumé is going to get better! In this episode I will share the biggest mistake and the best advice I've ever received about building a great resumé. This will take some work from you, but I hope you walk away from this episode feeling like you have the right mindset to improve your resumé drastically, and land more interviews, ultimately leading to better job opportunities for the Developer Tea audience!

In today's episode, we talk about the counterintuitive process of prioritizing based on critical path. This is not a novel concept that I've invented, but rather a revisiting of the classic discussion started by Eli Goldratt in his book "The Goal", and later in his book "Critical Path", based on the theory of constraints.

The most common mistake for any manager is to fail to clarify. This often happens because we mistake our average communications for having perfect clarity, when in fact we most often don't communicate at high levels of clarity. This isn't because we are bad at communication, but rather because our social communications carry less consequence when they aren't precise. Clarity is not simply being honest. We'll discuss the importance of clarity in this episode, and your first steps towards achieving clarity above the norm.

What does your culture have to do with your values? In this episode we open up the discussion about a model of thinking for culture and values to understand how they link, and more importantly, when they don't.

Your feedback loops should be short enough that the cost of making a mistake is low enough that the value of the learning in the feedback loop exceeds the magnitude of the cost of a mistake. In other words: shorten your feedback loops to the point that you're no longer afraid to make a mistake.

In this episode we discuss the importance of being your own advocate, and why this is likely the most rational position to hold. The takeaway: At any point, the person advocating the most for you is almost definitely YOU.

In this episode we discuss a practical application of information theory. Information theory is similar to the classic theory of communication, but distinct in important ways; these two theories together are a useful combo for creating a strategy for clarification.

In today's episode we talk about working principles again. Specifically, we're looking at a problem with measurement fixation, as well as the natural curve of degradation that most communication follows.

In this episode we are revisiting some of my own personal core principles of working. I'm sharing these with you for you to do whatever you want with them, so please share however you can! The principles we discuss today are around the relationship between clarity and focus, and about how most negotiations aren't about feasibility but instead about strategy.

In today's episode we talk about principles of productivity. Most of the advice you receive will fit in the two categories we discuss in this episode. Once you connect with these ideas, you'll be able to use them for your own gain.

In today's episode we discuss the concept of "cost of delay", and explore the fact that cost of delay does not necessarily follow a linear path. When cost of delay has a cliff, or an exponential curve, how do you weigh one opportunity versus another?

"What actions can I take to get better from here?" This seems like a simple concept, but in practice we often are more interested in protecting our ego. In this episode we try to practice this self-accountability through an exercise.

In this episode we continue our discussion about the most overused statistical measurement. We'll talk about a few more counterintuitive properties of the average, and how you might be underserving your colleagues as a result of thinking in averages.

On average, you're probably overusing this specific type of statistic. In today's episode, we discuss the king of all misleading numbers: averages! There's so much to talk about with averages that we're splitting this into two parts. Disclaimer: I am not a mathematician. But we will talk about some of the interesting properties of averages and why they are so addictive to use for humans, but more practically what counterintuitive ways we might be using them incorrectly. If you're using your sprint velocity to forecast work, this episode is for you!

Today we explore the idea of treating your time as a product. Start with a wishlist: what do you wish was true about your week? What are your "if-only" statements? Next, put on your product owner hat. How would you improve the situation, if you knew the "consumer"'s requests? This exercise should provide unique insight and a new lens to view your time and agency through.

The Von Restorff effect says we remember things that stand out. This is probably mostly intuitive - "that stood out to me" is a common colloquialism. But what isn't intuitive is the implied downside of uniformity, which is often the product of process. In other words, if your process creates perfect uniformity, elevating any one thing, say, in priority, is going to be exceedingly difficult. Additionally, if your "escalation" process is overused, it will once again violate the point of the escalation in the first place. "If everything is urgent, nothing is urgent."

In today's episode, we do a journaling exercise to provide a new lens on developing your own career roadmap. We're going to practice the power of hindsight, finding our wiser selves, and ultimately looking forward and backward...at the same time. It sounds a little odd, but it's all based in solid cognitive science. If you have a notoriously hard time figuring out your career path, I'd invite you to participate!

As you grow your career, you will continuously lean on delegation to scale your efforts and focus on the most important things. True delegation requires ownership, and ownership can be thought of in two critical parts: agency and responsibility. In today's episode, we discuss the fool's errand of delegating only one or the other of these parts.

Little's Law explains, in a given queuing system, what the relationships of throughput within that system are. We can garner insights both for our work, and for our own lives, by recognizing how these relationships work and what we can do to utilize them. In this episode, we talk about when it is useful to use Little's law to your advantage.

Finding leverage is difficult to do, but a lot of the reason for this is that we allow ourselves to fall into well-traveled cognitive pathways. If we reject the solution domain-set that comes to mind immediately, we may be able to consider options for solutions we had never considered. This larger solution set may also include a high-leverage option we had previously ignored.

In today's episode, we discuss turtles, resolutions, and why your beliefs and what you see as fact is probably worth questioning anyway.

Today Marks 9 Years of Developer Tea. Thank you all for your support, and your friendship. I wish you all well on your journey, and may you find clarity, perspective, and purpose. (Don't worry, we aren't going anywhere!)

What characterizes good plans from bad ones? And how can you make your plans better on average? In this episode we discuss how to better organize your intentions and processes to yield better plans.

The "lollapalooza" effect (coined by Charlie Munger) occurs when multiple other effects have a compounded outcome that tends to create an extreme situation. In this episode, we discuss lollapalooza effects and how you might fall victim to them, and more importantly, how you can use them to your advantage.

When you are newly joining a team, you have a huge opportunity to do something that no one on the team has: to find your "weathervane." The pressure pushing against you to adopt the beliefs of the team you are joining. What you do with it is one huge way a team can improve, or otherwise, stay the same.

Most people believe good things will happen by default. Not to be the bearer of bad news, but there's a downside to this endless optimism. You cannot will good things to happen, and when you don't prepare for adverse events, you won't be ready when they inevitably occur.

Your team's process for managing a backlog is probably growing stale because you are running on habit rather than procedure. Break out of procedure and remind yourself why you have a process to begin with: orient yourself to the outcomes!

What is it about our present situation that changes our perspective? In today's episode we talk about the availability bias and why our present reality looms so large in our decisionmaking.

What do you expect of yourself? Are you spending your time in ways that align with those expectations? In this episode, I provide you a simple framework as a starting lens for getting a better idea of how you are spending your time in relation to who cares the most about those investments. You'll walk away with a new lens on how to evaluate your most precious resource: time.

Almost every conversation you have will start with a question. Have you stopped to listen closely? Questions are extremely meaningful and deeply human. Paying close attention to questions is a skill that will put you head and shoulders above the average engineer or manager.

How often does reality match your expectations exactly? Sure, you may guess in the ball park, but usually there are errors in our expectations. In today's episode, I talk about a simple shift in thinking that will help improve your expectations for your work.

In this episode we continue a little mini-series called "Backlog psychology." How do you get better at anything? (Hopefully you said "practice" almost instinctively.) What does good practice look like? Your team has an opportunity to practice every meeting and every day. But if your days look different from one to the next, how will you ever have the opportunity to actually do that practice?

In this episode we continue the mini-series "Backlog psychology." Would you rather have $5 now or $50 next week? The answer to this question, though it seems logically obvious which is better, does not always produce the same response. The required incentive to convince someone to wait tends to follow an exponential curve upward. This is not just true with money, but for any benefit and incentive: monetary, social, emotional, physical, etc. What does this mean for our backlogs? What about our daily habits?

In this episode we kick off a little mini-series called "Backlog psychology." You've heard you should "limit your work in progress" - why? What makes more work in progress more difficult to handle? Cognitive load isn't just about multi-tasking in the moment - it's also about limiting your open tasks.

Your retros may feel like deadends where complaints go to die. If you're running retros and treating it only as an avenue for emotional support rather than continuous improvement, today's episode is for you. Retros are for improving iteratively over time. That can only happen if your outcomes are aligned to that iterative mindset. Two simple adjustments can help drive that improvement.

Count the cost of learning. When you choose a path towards a goal, it's absolutely critical to optimize for the cost of learning. Often, with software, it is easier to learn by a series of smaller steps, even if they start out as random, rather than take on the major risk of a large step possibly going the wrong direction. This isn't always true; sometimes, the cost of learning is *greater* with small steps. Determining which is true in your situation can make or break your plans.

Decisions are made in many ways, but one important type of decisionmaking tool is the "rule." This is something you follow without any cognitive processing. But, we eventually develop rules as a part of habit-building. These are "implicit" rules - they aren't necessarily something you have set as a rule, but they are followed as if they were. These are worth interrogating, and perhaps replacing with more explicit rules.

Are you stuck trying to prioritize your long list of things you need to do? Maybe you're trying to establish a habitual routine or areas of investment in your schedule, budget, or decisionmaking. Figure out what you need to avoid first. This creates the opportunities you need to say yes.

Are you measuring the wrong thing for your short term game? If so, you probably continuously change directions and are never sure if anything you do is working. It's time to rethink your scoreboard.

Your career doesn't have to take off without your approval. Slow down, and make sure you actually have goals you are setting. Control your own destiny by aligning your plan to your actual goal, or vice versa.

Accountability can be complex. When something goes wrong, fingers start flying: *someone* needs to be held responsible. But true accountability starts before anything goes wrong. In this episode, we discuss the Accountability Triangle, a mental model for ensuring that your accountability structures are valid and actually usable.

Improving your clarity is the beginning of your journey in engineering leadership. This takes courage and patience, but the investment will benefit everyone you influence, including yourself.

If you've used the term Tech Debt, you probably know that the metaphor is loose at best. Taking on tech debt sometimes becomes a permanent choice, and the repayment isn't always a clear-cut investment. Most importantly, the concept of "debt" doesn't as easily take into account the human factors involved. Tech lag (taking inspiration from jet lag) is about the thrash involved in changing the standard of quality. In this episode, we talk about how this metaphor applies where you normally might think of tech debt.

Negotiation is not about getting more of what you want out of another person. Real artful negotiation is about finding alignment, and solving the problems presented at a level of divergence.

Layoffs happen whether we want them to or not. Being prepared with a principled approach can help relieve anxiety and produce better outcomes for when layoffs occur. In this episode, I give you two principled mental tools to help you deal with layoff anxieties no matter where you are in the picture.

Everything around us is primarily governed by some kind of system. The question is, are you designing your systems intentionally, or just letting them emerge? In today's episode, I give you one piece of advice when designing your systems: limit the responsibility of a given actor in the system.

If you don't have agency over your goals, how can they help you to begin with?

Good feedback isn't about getting something off of your chest. It's not about sharing your feelings (though that doesn't mean your feelings aren't important). It's about finding a problem that you and the person you are sharing feedback with both care about, and working towards a solution.

Planning will give you the illusion of certainty. What you really need to execute on your plans is clarity. The reality is that the future is impossible to predict, and the further away from now that you get, the more difficult it becomes to predict at an exponential rate. Focus on creating the best pathways for present decision-making.

You may hate hearing the word "process." You aren't alone if you do. But, what feels like a slog today is really in place for when the most critical things happen in your career. Have a process, even if it feels useless on a standard day.

The psychological phenomenon of hedonic adaptation can seem like the enemy of your happiness, but once you understand how it works, you can use it to create lasting habit change and focus on what matters most.

Today we look at a mental model from the field of psychophysics called Weber's Law. This concept is a great analogy for a lot of problems we face as engineers and people leaders, and can help us understand just how deeply humans depend on context to understand the world.

A senior developer understands that they have to be very selective about how they apply knowledge. Know matter how vast your knowledge may be, you are limited in how you can practically use it in a given circumstance.

Your intuition says that control is the ladder you climb to improve your career. But most great leaders tend to do one thing: the opposite of increasing control.

In today's episode we explore the duality between confronting difficult realities while maintaining optimism. Specifically, we discuss a critical question: what does it mean to be optimistic?

The traits that define a senior engineer are not catalogued perfectly in one spot. But, nevertheless, we'll try to cover some of the most important traits and habits of a senior engineer. In today's episode, we'll add more detail to the commonly recommended skill of "work breakdown." Sometimes this extremely valuable skill is the opposite of what you really need to practice. Feel free to incorporate these into your skill matrices, reviews, or job descriptions - I'd love to hear about it if you do!

The traits that define a senior engineer are not catalogued perfectly in one spot. But, nevertheless, we'll try to cover some of the most important traits and habits of a senior engineer. In this episode, we'll discuss the fact that difficulty does not equate to value, and hazard a guess as to why we can easily confuse this, especially as we begin to grow from junior to senior roles. Feel free to incorporate these into your skill matrices, reviews, or job descriptions - I'd love to hear about it if you do!

The traits that define a senior engineer are not catalogued perfectly in one spot. But, nevertheless, we'll try to cover some of the most important traits and habits of a senior engineer. In this episode, we'll discuss the importance of systematically communicating value to various audiences. Feel free to incorporate these into your skill matrices, reviews, or job descriptions - I'd love to hear about it if you do!

The traits that define a senior engineer are not catalogued perfectly in one spot. But, nevertheless, we'll try to cover some of the most important traits and habits of a senior engineer. Feel free to incorporate these into your skill matrices, reviews, or job descriptions - I'd love to hear about it if you do!

We play the short game so we get the chance to play the long game. Early in our careers, we imagine the best way to play is always focus on the long game. But in reality, we need both. Be aware of leaning too far the opposite direction, and accidentally abandoning the long game entirely.

We can become accustomed to the rate at which we experience change, and imagine that that rate will continue to increase linearly. Eventually, change will level off. We accumulate fewer skills later in our careers, our network of connections might seem to top out, or our salary bumps slow down. If we know that change tends to follow a logarithmic shape, we can prepare and plan better for the changing rate of change.

At the beginning of any work session, practice, performance, or any other activity you want to achieve flow during, you can give yourself the best shot at getting into flow by controlling a few simple variables. We talk about two of them in today's episode: Session Feedback and Session Goal.

Protecting your flow state may help you have more "peak experiences" - whether in your career or in your personal life. This is your opportunity to make the biggest strides and highest achievements. In this episode we start a conversation about what it takes to protect your flow state.

Sometimes I hear advice that is worth its weight in gold. In today's episode I share one piece of advice that is almost universally applicable across life and career efforts.

If your identity is complex, your purpose is by extension complex. In this episode, we talk about purpose as an expression, rather than a regulator, of your identity.

You don't need to overthink purpose. Focus on clarity, and finding your underlying motivation. That clarity can be short-lived; purpose is a dynamic and powerful force, but only if you hold it lightly.

What you are afraid of in your career may be the thing that propels you. It's all about framing, and removing the negative and positive language. Instead, think about how you can best position yourself and that behavior to be valuable instead of a detractor.

If you aren't doing something, you either can't or won't. In today's episode, we explore this very simple starting point for behavior change and habit development, and explore the boundaries of the model.

You aren't going to put your foot in your mouth, or reveal some devastating level of ineptitude. Asking questions, especially as a beginner, is much more likely to gain you favor than disdain.

What does a feature cost? Your first answer will probably focus on the time to build, or the features needed... Maybe the amount of hiring necessary to deliver. But what about after that? The cost of our decisions is not limited to the short term - usually, a decision has a long term cost curve. Knowing what the cost curve is for any significant investment helps you make better decisions and have clearer anticipation and planning intuition.

There is a spectrum of buy-in for behavior change. In today's episode, I'll give you a thinking model for considering different types of buy-in along this spectrum, and when one might help you make better systems for behavior change in your organization.

What is your learning strategy? If you don't have one, you are implicitly saying that all learning is equal. Learning is an investment of time. Choose what you invest in carefully.

Developer Tea has been around for 8 years. Thank you so much for your incredible support over these years! In today's episode we discuss how it feels to be wrong.

Most resolutions aren't as simple as saying something and then doing it. Instead, focus on breaking apart your resolution by looking at intent, strategy, tactics, and operations.

Make a commitment to determine three requests that could change your life for the better, and the people you need to give those requests. Then, in the new year, make that a part of your resolutions.

Complexity is an asset, but often it depreciates in value over time. Simplification strategies should evaluate what kind of value complexity is providing, and whether that could be replaced or if it doesn't provide sufficient exponential value versus the cost over time.

Opportunity is in front of you every day. But, you may not recognize it at first, because you by default will likely imagine yourself to be an external observer. If you change that mental model, and view yourself as an active participant with the power to influence others, your perception of opportunity will follow.

What will hold you back from achieving what you want to achieve in your future? How do you imagine your future, and what do you assume will keep you from going further? In today's episode, we'll do a visualization exercise to help understand the assumptions we make about our own problems and flaws, and why avoidance isn't helping us grow.

Practical application of psychology can help us understand how to order our days more consciously. In this episode, we talk about priming and regression to the mean, and how they could impact our work as engineers and managers.

AI and code generation will change your work... But it's time for us to find the path forward.

AI and code generation will change your work... But it's time for us to find the path forward.

Focus on things that provide asymmetrical upside. This is a personalized ROI evaluation. This is how you invest your time wisely.

We imagine others are more interested in our mistakes or self-conscious areas than they are. We also imagine they pay little to no attention to us at most other times. Both of these are errors in judgment.

We adapt to our circumstances. This dampens our capacity for gratitude, as we become less aware of what we are experiencing the longer we have the same experiences. In today's episode, we use a version of an exercise from Julia Galef's excellent book, The Scout Mindset, to help us break out of our status quo thinking and recognize what is in front of us.

You know how to determine what would be a good decision. You have the tools and the reasoning; if you find yourself still not making the right decision, you may be tempted to focus on the "left side" - increasing the energy, gumption, reasoning, or motivation. Instead, focus on the barriers - the friction.

Determining your values isn't just about fluff. This is what you personally care about. In this episode, we talk about two ways to use direct observation as a tool for determining your values, and why those values are not just buzzwords.

Focus on what you can control. Create incentives and language and internal narrative that produces the right actions within your locus of control. Avoid attaching your definition of success to things outside of your control.

Don't buy in to the lie that you have to overwork to succeed. Not only is it not true, it's also dangerous - and the opposite is more accurate.

In today's episode, I provide a simple coaching tip on improved communication for software engineers. It's simple: always make precision explicit, and layer context. Start with precision, then create meaning on top.

We don't think about the unexpected as a category of possible outcomes. This leads us to assign overestimated probabilities to things that are front of mind, and discount the likelihood of things we don't expect. This may lead us to prepare for expected events without consideration for what we'll do in the face of the unexpected.

Look closer at the things that don't happen. Evaluate the options you never considered. When you are looking back, don't just judge based on actions and outcomes - look at the quality of decisions through the lens of information, and wonder: was there a better decision? Was there an option that was nearly as good, but this one was better?

You can't wait for luck to strike, but you also won't always get what you deserve. Both of these are true - so, go make luck happen for you!

Habits aren't built on their own. They are the result of environments. Reduce friction and create a positive reinforcement loop, and the habits will follow.

What happens in high-stakes environments? Is the learning you do in your low-stakes environment actually helping you when you have skin in the game?

Having trouble setting goals? Take a look at a different angle with the guided exercise in today's episode.

Our goals usually take two forms: what we want to accomplish, and who we want to be. When we can align these things, we find cohesion in our goals, giving us more clarity and purpose.

Two guidelines for better goal setting. First, goals don't stand alone. Second, ranges often beat arbitrary points.

Stop and think about how you are spending your time. Time is constantly moving, whether we stop to recognize it or not. How will you spend it? These five powerful questions will help you reconfigure your time today.