Like always, I am sharing my best findings for the week. Under "Culture," you'll find content worth reading and sharing with others; you'll need others' help to pull it off. Under "Peopleware," you'll find content that can help you approach situations differently with new perspectives and frameworks.   

 

This Week's Favorite

Welcome to the Room - A Lesson in Leadership by Satya Nadella
5 minutes read.

If you want to have a glimpse of how top performers operate, this one is for you. No excuses, full leverage. This truly hits hard: "If you are in this room, you need to deliver outsized success. [...] You need to have courage and be bold." -- Everyone says so, but very few have a plan and are willing to put their credibility on the line.

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Culture

“We Used to Review Every Line of Code Before It Went Into Production”
1 minute read.

My humble effort to help you start the weekend with a smile.

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The Self-Driving Company
4 minutes read.

Nikunj Kothari will get your brain to spin and think deeper into the levers you need to create in your company to adopt such feedback loops: "The full self-healing loop is almost here. User feedback flows to analytics. Analytics generates user stories. Stories become designs. Designs become code. Code ships itself. Each piece exists today in fragments. Within 24 months, they'll connect into something new: companies that build themselves. [...] What decisions will only humans make when execution costs nothing? Taste, judgment, ethics become more valuable as everything else gets automated."

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The Hamster Wheel Has Engineers
7 minutes read.

One of the best takes I've seen on FDEs and what you should track to see the type of impact that truly changes the business (e.g. FDE:customers YoY, product changes due to FDE's feedback, etc.): "I run an AI company with forward deployed engineers, so I’ve seen this role split into two entirely different animals wearing the same costume. Some FDE teams are genuine force multipliers, small groups generating enormous leverage because every customer engagement makes the product smarter. Others are expensive human spackle, bodies thrown at gaps that should have been closed in code, a services business hiding inside a software company’s cap table. [...] The FDE isn’t creating leverage. The FDE is the leverage, which means you don’t have any. [...] Because here’s the thing: if your organization is structured to solve problems with bodies, it will keep solving problems with bodies. The product team has no pressure to improve because the FDEs are handling it. The FDEs have no time to document patterns because they’re too busy fighting fires. The fires keep burning because the product isn’t improving because the product team has no pressure to improve."

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Financial Modeling Will Be Obsolete
4 minutes read.

Asking the following question to predict where we'll see massive transformation with AI is very powerful: "What other computer-based workflows have billions of examples of “correct” and “incorrect” scripts that can be verified formulaically, have millions (or more) of users, and subject users to tedious time-sucks as they seek to get these formulas correct."

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Peopleware

My AI Adoption Journey
6 minutes read.

Mitchell Hashimoto (HashiCorp's cofounder and one of the sharpest engineers in the industry) shares how he changed the way he operates AI to invest the time in areas he loved: "At this point I was firmly in the “no way I can go back“ territory. I felt more efficient, but even if I wasn't, the thing I liked the most was that I could now focus my coding and thinking on tasks I really loved while still adequately completing the tasks I didn't."

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Clankers With Claws
4 minutes read.

The progress we're seeing with LLMs and tools connecting and delivering value we couldn't imagine just a few months ago is staggering. The product surface area is growing from deterministic flows we understand to open-ended worlds where everything (all software) is connected, and everything becomes possible.

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And finally, inspiring tweets...

@arampell: Anyone who’s written software knows that the last 5% can take 95% of the time Edge cases, conflicts, weird environments, you name it And for many areas of work, 95% right is still 100% wrong AI is a remarkable tool and a huge productivity gain. Laws of physics still apply.

@harrybrundage: For the first time ever Opus 4.5 turns tech debt into actual debt


p.s. if you're interested in joining SWLW's Slack channel, simply reply to this email and let me know. If you're leading a team, consider writing your Manager README (it's free) or getting my e-book and interviews Leading Snowflakes: The New Engineering Manager's Handbook. You can also support me by becoming a SWLW Patron. Thank you ❤️



Keep reading, keep learning.
-- Oren Ellenbogen.