The Leadership Garden Weekly – #33

Efficiency is highly overrated; Goofing off is highly underrated. Regularly scheduled sabbaths, sabbaticals, vacations, breaks, aimless walks and time off are essential for top performance of any kind. The best work ethic requires a good rest ethic.

The truth about bias in performance feedback

You’ll need to give your email address away to get the report based on 25,000+ responses, but it’s worth it. Some highlights:

• Compared to men, women are 7x more likely to report being described as “opinionated,” and 11x more likely to report being described as “abrasive.”
• Black and Latinx people receive 2.4x more feedback that’s not actionable compared to white and Asian people.
• White men under 40 get the word “brilliant” in performance feedback 8.7x more than women over 40.

Software Engineering – The Soft Parts

Addy Osmani (an engineering manager at Google working on Chrome) shares what “soft skills” he finds essential. Not your usual “soft skill” content – a highly recommended reading.

On Hiring: Seven Principles

A short & sweet list of guidelines for hiring. I found myself nodding at each point.

What Makes a Great Developer Experience?

A collection of opinions on Developer Experience regarding frameworks, libraries, documentation and APIs.

Having Career Conversations

“What’s your 3-5 year plan?  Where do you see yourself in a few years?  What do you want to accomplish?”  Unless you’re in a massively trusting setting (e.g. a spouse or best friend), who wants to answer these kinds of questions?

What is a 1x Engineer?

You might have already heard of a 10x engineer. Probably too often, actually. If there's such a thing as a 10x engineer, surely there must be a 1x engineer, too? We need more 1x engineers!

And finally, a piece of advice: