The Leadership Garden Newsletter – #37

🧠 Stop comparing yourself to others. You’re not them, and they’re definitely not you. Measure progress in life based on who you were 12 months ago versus now.

How To Start Managing People – The First 3 One-on-Ones

Get the one-on-one advice you need to get started as an engineering manager: three tangible lists of ideas of what to talk about in your first few one-on-ones.

Management Lessons From Elon's Twitter

Can we find method in the Muskian madness? This post makes the attempt and concludes that Musk’s approach can be understood as a speed run of a ‘standard executive transition’. A fun read.

We asked 250k UK candidates what they want from a new job in tech: Here's what they said

No big surprises here – tech workers want flexibility, great team members and professional growth.

How to have better meetings

The historical CIA memo in this article on how to disrupt your enemies by having bad meetings, is quite disturbing given how much we might recognize from our experience….

Investing in Internal Documentation: A Brick-by-Brick Guide for Startups

Nunez outlines specific steps for creating a culture of good internal documentation hygiene. “Pulling from his playbooks as Uber’s first dedicated docs hire and the first-ever Head of Docs Content for Stripe, he shares ultra-tactical advice for each part of the process: from building the habit and incentivizing engineers to make the effort, to keeping things organized.”

Fallacies of Distributed Systems

Oh, this is a gem! A list of false assumptions that programmers new to distributed applications invariably make. Have you heard the one about “The network is secure”?

11 Laws of Software Estimation for Complex Work

I love the headline: “Wrong estimates aren’t your fault, but they are definitely your problem” – Nothing really new in this list, but it’s still a nice compilation that can act as a reminder to us all.

If you liked this, you might be interested in the Leadership Garden blog, too – subscribe there to get notified of new posts.