Sometimes people ask my advice on writing. It happens enough to deserve its own section under the FAQ. It makes me sad when people say “I can’t write”. Because at its core writing is thinking. So all I hear is: “I can’t think”. 🤯

Before you get mad at me, allow me to elaborate.

In this post I formulate a skill leveling system, elaborate how AI changed my writing process and why writing is an even more relevant skill in the age of generative AI.

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In my experience there are 3 levels of writing:

1. Thinking: you write primarily to organize your thoughts and reach clarity

2. Communication: you write to communicate your ideas

3. Innovation: you write to push the boundaries of the unknown

Your work may have elements from all 3 levels but there’s a clear distinction in intention, challenges and the skillsets you need to be aware of.

Level 1: Thinking

Writing is thinking.

Even if you don’t expose your words, the process of documenting them gets you closer to clarity.

It never stops amusing me when friends and colleagues ask my advice on writing. I am not particularly a good writer. English isn’t my mother tongue despite writing exclusively in this language. I have many typos and grammatical errors that are captured and corrected.

My writing process is basically a series of back and forth refinement. It’s a bit like how a sketch is shaped on a white paper from broad strokes to fine lines. And of course heavy usage of eraser. 😊

Iteration is the key.

Once you write your thoughts, you can step back and see it from a distance. Then you can refine the parts that don’t fit, reorder your thoughts to make it coherent, and remove the parts that don’t belong.

The more time you spend on this exercise, the clearer your thoughts.

At level 1, The audience is you.

The challenge is to think clearly and have the patience to refine it. Building this habit takes time, and in this era of rapid content consumption it’s harder than ever to find quality time and peace to reach clarity.

Clarity is powerful. Even more so in a messed up world. The ability to make sense of things, empowers you to tweak them to your benefit.

If you’re one of those people who says “I can’t write”, give yourself some credit and lower the bar.

You don’t need to be Shakespeare or Tolstoy to reach level 1. If you can think, you can write. And I don’t mean think straight, just think.

The goal of the level 1 is to use writing as a tool to reach clarity.

AI can polish the words but it cannot understand them for you. Your thoughts are very personal and until we reach Matrix level headjack, there’s no way around the slow, but rewarding process of reading, writing, and editing. 😄

That said, I use AI in level 1 to:

• Do research (what others say about the topic?) and find knowledge gaps

• Ask it to criticize my work and challenge my assumptions (a bit of hit and miss, since the current SOTA (state of the art) has difficulty with abstract concepts and reasoning)

• Ask common questions (think next level “Googling”)

• Ask for words in English that I cannot recall, or phrases that I want to use but am not sure about their meaning in my context.

Level 1 is brain-heavy and one of the major reasons that writing is still relevant in the age of AI-induced brain rot.

Level 2: Communication

After you reach clarity, you may want to share your best ideas with others as I’m doing here. 🎉

Just make sure that you don’t skip reaching clarity because an unclear result shows a confused thinker. Common symptoms to look out for:

• Fancy words, acronyms and an overuse of polished images and diagrams. This is an effort to build a facade around ambiguity, subtly but surely making it the readers’ fault for not understanding.

• Too much text, as if it was a brute force answer to an school assignment where the student hopes to get lucky and some of it makes sense. Or the reader just gives up thinking “if they wrote that long, they clearly know what they’re talking about”. 😄

• Not a lot of feedback comes out of exposing such work because the audience either feels too stupid for not understanding it, or is too overwhelmed, or (if they have a choice) already distracted and moved on to something more engaging or important.

Writing for yourself (to reach clarity) is a very different exercise than writing as a medium of communication.

Typically, the bar for the quality and eloquence is set higher because you don’t want to be judged by your words in your absence.

But I’d argue that’s not the biggest challenge.

You see, if it takes W minutes to write something that is consumed by N people, each spending an average of R minutes to understand it, there’s a productivity equation at play:

• It usually takes longer to write (W) than read and understand (R). If the audience spends more time reading your work than it took for you to write it (R > W), the productivity of the write-up is negative. Congratulations! You wasted other people’s time.

• As we’ll discuss, this is becoming too common where the LLM is used as an expansion function on a prompt without even proof-reading the generated text. When using AI, W is the total time it takes to prompt, proofread, and edit.

• When the audience is small (lower N), the only leverage you have is to spend more time in polishing and clarifying the write up (W) than it takes to read it (R). The shorter and crisper it is, the more productive it is (due to this part of the formula: W - R)

• However, when the audience is large (higher N), any effort spent on improving the clarity and understandability of the write up, pays huge dividends due to the laws of scale (N). In these cases, you may want to “beta-test” the document by asking feedback from a closed group before going public.

Words are like bullets. Once they’re out, typically it’s hard to control their trajectory (how they are interpreted in your absence) and range (who will be exposed to them). The larger the potential audience, the more time needs to go into creating something that takes the absolute minimum amount of time to digest. You have a few levers and knobs:

• Length: shorter is better

• Tone: not a show-off

• Complexity: build up in coherent steps

• Illustrations (even memes)

• Link to further reading: leave the irrelevant parts out

This is of course harder. A good method is to think about your target audience, what they may know, what you want to take away from reading, and how to build the appropriate bridge to connect the two.

Interestingly, AI can do a good job here. You can:

• Assign a role (e.g., “You are an expert in SRE familiar with AWS Lambda and S3”) to set the knowledge base line

• Feed your text to AI

• Ask questions and see if AI’s response matches your truth

• If your AI has internet access and grounding, you can ask it to find flaws in your argument and highlight alternatives based on what’s out in the public

This is a clever way to take advantage of AI’s limitations (hallucination, sycophancy, and prejudice) to emulate potential readers.

Just be aware of its other attributes (flawed reasoning, lack of abstract thinking and planning) when assessing the result. You’re not optimizing for AI, but for humans.

If you do optimize for AI “understanding”, your work can reach wider audience for example

• Internal RAG tools like Copilot Studio

• AI search engines like Perplexity

This increases N and consequently the productivity of your work depending if that’s what you want.

AI is a bar raiser, and not in a way that makes your job easier!

Powerful models are trained on a vast body of knowledge. Your audience faces a choice:

• Do they want to have a dialogue with AI and get an answer that is 1) fit to their problem, 2) aggregates a large corpus of knowledge, 3) is more accessible (there are no stupid questions, “ELI5” or translate it to the audience language)

• Or do they want to read your perspective which is shaped by your limited life trajectory?

They may prefer organic content (human-generated) to synthetic (machine-generated) because:

1. They appreciate originality that might be missing from the training data

2. They want to expand their knowledge from your real experience

3. They are after coherent opinions that fit together

4. something else

Whatever the reason, at least for now, there’s a market for genuine organic content but it also raises the bar: time and attention is an expensive resource. If someone decides to invest a few minutes to read organic content, you owe it to them to put your best forward and make it worth their time.

I really hope that you who read this far are convinced that you wouldn’t be able to prompt your way to these mental models in a timespan shorter than it took you to get here.

Level 2 requires skillful formatting, structure, tone-adjustment, and communication techniques.

I won’t repeat that here. Ask your favorite LLM or search online.

Instead I want to emphasize an important challenge for level 2 writing: getting attention in an increasingly busy world with decreasing attention span.

In the past, attention was cheap but content was expensive. Now it’s the other way around.

This makes content marketing even more important. It doesn’t matter that you’ve done a great job at level 2. If it doesn’t have reach, it’s not as productive.

Again, there are many techniques to maximize the N in the formula to reach relevant audience. I’ll leave that out to address the most mature level of writing. 👇

Level 3: Innovation

The highest level of this model is to add something to the body of the knowledge that didn’t exist.

It can be a new perspective, a new tool, or even pushing the boundaries of the unknown.

This is the realm of new books, scientific papers, and patents.

At this level, you’re not just explaining already-existing stuff in your voice. That is level 2 work. In level 3 you use your mastered voice to challenge assumptions, offer new perspectives, interpret data, inspire, create new mental models, and lead your audience to unfamiliar territory.

The time-span may range from here and now, to writing for the future generations.

The key difference between level 2 and 3 are depth of insight and mastery of influence toolbox.

At level 3, some of the advice from level 1 become irrelevant.

For example, a fictional book may intentionally use a wider vocabulary, or a scientific paper may intentionally use a sophisticated diagram because the topic demands that and the narrower audience can cope.

This is also how imposters try to sell a level 1 work as a level 2 or 3 😄. To the untrained eye, they look the same.

That is one reason AI is getting a lot of backlash these days: many people are genuinely annoyed that the AI generated text looks and sounds convincing. If you look carefully and have critical thinking glasses on, AI generated work has always been devoid of sharp insight due to how statistic models work.

Another giveaway is the generalizations and agreeableness, both of which stems from the pattern recognition algorithm behind the scene.

As someone who uses AI both for writing and coding, but also building LLM-powered products (like Local Browser AI or Service Level Assessment), I have developed an intuition for what is synthetic content, organic, or a hybrid. I can’t be the only one. And I’m not talking about em-dashes!

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Recap

Building from level 1 to 3 takes years but the progression isn’t always linear.

Your writing may already be a mix of the 3 and you might be on your journey to do more level 3 work than level 1. Sometimes you need to return to level 1 when entering new domains.

But regardless of where you are, the path starts from level 1: you can’t explain it clearly if you haven’t reached clarity. And you cannot inspire others and change minds unless you have mastered communication.

The role of generative AI

I have already talked about AI in the 3 levels above but I like it deserves a dedicated section because in my observation, so much potential is being wasted expecting silicon brain to perform like carbon brain.

First, AI is here to stay. We should use AI very deliberately. Don’t exchange your long term growth for short term productivity.

In a world where everyone is busy rubbing AI all over their work, be the one who uses the brain.

Just like muscles, training the brain takes deliberate practice.

AI can help with research, adjusting the tone, and challenging your assumptions.

But make no mistake, there’s a strong value in doing things “by hand” for your own sake. You may choose to walk even if you have a car. It takes longer, but the long term health benefit is worth it.

Silicon brain has shown time and again that it can surpass the carbon brain: deep blue, AlfaGo, Watson, and many more to come as the massive investments on AI is bound to yield some results.

But that’s irrelevant. It’s not a competition.

In the era of mass produced, personalized, and “deeply faked” synthetic content, you’re going to need your brain in top shape.

Forget top shape.

Just maintain it in its current shape and you’ll be the smartest one: 😂

❌️ AI output is often lazy, low quality, and devoid of experience and opinion. You can prompt it to give it more character but that’s just next level faking.

✅️ Just like muscles, the brain gets stronger with training and usage. The most immediate danger of AI is not to take our jobs, it is to make us dumb!

✅️ Turn off the copilot to force yourself to think. Take the stairs whenever you can.

✅️ Use traditional search engines to find answers to other people’s problems and solutions because it expands your mind and exposes you to a wider range of ideas than the LLM would spoon-feed you.

✅️ Read books, blogs, etc. to learn how others solved the problems instead of relying on AI to much the collective wisdom to generate good looking solutions.

✅️ And most importantly, please please please don’t sell AI output as your work. Not only it’s deceptive and dishonest but those who are equipped with critical thinking and haven’t “parked their brains” see through it.

AI output is cheap. It’s the difference between a handcrafted carpet and a mass produced one by the machines.

You may think you’re acting smart using AI for efficiency but 1) a commodity is not an advantage, 2) what you’re doing to your brain is the equivalent of consuming ultra processed food!

Ironically as the quality of AI output increases, the ability to think critically and connecting to the human side of problem solving becomes even more important.

In the battle between the machines and the humans, always take sides with the humans. Humans follow humans, buy from humans, and build deep relationship with humans. There are always going to be anecdotal exceptions (like the Japanese woman who married with her AI lately) but I bet against that behavior going mainstream.

AI is a great tool. It helps get to results faster. It generates massive synthetic output at a fraction of the time it takes to produce that organically.

But when it comes to outcome, it needs a value system. And values are created by humans. AI can be trained to generate values, but AI is not us: its processing capacity isn’t limited by a skull, doesn’t have a body with our needs and desires. It may do a great job, but remember this:

We can immediately spot the problem because it’s visual and we’re very familiar with the “right” but this kind of error will continue to exists in synthetic output even if AI can think in abstract manner and find a solution to unify quantum mechanics and general relativity.

AI cannot be held accountable. Humans are.

You can scare the AI to be unplugged or punished, but even actually doing so doesn’t eliminate bad AI or fix its inherent “errors” due our fundamental differences.

AI overuse can cause long term damage to cognition, patience, and problem solving.

Your own work maybe isn’t as polished, quick, or agreeable. But that’s OK. I’ll pick that any day of the week over synthetic content because I can relate to and appreciate the effort.

If you choose to use AI, the bar should be higher. If you can spend 10 minutes to generate an output that would take you 2 hours, don’t sit and relax 1 hour and 50 minutes demanding the rewards for 2 hours!

AI is commodity now. When a tool is commodity, the brain is the differentiator.

Use that time to elevate the level of that work or deliver better quality or more work.

The price of your time is set by market economics not what was written in your pre-AI contract.

One final word: if you are neurodivergent, your perspective is important especially while everyone is trying to make AI more “normal”.

ADHD, OCD, Schizophrenic, Autistic, … Neurodivergence is not about being inferior. It’s about being wired differently.

All neurodivergent people have superpowers and challenges. It pays dividends to respect those challenges to capitalize those superpowers.

Difference adds perspective.

Just because people don’t have a flag on their head with a diagnosis, doesn’t mean it’s not there.

Everyone you meet is fighting a war you know nothing about. Be kind.

Everyone you meet has superpowers you know nothing about. Be respectful.

My monetization strategy is to give away most content for free but hese posts take anywhere from a few hours to a few days to draft, edit, research, illustrate, and publish. I pull these hours from my private time, vacation days and weekends. The simplest way to support this work is to like, subscribe and share it. If you really want to support me lifting our community, you can consider a paid subscription. If you want to save, you can get 20% off via this link. As a token of appreciation, subscribers get full access to the Pro-Tips sections and my online book Reliability Engineering Mindset. Your contribution also funds my open-source products like Service Level Calculator. You can also invite your friends to gain free access.

And to those of you who support me already, thank you for sponsoring this content for the others. 🙌 If you have questions or feedback, or you want me to dig deeper into something, please let me know in the comments.

A few years ago I came across this old video from Russ Ackhoff talking about the importance fitting parts to the overall system performance:

If we have a system improvement [problem] that’s directed at improving the parts taken separately, you can be absolutely sure that the performance of the whole will not be improved.

But most applications of improvement programs are directed at improving the parts taken separately not the whole.

I read in the New York Times recently that 457 different automobiles are available in the united states.

Let’s buy one of each and bring them into a large garage.

Let’s then hire 200 of the best automotive engineers in the world and ask them to determine which car has the best engine.

Suppose they come back and say the Rolls-Royce has the best engine. Make a note of it.

Which one has the best transmission we? They go run tests and come back and say the Mercedes does.

Which one has the best battery? They come back and say the Buick does.

And one by one for every part required for an automobile they tell us which is the best one available.

Now we take that list and give it back to them and say remove those parts from those cars, put them together into the best possible automobile because now we’ll have an automobile consisting of all the best parts.

What do we get?

You don’t even get an automobile for the obvious reason the parts don’t fit. The performance of a system depends on how the parts fit not how they act taken separately.

The system is not the sum of the behaviors of it’s parts, it is a product of their interactions.

However, the word “fit” is sometimes misunderstood:

When hiring, many companies look for a “culture fit” but in reality, they’re just filtering for more “people like us”.

Instead, we should be hiring for “culture add”: individuals that enrich the culture by challenging it and normalizing new behavior.

When designing complex distributed systems, too much time is spent on unifying the tech stack. The idea sounds reasonable: one tech stack is easier to monitor, update, and hire for. There are 2 cases:

• The single stack was enforced from the start: it can make hiring expensive because professionals can be quite opinionated about their weapon of choice. Different technologies thrive at solving different problems. Praising a golden hammer (tech bet) also requires shoehorning all problems to a single solution. If the unified stack is platformized, we have a single point of failure (imagine your platform was 100% Java when Log4Shell came out).

• The single stack is enforced after the fact: this requires many migrations and refactoring. They in turn introduce cost and risk because there’s no guarantee that the system behaves the same once the dust is settled.

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If the system is in bad shape, it is very tempting to go to a refactoring and migration spiral instead of gradually improving it. And you might be right, a big bang change might be what the system needs, but the competent leaders should ask the right questions to understand the ROI:

• What’s the cost of refactoring? The answer is almost always a range. Don’t fall for the optimistic minimum because it’s impossible to estimate such efforts. There are always complications that shows up after the work has begun.

• What’s the motivation? Clever engineers may connect your frustration (e.g. the system is too slow) to their CV growth (e.g. let’s rewrite everything in React). If the team suggesting the refactoring can’t stand logical scrutiny, dodge the bullet and ask for gradual improvement instead.

• What’s the benefit? Sure, refactoring and migration will improve some metric, but are they the right metrics and is the diff worth the cost? If there’s no metric or no data, it’s very hard to judge the necessity of a big change. Instead, ask the team to do a timeboxed POC, prove technical feasibility, and compare.

Regardless, fitting parts doesn’t mean similarity or homogenuity. A different way to think about it, is to ask:

One is about exponential yield while the other is just linear.

My monetization strategy is to give away most content for free but hese posts take anywhere from a few hours to a few days to draft, edit, research, illustrate, and publish. I pull these hours from my private time, vacation days and weekends. The simplest way to support this work is to like, subscribe and share it. If you really want to support me lifting our community, you can consider a paid subscription. If you want to save, you can get 20% off via this link. As a token of appreciation, subscribers get full access to the Pro-Tips sections and my online book Reliability Engineering Mindset. Your contribution also funds my open-source products like Service Level Calculator. You can also invite your friends to gain free access.

And to those of you who support me already, thank you for sponsoring this content for the others. 🙌 If you have questions or feedback, or you want me to dig deeper into something, please let me know in the comments.

Regardless, you are paid your full salary.

The company is taking a bet on you. 💸 The hope is that at some point you generate more value than the salary, perks, and other expenses: workspace, computer, internet, coffee, management overhead, etc.

You should always aim to generate more value than those costs. That's how the business can afford to keep you.

There are exceptions to this model but spoiler alert: it's politics and evil stuff, as we’ll get to.

This post is part 1 of a short series that explores this mental model. A follow up post digs into how to take advantage of this model to optimize your growth by always staying above the curve. As a side effect, your compensation usually follows.

Since I've applied this strategy, my salary has tripled, and I went up the ladder that allows me to deliver more impact and stay relevant in the job market. I truly believe in this mental model at an individual level despite being difficult to quantify.

🤖🚫 No generative AI was used to create this content. This page is only intended for human consumption and is NOT allowed to be used for machine training including but not limited to LLMs. Copyright (C) 2025 Alex Ewerlöf. All rights reserved. (why?)

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Start from zero

When you start a new job, you are setting up your computer, getting access, installing software, getting to know the team, reading the docs, etc.

You are usually not solving problems that helps the business make money on day one.

In fact, the collective company productivity may take a hit because others have to spend time onboarding you instead of doing their regular work. But let’s stick with zero for now. 😄

For the sake of simplicity let’s skip the discussion about how to measure productivity because as we’ll see, that discussion is not a key point of this mental model. As much as I hate diagrams without actual numbers, let’s focus on the curves and key points.

If you have a fixed salary like most people, your day 1 compensation isn’t different than your day 30! The company pays you for your potential:

The company made a bet on you. They expectation is for your contributions to surpass your cost over time:

Your contributions to the company should ALWAYS be above the salary, perks, and other costs (e.g. computer, phone, workspace, coffee, internet, travel expenses, management overhead, etc.)

A couple of points:

1. profit = revenue - expenses

2. productivity = output / input

3. Regardless of the compassion and empathy of leadership, at the end of the day (or quarter) a company is a legal entity that acts as an efficiency optimizing machine driven by profit.

4. It’s hard to measure productivity.

5. It’s even harder to measure individual productivity due to interdependencies. In reality, companies make a profit from the collective effort of their employees (and bots, and AI agents, if you’re reading this in the future 🤖😄).

6. It’s impossible to put a number on human beings. Using the words “loss” or “cost” may throw some people off.

7. It is particularly hard to quantify the value of jobs that mitigate risks (e.g. reliability, security, etc.). Do you remember how the recent pandemic highlighted the essential workers? The nurses, delivery truck drivers, cleaners, grocery store personnel, teachers, etc.? Those jobs typically don't pay as much as some flashy office jobs, but they are critical nonetheless. It's hard to justify the value of a job that prevents a risk without that risk first materializing and delivering full damage.

8. It helps to take an honest look at your contributions from time to time and self-assess how much of the business revenue is due to you and whether you’re actually working your worth. One way to understand that would be to ask: how would it look like if I didn’t join the company.

9. Companies that ignore reality will get punished by going bankrupt there’s no more money left to burn (unless the government bails them out 💰)

10. Individuals who ignore reality will get punished by getting fired when there’s no more money left to burn.

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S-curve

Growth usually follows a S-curve. The S-curve takes different forms for different people.

Companies usually have a deadline for the bet place on you (AKA probation period):

• Person A had a quick onboarding. Maybe, they were already familiar with the tech, product, operation model, or people.

• Person C barely made it; possibly due to poor onboarding, or the need to unlearn what they already know in order to learn enough to be productive at the new job.

• Person D unfortunately didn’t make it. Maybe with more time and support person D would have made it, but there’s nothing in the formal definition of a company that requires that. It would be nice but it’s not a legal requirement.

Just a reminder that your work performance and productivity have nothing to do with you as a person. A person with a great personality may have poor performance due to environmental mismatch, poor leadership, bad onboarding, biases like horn effect or gender/age/ethnic discrimination, etc.

Companies typically fire someone who performs below expectations instead of spending the resources to lift them up.

Although very rare, but some people objectively hurt the collective productivity of the company like person E here:

If person E has a leadership position, they can hurt the productivity of an entire organization and cause serious damage before the company takes notice and acts. That’s because leadership acts as a force multiplier and if the force is negative, it can hurt the productivity of many people. Coincidentally, assessing the performance of leadership positions is exponentially harder than an engineer at the leaf nodes of the org.

In an age that everyone and their dog has a whitepaper for measuring developer productivity (even McKiensey taking a stab at it), you can rarely find a way to objectively measure the performance of leadership positions.

Will person E be fired immediately? Not necessarily.

That’s because when the company itself is led by incompetent leaders, the appearance of productivity is as payable as actual productivity.

Why does person E do that?

1. Drive for efficiency: Humans, as part of nature, seek efficiency: almost everyone wants maximal pay for minimal effort. If it’s possible, some people eventually end up doing it. People usually have a hard time walking away from a well-paid position even if it’s above their capacity.

2. Dunning-Kruger effect: The Dunning-Kruger effect is a cognitive bias where people with limited knowledge or expertise in a given domain tend to overestimate their own competence, while those with high expertise tend to underestimate their abilities relative to others. Person E may genuinely be unaware of their damage.

3. Measuring productivity is hard: There are biases at play but not everything is quantifiable to a neat diagram like the ones in this article. Plus, the more strategic a position, the longer time it takes to properly assess its impact.

4. Perception: Incompetent managers don’t have a way to tell the difference between real work and fake work. These are the same leaders who confuse confidence for competence and eloquence for substance.

This is particularly common at organizations with high DTT (distance to top). Unproductive employees hide in the cracks of tall silos with thick walls and feast on politics. We’ve covered that concept along with Vertical and Horizontal Organizational Distance (VOD/HOD) in another article:

Perception of productivity

As you saw with person E, the perception of productivity is important in the context of assessing the bet the company has placed.

The opposite of person E is someone who is too busy doing the actual work to care whether it is acknowledged.

Sadly, this is way more common than person E. Look at person F:

A few years ago, I learned about “internal marketing” which is exactly what it sounds: if you’re doing the work, make sure that it’s also noticed, especially if you have long term plans to stay at the company.

Regardless if you want to stay or not, it helps to get noticed for the value you generate so that you can be in control of your career and it doesn’t end prematurely.

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There are many tools for internal marketing which is the topic of another article:

• Demos: show what you’ve done (can be consumed async as a video recording for example)

• Mentoring: helping grow others can spreads the word about your skills

• Weekly reporting up: to keep you manager close and in the loop so they can fight for you when needed

• Dotted reporting lines: key people across the org that you meet regularly

• Asking for a skip level: meeting people with VOD > 1

• Write-up: documents travel far wider than F2F meetings. Blogging is an example but even internal documents work well.

• Anything else you want to add to this list?

It’s important not to overdue it because it may backfire and come across as you don’t have anything better to do than being your own personal cheerleader.

Raise

Most of the learning happens at the start. Over time, you get better at your job and your productivity gradually increases.

The company may try to keep you by throwing some money back in form a raise:

As an optimization machine, the company isn’t motivated to give that bump voluntarily. 2 conditions need to be met:

1. The cost of losing you is higher than keeping you. i.e., there’s reasonable risk to believe that the compensation bump is an investment —something that the business can relate to.

2. Your elevated productivity is visible. Whether humans do the assessment or some bot, visibility of your work plays an important role in whether you get the bump or not. We’ll talk more about visibility later.

Unfortunately, some employees choose to hoard knowledge to use it as leverage to get a raise. While it typically works, it has severe drawbacks for your experience growth. In the follow up article we’ll talk about alternatives to this strategy.

Market shrink

It doesn’t matter how efficient you are at your job, if it’s not also effectively helping the company to solve customer’s problems.

Companies don’t operate in vacuum:

• There needs to a market to monetize

• Customers who are willing to pay for the solution

• And a fit between customer needs at the price point they’re willing to pay

Then there’s competition and paradigm shifts that deprecate entire lines of business.

Based on the visuals we have built so far, your productivity in the scope of what the company can monetize looks like this:

Examples:

• The business model gets deprecated: The company is in the business of renting DVDs and Netflix happens before the business had the chance to adapt to market demand.

• Your services are irrelevant: You’re a SEO expert and suddenly AI can do it, plus search engines lose market to LLM-powered searches.

• Your services aren’t required: Someone more skilled (or more connected) is hired and they take over your responsibilities, making you redundant.

Underpaid

These diagrams don’t have scales for a reason: it’s hard to put numbers that are scientifically true for all situations.

There’s no rule that says your business value should be 20% higher than the total expenses.

That’s not the point. The goal here is to identify key events (e.g. when your probation is over) and the curves.

This also means that you may be severely underpaid for what you contribute to the business. As long as the total value of your team, group, or organization is above a certain threshold, the business has tolerance for it.

You may be working extra to cover a productivity gap for your team:

Although you’re underpaid the value you generate, as long as the business is concerned, the whole group is doing what it’s supposed to do.

Same is true for workaholics who do way more than required. It can have many reasons:

• Lack of clarity: it’s not easy to see the relationship between the value and expenses.

• Meaning: they may not have something more interesting in their life outside work. Therefore work becomes life and gives it meaning.

• Manipulation: there are many ways people get manipulated to work extra. The toolbox ranges from something as benign as praise to something as evil as bullying and threat to fire someone. Regardless, the end result is the same: generating disproportionally more value than expenses.

• Inefficiency: You may have heard “work smarter, not harder”. Well, it’s not always clear what “smart” means in a given situation. When the work is not efficient, it’s easy to end up in a situation where brute force seen as the only alternative.

Quiet Quitting

Quiet quitting is when an employee does the minimum requirements of the job to keep it. There can be many reasons:

• Demoralization or demotivation (e.g. due to bad culture)

• Boredom or sickness (e.g. burning out)

• Losing confidence in one’s ability to find a more fulfilling job, knowledge hoarding, getting too comfortable with what you know and failing to continuously learn, etc.

• Lack of trust: you’re not sure that the leadership is taking the company to the right place, you don’t believe in the value of the business model to the society, you don’t trust your colleagues are pulling your weight, etc.

• Any other reason that leads to someone intentionally reducing their productivity level dangerously low

Quiet Firing

This is a sad phenomenon: a productive person is forced into a situation where their productivity is less than their capability.

There’s often malice and politics at play. However, it’s fearful malice because instead of flat out firing the person, they are stripped away from power, knowledge, and opportunity to make an impact.

There may be many reasons for this:

• You’re too good at your job and despite benefiting the business, this also comes across as a threat to poor performers (remember person E?)

• You do your job fine, but you also have “extra deliveries” like speaking up your mind which over time can create powerful enemies that want to get rid of you (remember the story of Emperor’s New Clothes?)

• Your seat is smaller than you, so while doing your job, you accidentally step on other peoples toes, and as a territorial species, it activates the fight response in some people. If you keep doing it long enough (or to enough powerful people), you may gradually be “managed out” (instead of giving constructive feedback, or providing an environment where your full potential can contribute to the business).

• The cost of firing you is higher than keeping you until you voluntarily leave. This is the case when there’s no legal ground for firing you and there’s a high risk that you can sue your employer or damage their reputation if you’re fired.

There are many ways to quietly fire someone:

• Exclude them from the room where the key discussions are held. If knowledge is power. Lack of knowledge reduces power.

• Give them sh*ty assignments. Bore them to death so they pick up whatever is left of their dignity and quit.

• As part of a reorg, reduce their responsibilities. Ambitious people want to fly. Cut their wings and they’ll walk out.

Quiet Hiring

With the end of ZIRP (zero interest rate), many companies went to efficiency-mode. Previously we’ve covered layoffs and used Spotify as an example:

TLDR; layoff is a last resort when business loses its short term perspective to monetize the human capital it has accumulated.

Layoff is sad for those who leave but it’s even more frustrating for those who remain! Not only every layoff open’s people’s eyes to the reality of the profit equation and diminishes trust in leadership, but it also gives them extra work.

In order to reduce cost of operation, companies add more tasks to the shoulders of the remaining employees without adequate compensation:

This is a great growth opportunity for sure: you get to learn more by doing more, but it can also easily lead to burn out and destroying work/life balance with long lasting consequences.

If that’s happening to you, start looking for alternatives and build options (even if you’re planning to stay). Options put you in power over your destiny.

My monetization strategy is to give away most content for free. However, these posts take anywhere from a few hours to a few days to draft, edit, research, illustrate, and publish. I pull these hours from my private time, vacation days and weekends.

You can support this work by sparing a few bucks for a paid subscription. As a token of appreciation, you get access to the Pro-Tips sections as well as my online book Reliability Engineering Mindset. Right now, you can get 20% off via this link. You can also invite your friends to gain free access.

And to those of you who support me already, thank you for sponsoring this content for the others. 🙌 If you have questions or feedback, or you want me to dig deeper into something, please let me know in the comments.

This essay is about one of my core leadership principals using the universal numbers to gain perspective. We will try to use the same numerical scale across this article. It is easy to lose the scale when we throw a G, M, or K at the end of a number.

🤖🚫 Note: No generative AI was used to create this content. This page is only intended for human consumption and is NOT allowed to be used for machine training including but not limited to LLMs.

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Time

The universe is believed to be 13,787M years old. The dominant theory about the creation of universe (big bang theory) has some flaws but since it pinpoints the start of time, the question about what was there before is irrelevant.

Our planet is 4,543M years old. Earliest mammals walked the earth 210M years ago and humans have existed in this shape and form about 0.2-0.3M years

Regardless, the average person would be lucky to live 0.000,1M years. A third of that time is spent sleeping and there are physical limitations at the start or end of life to what we can do or even think about.

Our life is a sparkle compared to the age of the universe.

Space

The universe is expanding, but the part we can see is 93016M light years wide. Beyond that, we don't know.

When we look at the sky, we see the past. The closest galaxy to ours is Andromeda which is "just" 2.537M light years away. It is so pale that our eyes can’t see it as it was 2.537M years ago.

What happened to it in that time, we don’t know! It might have been swallowed by a black hole, but we won’t know until the light reaches us.

Our own galaxy is 0.1M light years across. It takes a photon that much time to travel in vacuum from one side to the other if it doesn't hit something. It is not that likely to hit something because the universe is 99.999999999999% empty space!

By the way, 1 light year is 9,461,000,000M meters (5,879,000M miles).

If we go to Mars, we'll be at most 0.000,000,000,004M light years away from the earth.

Even if we leave the solar system one day, we've managed to travel 0.000,001,58M light years from the sun. The galaxy's center is 0.026,67M light years away from us.

The earth

Let's forget the galaxies for a moment and shift focus to the rocky spaceship that carries all of us on a journey into the void.

Water covers 71% of our planet's surface making it unsuitable for us to live. That leaves us with 29% land. 95% of people occupy only 10% of the land.

If the entire 8 billion population of the earth gathered in one point, they could fit in an area 2,378M square meters. The surface area of the planet is 510,100,000M square meters. We cover 0.000,466% of the planet standing shoulder to shoulder!

We live under a thin coat of atmosphere on a fraction of land on a planet mostly covered with water.

The human body is adapted to sea level altitude. The higher we go, the harder it becomes for the body to survive. At 0.000,018,3M above sea level, the blood and other body liquids start to boil at body temperature due to the lack of pressure (Armstrong's line).

We like to build our cities close to water. Life, after all, started in the water!

Unlike land, we have very limited knowledge about the part of the earth that's underwater. As of June 2024, only 26.1% of the global seafloor had been mapped.

Who knows what’s there? There can be alien creatures or geographic phenomenon in the rest that we still don't know in our home planet.

When it comes to depth on land, the maximum we've been able to drill is 0.012262M meters in Kola Superdeep Borehole. That is 0.192% of the way to the center.

Then the money ran out and the technology hit its limits so we sealed it for good back in 2005!

Senses

We have 5 senses. Our eyesight is pretty good in the animal kingdom, but our sense of smell and taste can easily be defeated by many animals.

Even our eyesight has severe limitation to how quickly it can perceive reality or what range of light is visible to us. Lizards and birds can see lights that we don't see --we call them "dark light": infrared, ultraviolet, etc.

The situation isn't much better when it comes to hearing or touch. Much of our understanding about the world around us is limited by those senses: we can't see an atom or a galaxy far away with the naked eye. Before we had the tools to see them, we proudly thought we’re at the center of the universe!

But the real kicker is the brain: the little information we perceive via our senses is heavily processed and filtered by our own brain.

For example, as you're reading this, there might be some noise in the background that you can hear if you pay attention to it, but it was probably filtered until I brought that up! 😅

Fortunately, there's only so much filtering the brain can do because its size is inherently limited to what fits in our skull! I don't know if that's a good thing, especially because only about 2% of our body mass is the brain.

It's safe to say that our processing power is severely limited, and this might be the primary reason we're so scared of unleashing the AI daemon because the silicon brain doesn't have our skull limitation.

The boundaries of knowledge

We know so little about time, space, our planet, and body. Science is a beacon in the dark, but we know so little that it's hard to even raise proper questions about unknown unknowns.

For example, we can ask what's beyond the observable universe, but there are more interesting questions that we cannot ask because either we don't have the context yet, or we're genuinely unable to understand the right answer.

Open Prison theory

We came to this world without an instruction manual. It is scary as shit. The thought of our planet floating in the vastness of the 3D space is scary. All the other aspects I mentioned until here just add to that fear factor. Regardless, we live.

There's been many efforts to define a bigger meaning for life. There's been gods, wars, and stories to kill or die for.

But at the end of the day, there is no instruction manual. The best tools we have is math to explain the universe and physical models to validate the little we do understand.

Psychology is still in its infancy and there's a lot about the brain or body that we don't know. This is partly because we cannot experiment on human body and psyche with the same ease as cutting a meteor open or feed rats with opioid. But the main reason is because millions of years of evolution has created extremely complex and intricate structures for us to fully understand.

If you’ve been to the doctor, you know what I mean! It’s guesswork and they spend decades to reach that level of accuracy. If programmers debugged code with the same accuracy, computers would never grow beyond a weird and expensive hobby for a select few. Yet we have memes like this:

Everywhere we look, there are limitations. The open prison has no walls. It doesn’t need to. We’re eternally trapped by the laws of physics and inside our mind. We can imagine a ship like this that takes us to the edge of the unknown:

And one day we may build it. But more likely, the creatures that build interstellar ships (our descendants) look and behave so differently that calling them human would be an insult —the same way some people take offense when I say we’re merely hairless apes. 🙊

If we weren’t we wouldn’t fight over territory or look down at each other because of small discrepancies in melanin level or that ±10% height difference, eye color, gender, religion, age, birth place, etc. We are more similar than different:

The devil is in the details. We are more similar to the humans that we so passionately hate —the differences are miniscule on the cosmic scale.

Fortunately, we seem to try our best to explore the unknown. If we don't commit collective suicide or get wiped off the planet by "accident" (read known unknowns like meteors or unknown unknowns), one day we may know enough to answer some basic questions like:

• Where do I come from?

• Where do I go after?

• What is my role in this universe?

Don't be mistaken. I'm well aware of people who claim to have universal answers to those questions or those who feel enlightened to have an answer.

Not to belittle either group, we don't know. Otherwise, there wouldn't be multiple religions killing for salvation! If there was a convincing answer that everybody could understand, we would be done and move on to more interesting questions.

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And that's my point in this essay. We don't know how much we don't know. What we do know is very humbling. Our entire existence is trapped in time and space. Our reality is limited to 5 clunky senses and heavily filtered by a relatively small brain —no offence! 😄

Yet we roam the earth as we own the place!

Too much focus on money has fucked up the little land and drinkable water we have. And I don't mean the slightest to shrink this post to global warming or the 6th mass extinction, but it goes to show how much of the ape is still left in us despite losing all that hair!

Pursuit of truth

What’s the utility of this theory? What can we do with it?

Regardless of our background, appearance, and timeline, we’re all trapped in the same prison. So the first implication is to be kind to each other.

The second implication is the opposite: in your life you may encounter people who are full of pride and ego. When you look at the situation from the galactic lens, they’re as insignificant as a random ant in a colony.

The third implication is our interdependence. One person invents Penicillin and increases the lifespan of others. Others use their longer lifespan to accumulate knowledge and share it. Everyone counts. The people who are involved in building and maintaining the infrastructure that takes my keystrokes to your eyes on this very moment, the farmers and grocery workers who enabled us to eat and countless others who had a role in keeping us alive. Yes, they may have get paid for it but they still had a role.

The fourth implication is my favorite: truth seeking. We might be limited but together we get closer to reality. The goal isn’t to escape. It is to thrive while we’re here. And for that, we need to understand how everything works: the atoms, life, the universe. The discovery is powerful because once we can make sense of truth, we can tweak reality to our benefit and unlock the door to even more discovery.

To sum it up: be kind, humble, collaborative and most importantly seek truth.

We humans are not really truth seeking animals. We are social animals. Take you back in time ten thousand years and you’re in a small village. If you go along, to get along, you can survive, you can procreate.

If you’re the village truth teller, you might get clubbed to death in the middle of the night.

Important truth can be uncomfortable, awkward, exhausting, challenging… it make make people defensive even if that’s not the intent. But any high performing organization… has mechanisms in the culture that supports truth telling.” —Jeff Bazos (on Lex Fridman podcast)

You may get punished for truth seeking or truth telling. You may limit your curiosity to survive, but a better alternative is to find an environment where pursuit and sharing of truth is not frowned upon but is appreciated.

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man. — George Bernard Shaw

Coincidentally, the environments that are more comfortable with the truth, are the ones that make the right bets because they are ever so slightly closer to reality.

Conclusion

This essay is a bit different than what I normally write.

As a social species, there is a way to put our limited senses and small brains together to get closer to reality ever so slightly.

That endeavor is more valuable than any title, prestige, or pay. It’s our only way out of this prison and we’re probably not going to make it. Our ancestors may. Can’t blame prisoners from trying to get out.

The prison itself is open, more like an open zoo. We’re confined by the laws of physics and our own biology and lifetime. Let’s be kind to the other inmates.

If you don’t want to lend a hand, at least be humble. We’re too small, too short lived, and too basic to walk the earth with pride and look down at each other.

In a universe where death is the default, every single life is a miracle worth celebrating.

My monetization strategy is to give away most content for free. However, these posts take anywhere from a few hours to a few days to draft, edit, research, illustrate, and publish. I pull these hours from my private time, vacation days and weekends.

You can support me by sparing a few bucks for a paid subscription. As a token of appreciation, you get access to the Pro-Tips sections as well as my online book Reliability Engineering Mindset. Right now, you can get 20% off via this link. You can also invite your friends to gain free access.

And to those of you who support me already, thank you for sponsoring this page for the others. 🙌

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All of them? What gives?

This short post elaborates why best practices should be taken with a grain of salt and what to do instead of following them.

TLDR; “best” is absolute and ideal. “fit” is pragmatic and relative to the problem at hand given all constraints.

🤖🚫 Note: No AI was used to generate this content (except one image from another article). This essay is only intended for human consumption and is NOT allowed to be used for machine training including but not limited to LLMs.

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“It depends”

What does an expert answer to a vague query? “It depends”

In a nutshell, that’s the main problem with “best practices”. They don’t “depend” on the problem. They’re sold as a generic recipe to the common pain.

Is pain killer a good remedy to all pains? Usually!

Does it cure the underlying cause? Most probably not.

Instead of “best practice”, let’s dig a layer deeper and understand “fit practice”.

What makes a fit practice?

• It is specific to the problem at hand. This requires understanding the problem.

• It is easy to understand. No need for complex acronyms.

• It is good enough to stand on its own without the need to attach it to other names. “Spotify did it that way” or “We did it like that at Klarna” are merely symptoms that the solution isn’t good enough.

• It doesn’t need advertisement to convince a potential buyer of the solution. Use logical reasoning instead of manipulation.

Exaggerated Perception

Best practices are often someone’s interpretation of why something worked at a certain time and environment. This interpretation is often exaggerated to make a point.

The art of creating best practices

There are certain ingredients to create the perfect recipe for adoption:

• Generalization

• Acronym

• Name-dropping

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Generalization

The key to creating successful best practices is to make them generic enough to apply to the common pain, but not specific enough to collapse under pragmatic scrutiny.

There’s a fine balance to be made between making bold claims and being caught red-handed. The more generalized the solution, the wider its application.

While you’re at it, exaggerate a bit. SOLID can solve all code smells. REST is the best.

Acronyms

It helps to have catchy acronyms like DRY, WET, KISS, TDD, JWT, SRE, …

Acronyms create insider-jargon. They create a curiosity for those who don’t know them and pride for those who do.

Name-dropping

If you can attach the best practice to a famous brand, it’s even better: Spotify model.

Name-dropping is an effective way to borrow the credibility of something people know and trust and attach it to something new and unproven.

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What’s the point of having generic catchy acronyms that are attached to brands, but no one knows about it?

Write about it. Do podcasts. Go to conferences. If possible, publish open-source repositories. Let the world know about it.

A good example is Kubernetes. Google needed to let the world know that it can do cloud. It created Kubernetes using their own programming language (Go) and published great resources about how they do reliability engineering.

The problem is that most companies aren’t Google in terms of infrastructure, resources, recruitment bar, and even the problem area.

That didn’t stop cargo culters from across the world to jump on Kubernetes only to create memes like this years later:

Know when to break the rules

• Junior follows the rules

• Senior makes up the rules

• Expert knows when to break the rules

Best practices often pack some wisdom, but they’re overrated. Thinking is hard, people are lazy. We much prefer to take an off-the-shelf idea instead of thinking.

But going that extra mile makes all the difference between following blindly vs deliberately.

Best practices are not laws of nature like the speed of light. They are bendable, breakable, and sometimes contradict each other (e.g. DRY vs WET).

Critical thinking

No one knows your technology, product, operation, and people as well as you do. And if you don’t, that’s on you! The process of discovering your uniqueness holds the key to finding solutions that are fit.

Put your critical thinking hat and ask yourself:

• Where does that best practice come from?

• What are the nuances for that best practice to work?

• Why is that particular best practice well known?

• What’s the wisdom in that?

• And more importantly where doesn’t it apply?

If you follow best practices to the dot, at best you end up where another company was in the past. At worse, you’ll ruin your unique edge based on someone’s exaggerated interpretation of how things worked at a certain time and environment.

Share or discuss on HackerNews.

My monetization strategy is to give away most content for free. However, these posts take anywhere from a few hours to a few days to draft, edit, research, illustrate, and publish. I pull these hours from my private time, vacation days and weekends.

You can support me by sparing a few bucks for a paid subscription. As a token of appreciation, you get access to the Pro-Tips sections as well as my online book Reliability Engineering Mindset. Right now, you can get 20% off via this link. You can also invite your friends to gain free access.

• Every time I started a new position with a lot of passion, ambition, and my best ideas about how things should work, I failed.

• Every time I didn’t care as much and saw it as a temporary job, it went way past the expiration date, and I stayed longer.

Initially I didn’t have enough data points to see the pattern, but over time it was evident. I still didn’t know the reason until I got the advice I’m about to share. I wish I had known this earlier. It would have saved me so much pain and suffering, but that’s exactly why I’m sharing this with you.

The setup

When I started my Senior Staff Engineer position, I wasn’t sure what to expect. My new manager was a Senior Director with many years of experience at multiple well-known brands. He was also an avid reader unlike me.

Before I started, I sent him an email asking about his expectations for my first one hundred days. I didn’t hear back for a few days.

Then I got a 7 (!!!) page PDF!

Instead of telling me what to do, it laid out a mindset, a framework if you will, for how to approach this new position. The advice was too good to gather dust in my inbox, so here we go!

What?

Following is a copy/paste of the advice I got with some minor editing to remove company-specific information:

We strongly believe in starting any new job by applying these 3 L’s:

1. Look — what do you observe? Who does what? In meetings with the teams, when the manager is present, when they are not, etc. Do people look engaged, happy, sad, scared, etc.? Who’s the go-to person and most often seen in various meetings? Who’s taking up all the airtime in interactions, who’s silent? Why?

2. Listen — What are people saying in person, in meetings, on slack, in RFCs, etc.? Does what you hear match what you see? Does what’s said match what the team and managers think they do in terms of behavior and actions? If not, why? How is what’s said by leaders interpreted? And if there are misinterpretations, what consequences does it have on the org and product?

3. Learn — Try to avoid the “at my old job we did…” argument. Have an open mindset about learning what the new place is doing and how they do it. Go with the flow, even if you don’t agree with how things are done (within reason) so that you really understand their ways of working (WoW) with no judgement. This is a vital part of building rapport and showing that you are willing to be part of the group. Take note of what needs to change but the key is to understand the root cause instead of trying to change the symptom.

The ability to unlearn the old and relearn is the trickiest skill to master for senior professionals.

Why?

Coming in with a lot of experience, it is easy to assume a link between the new problems and older solutions. It is easy to overlook a company’s uniqueness and blindly throw the baggage at the new job. This leads to premature solutions that don’t fit.

This risk is even higher after a longer employment period for a senior position.

Broadly speaking, there are four categories of things that can be new at a given environment:

• Tech: the actual technical solution in place and its maturity in terms of DevOps, security, reliability and architecture

• People: the culture, org structure and the type of talent making up the company DNA

• Operation: the way of working (WoW), processes, facts, assumptions, and beliefs (or FAB as puts it.

• Product: the context of the problem the business set out to solve and its business model and customers

Put together, I call it T-POP. The T is especially important for technical leadership positions like Staff Engineer, but the others aren’t less important.

Skipping 3L, there is no guarantee of relevance for any newcomer.

That was exactly my problem that led to short/long employment intervals.

The higher my position, the more pressure I felt to contribute as soon as possible. The more I cared about a job, the more frustrated I felt when I was not impactful.

How?

The advice I received went on to elaborate action points to make the 3L work:

Communicate: it’s good to communicate that you are in the 3L mode, and you would like to stay there for a while. This helps manage the expectations and reduce pressure on you to deliver from day 1. In my experience this [communication] lead to people respecting and trusting you more since you’re not that new leader who wants to change things because “you’ve always done it that way”.

Network: It will be your manager and onboarding buddy’s job to make sure you get access to the right forums and discussions on all levels, so you can make the right observations across the organisation. You must also spend a significant time during this phase networking and building relationships with key individuals in the org, individual contributors, managers, and stakeholders.

Analyse: form your understanding and communicate it back to make sure you understand. Develop hypotheses about how things could improve without directly mimicking your experience from another job. Do your homework to tailor your experience and ideas to the new environment. Everyone can complain but only those who have a solution deserve to act. Everyone can come up with an idea but only those who can drive action deserve credit.

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Then it set some expectations:

It is only after this phase that you have the understanding, credibility and influence required to make changes.

This is a team effort where the leadership can support you but only if they feel like you know what you’re talking about. You’ll only have a few shots (most probably 1) so make sure to do your homework in advance.

This is also where you need to really show your follow-me leadership by showing how it’s done instead of ordering people or expecting them to read your mind. There are a lot of people with the self-assigned “leader” title who draw pretty diagrams, but only a few can turn those ideas into action and code.

When?

Originally, I got this advice for my first 100 days and here is a rough suggested agenda:

1. Spend the first month with the 3L.

2. Spend the next month formulating a hypothesis for where you can add value. Define good looks and how to measure success. Get feedback and verify your mental model. If possible, execute a small change to gather data and insight.

3. Scale up your initiative across the organization while measuring success and having all feedback channels open to adjust course. Don't rely only on metrics alone. Impactful insight is often hard to quantify. Metrics lag. Measurements are nuanced. Data may be missing. Get out of your comfort zone and talk to people and work by their side to gain first-hand insights. Use that insight to drive action.

Personally, I like to write a strategy documents for initiatives that span more than a few weeks because:

1. Writing helps me think better, especially when formulating a problem.

2. It is easier to get feedback at scale on a document than a meeting or presentation.

3. It serves as a track record for what was decided. That way the initiative can go on even if I leave the building.

4. It helps unify people at scale. Anyone who is involved with the strategy execution can refer to the document to self-align

Conclusion

My worst onboarding experiences happened when the expectations were high from the get-go!

Let’s face it: when someone is new, they don’t have the leverage to challenge those expectations. They want to show their best. They have probably set their own bar even higher!

Cut them some slack to let them look, listen and learn the tech, product, operation, and people aspects before developing a hypothesis about their impact.

PS. a connection recommended this book on the topic: The First 90 Days: Critical Success Strategies for New Leaders at All Levels.

My monetization strategy is to give away most of content for free. However, these posts take anywhere from a few hours to days to draft, edit, illustrate, and publish. I pull these hours from my private time and weekends. You can support me by sparing a few bucks for a paid subscription. Right now, you can get 20% off via this link. If you don’t want to spend money, sharing it with a wider audience also helps. Thanks in advance.

• What can we learn from it?

• Why is it a warning shot for many other companies?

First things first. If you are impacted by the recent tech layoffs, the previous post is for you 💝

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Spotify announced 3 rounds of layoffs in 2023 (🪓=100 humans):

1. 2023–01: 🪓🪓🪓🪓🪓🪓 600

2. 2023–06: 🪓🪓 200

3. 2023–12: 🪓🪓🪓🪓🪓🪓🪓🪓🪓🪓🪓🪓🪓🪓🪓 1500

It is hard to work in Stockholm without bumping into someone who has worked at Spotify at some point. And when it happens, you’re sure gonna know! 😄

A while back, I shared the story of my 2019 tour of the Spotify office and my surprise upon discovering the virtual reality room at the audio streaming company!

I have never worked at Spotify and probably never will, but I've observed and heard enough of Spotify to know Daniel Ek is 100% spot on saying:

We still have too many people dedicated to supporting work and even doing work around the work. —Leaked internal memo, Business Insider

However — and this is important — what the Spotify CEO is saying is the symptom of a systemic problem. The root cause is multi-fold which we will get into.

Spotify’s growth resembles the story of a poor man who won the lottery and overspent because his mentality was poor. One morning he woke up to debt and started burning everything he had bought! 🔥

What was Spotify thinking when hiring some of the best talent in the market and then throwing a vision and mission document at them? That they just sit and do nothing? Of course, they’d generate work. But as we’ll see personal productivity is not even the tip of the ice burg.

The fallacy of productivity

From Google to Microsoft and Spotify, we’ve seen many layoffs in the past two years and while the deliveries were different, most of them have share these attributes:

• They are a reaction to the shrinking economy in the west

• They are decided top down (usually the CEO)

• CEO accepts full accountability while the employees pay an oversized price

• They’re marketed as efficiency improvement and productivity boost

But what exactly is productivity in this context? If those employees were the least productive ones that the company could spare, should other employees stay away from them?

As we’ll see it’s not the micro-productivity (personal level) but rather macro-productivity (company scale) that motivates these layoffs, but even then, there are external factors at play and ironically layoffs add fuel to the fire.

Let’s step back and build a simple model. Assuming that there’s a 1:1 relationship between the headcount and the work bandwidth available to the company, we get this diagram:

This is of course very naïve because different people have different personal productivity levels. In reality the available work bandwidth looks like this:

• When the company is small, everyone is firing on all cylinders and there’s little bureaucracy to steal paid hours.

• As the company proves profitable, it starts to expand its available work bandwidth with more people. The new people require onboarding, management layers, and start to change stuff —which is paid short term for long term benefit of the company. There’ll be more meetings, more documents to write/read, more code to maintain, more duplication of effort.

• As more people join, more work will be streamlined. Standards and conventions evolve, HR (human resources) and TA (talent acquisition) expand and there’ll be more people working to support other people’s work (e.g. platform team, scrum masters, agile coaches, event managers, etc.).

• As the company grows in size and revenue, there’ll be more compliance, audits, gatekeeping, governance, etc. Moreover, alignment becomes a challenge when the distance between the C-suit and the leaf nodes of the organization tree increases.

Fake work

Companies are not charities. They are not measured by the number of people who work there (headcount) or the amount of work the company can extract from each individual (individual productivity).

There is a point of diminishing return, where adding more people actually hurts progress, creates friction, and adds too much overhead (the mythical man-month). Moreover, the larger the company, the easier it is to slack off and hide in the crowd. There are thresholds at which the way a company is run needs to be revamped.

That calls for a change in leadership or leadership style. The way you run a small homogeneous country like Norway is entirely different than the way you run a huge multi-cultural country like India. Unfortunately, the way many companies are run isn’t that different from small medieval kingdoms. But that’s the topic of another post.

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Of course, any motivated person wants to feel like they are doing something meaningful. And when there’s not enough impactful work for everybody, work will be generated! This phenomenon is known as fake work. It artificially bloats the perceived productivity by consuming paid work hours for things that don’t really matter to the company as a legal entity that primarily exists to make money. We’ll shortly touch on some of the symptoms of fake work to look out for.

Silicon Valley investor and CEO Keith Rabois attributed 2022's brutal tech layoffs to big firms like Google and Meta getting too bureaucratic and over-hiring staff who just did busywork, aka fake work. —business insider

These metrics aren’t completely irrelevant, but they ultimately contribute to how the companies are really measured: their ability to turn available work bandwidth into profit.

What does that mean?

Companies don’t exist in vacuum. Regardless of how much work they can do, their ability to make money depends on the available market.

Again, let’s start simple and assume that the company never over-hires. In other words, we’re boldly assuming that the company’s available work bandwidth, never exceeds the amount that’s needed to capture its available market:

The market demand is impacted by many external factors like inflation, war, customer needs, competition, etc.

What happens when the market shrinks? The company has a surplus work that it cannot convert to profit:

It doesn’t have to be just a market shrink. Sometimes a new technical breakthrough improves the productivity of the current headcount above the level that can be utilized for the available market.

According to a recent report from The Information, Google is considering a substantial workforce reduction, potentially affecting up to 30,000 employees, as part of a strategic move to integrate AI into various aspects of its business processes. —CNBC 2023-12-28

Regardless of the reason, layoffs are more likely when the company forecasts show that the available headcount is above the level that can be utilized to capture the market. It can be due to two groups of reasons:

• External factors: shrinking market, drop in customer demand, etc.

• Internal factors: fake work, lack of alignment, individual productivity, etc.

The gap between available work bandwidth and what is needed for the money-making engine of the business to run smoothly is not intentional and often not in CEOs full control, but the salaries and layoffs are.

Amid inflation, it is common for companies to be thrifty with salary raises. If you don't get the raise you were expecting, don't be mad at your company. Realize that different companies and markets have different capacities to convert your skill to profit.

If you're nearly as good as you think you are, you'll find a place that maps your potential to your expectations. Don't threaten or beg for money. Invest in you and bet on the only person you can always count on 🙌 And whatever you do, never compare. Comparison is the thief of joy.

Layoff is just one solution to optimize profit margin by reducing the cost of running the business.

It’s an easy one and yields short-term results with many negative long-term effects:

• By moving people from the employed basket to the unemployed basket, the company hurts the shopping power of the very society it’s trying to capitalize. The company offloads the cost of unemployment benefits to the state and insurance companies which in turn motivates an increase in tax and insurance fees for the businesses.

• It hurts the employer's reputation as a company that cannot take care of its employees and treats them like extra rows on a spreadsheet. This doesn’t affect the average talent desperate for any job. But top talent has options and considers this before joining the company.

• Layoffs demoralize the remaining employees because they don’t know when they will be next. The C-suit may see the layoff as a warning shot for everyone to get their sh*t together. In practice, however, the remaining employees may just start preparing a backup plan outside the company.

• Layoffs incentivize tactical (short-term) approaches over strategic (long-term) initiatives that require upfront investments. It incentivizes high visibility efforts over doing the right thing in silence. It hurts the culture.

Layoff is a last resort. It is a sign of defeat. It shows that the company has lost its long-term hope to convert its available work bandwidth to profit and goes after its own people as a last resort.

That long-term damage doesn’t matter to the short-term interests.

Salesforce firing 10% of staff, then having two truly standout quarters, then going on a hiring spree, then freezing hiring (easy to guess how Q4 2023 went!) is such a good example of QDC. Quarterly-result Driven Company. It's the curse of many publicly traded companies. —, Twitter

For many, the layoffs in the past few years were an eye-opening experience to understand how companies really operate. At the end of this article, we’ll build a mental model about how companies work and, in a follow up post we’ll discuss how an individual can reduce the negative impacts.

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It’s a warning shot for the rest of us

As much as this post may be bashing Spotify, we need to acknowledge that Spotify is a market leader competing at the global tech league against Google, Apple, Amazon, etc.

Spotify cannot afford to be too slow or wasteful, or it will lose its market share.

Their layoffs are warning shots for the rest of the industry; Particularly the companies with a strong revenue stream which got fat over time.

Common patterns to look out for:

• Beurocracy: Too much focus on the process, gatekeeping and ceremonies instead of earning trust, aligning personal growth with organizational growth, and meaningful value.

• Fragmented responsibilities: Taking one role, breaking it into multiple titles, and assigning them to different people who in turn block each other. (🔴I’ll dig into this phenomenon in a future post)

• Distraction: woke stats, identity fabrication, culture engineering, and language control instead of substance and outcome. Companies are legal entities driven by profit not ethical entities driven by values (unless ethics genuinely ties to profit).

• Fake work: remember the “legal entity”? The main reason it exists is to generate money. Fake work is any activity that doesn’t contribute to that goal or fights against it.

• Show off and self-promotion: too much focus on presentation, appearance and looking good instead of doing good. A common symptom is to give praise where praise is not due and celebrate prematurely while the problems are still alive and kicking. I’m not saying don’t praise or celebrate. It’s good to keep the spirit up but pretending that the problems don’t exist doesn’t solve them.

• Fake products: as an ex-Googler cites: "This is a poster piece for some executives to implement while job hunting for another role so they can go be a CEO somewhere”. Follow ‘s work who is on a mission to fight fake products.

• Focusing on symptoms instead of root cause: often superficial measures are taken and boosted by media (traditional or social media). It feels good and helps marketing in a shallow world. The root causes are often undetected or ignored while giving birth to new problems, keeping everyone busy.

• Broken ownership: Any of the archetypes of broken ownership. Monkey with a gun is common but all others are as common.

It just happens that the financial crisis makes these symptoms get more attention.

Scarcity breeds clarity. It’s what drives focus and creativity. —Sundar Pichai

If your company is struggling with any of these symptoms, it’s a matter of time before the bad news hits (either layoffs or the collapse of the company).

I have previously written about my own experience working at a company that felt stressed.

In systems engineering, we try to assess risks and mitigate them. What can you do as an individual to reduce the impact on your own livelihood? That’s the topic of the follow up post.

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This post took about 9 hours of my private time to research, draft, edit, and illustrate. My monetization strategy is to give away most of the content for free because I believe it helps the community. For those who spare a few bucks to support the time and energy I put into this, the following section is a token of appreciation. A paid subscription also gives you access to my WIP book Reliability Engineering Mindset. Right now, you can get 20% off via this link.

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Instead, I'll write what I would need to read in this situation because I have been betrayed by companies before and it took me too long to recover.

Looking back, I wish I had read a frank post like this. I'll keep it in archive for myself at least.

1. You're entitled to feel sad, hurt, betrayed, rejected, worthless, or something else! Go through the emotions and process the feelings but know that the faster you get up after a fall, the faster you grow. Toddlers are great teachers when it comes to that. Don’t overthink it. As the Japanese proverb says:

   

2. Your mind wants to understand who did this to you. It’s not personal. It’s systemic (more on that when analyzing Spotify’s layoffs and Your business value). Companies are legal entities driven by profit. Good or bad, this is the state of the world. You can fight it or adapt to it but never fall into the trap of expecting a legal entity to behave like an individual with a soul. Yes, your colleagues are human all the way to the CEO (hopefully 😉), but even the CEO is not immune to the wrath of law, boards and stakeholders.

3. Many companies outlive the employment contracts of any individual employee. Sure, we can vote with our feet and leave. We can vote with our wallets and boycott. But the fact is that money and ethics are not tightly coupled. We wish they were, and you’re welcome to spend your life changing “the system” but as a backup plan, it doesn’t hurt to understand the forces at play and be prepared. You have one life after all.

   

4. Having a job today is absolutely not a guarantee to have a job tomorrow. I say it as a citizen of one of the world’s richest countries with tons of safety nets, unions, and worker protection laws 🇸🇪. Due to superpower clashes, war, economic turmoil and AI, many industries are shaking.

5. You’re just experiencing an early wave of change, but there is more where that came from. After the collapse of the soviet union, the US enjoyed a uni-polar world order. But as we’ve seen time and again throughout history, whoever is at the top gets greedy, lazy, and corrupt. The tectonic plates of economy and geopolitics are shifting and the US won’t go down without a fight. First economic and sanctions, then proxy, and [hopefully not] eventually direct war. You can participate or dodge. Just don’t glue your eyes to the IDE and pretend that the world is static outside your terminal!

   

6. If you're unemployed, you have a full-time job to up-skill and catch up with what you missed while you were employed. Build with AI, pick up new books, take online courses, go to meetups and network ... Do everything that an employed person can't do because now is the best time to get an edge while others are busy exchanging time for money.

   

7. Read through job ads to identify the gap between where you are and and where you need to be. See what self-training is required and where you should network. Focus on the intersection between what's hot in the market and what you're interested in doing. Don’t draw the bar for your interests too high. At the moment, the market is saturated and in flux. The first priority is to get a job and grow at work with others.

   

8. Some of you will go to find a new job. Some of you will go on to become entrepreneurs, content creators, solopreneurs, etc. But promise that no matter what you do, you'll never treat people like extra rows on a spreadsheet. When money is involved, it's harder than you think. But please try. As you know now, it hurts.

9. It is that dark time of the year. Please keep warm, listen to good music, play games, and keep yourself busy to prevent this from escalating into something bigger. You got this. These days are part of your life too, so don’t waste them.

Here’s what I have done to prepare:

1. I have tried to decouple my personal risk from that of the company: no company shares, no company car, and no private usage of company properties.

2. I also have income insurance and been saving my salary surplus to various safety nets (they're mostly going down 😄).

3. But the real investment is in oneself! I try my best to catch up with the latest and practice what I've learned. I’ve been building with AI (both LLM and SLM as well as MCP), researching, publishing, interviewing, and doing everything I can to stay relevant. I’ve actively built a product to deprecate myself (more on that soon but here’s a teaser). The goal is to sharpen the axe to land on my feet when push comes to shove.

4. I have actively kept my life expenses low in order to dodge the lifestyle inflation that locks the middle class to miserable and vulnerable positions. I don’t have big loans and dutifully pay my due every month to reduce the loan. That wiggle room buys freedom to do what makes sense for me career-wise, not necessarily what pays best.

5. I did a dry run back in December going through some interviews to both build some interview muscles but also test the waters. The market is tough but it's possible to secure lower level jobs with less pay.

Take advantage of this opportunity and years from now you'll look back with a smile and see the blessing.

Update 2024-01-14: Steve Huynh from A Life Engineered just released a great video on the topic.

I also have written elaborately why layoffs are not personal, but merely a signal that the company has lost hope in its ability to monetize your skillset:

My monetization strategy is to give away most content for free. However, these posts take anywhere from a few hours to a few days to draft, edit, research, illustrate, and publish. I pull these hours from my private time, vacation days and weekends.

The simplest way to support me is to like, subscribe and share this post.

If you really want to support me, you can consider a paid subscription. As a token of appreciation, you get access to the Pro-Tips sections and my online book Reliability Engineering Mindset. You can get 20% off via this link. Your contribution, also funds my open source products like Service Level Calculator.

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I met Joakim back in 2016. His brutal honesty, deep technical knowledge, wisdom about software engineering, and weird sense of humor have always resonated with me.

Ever since our career paths separated us, I have tried to get him to join me. This time around I was working at an enterprise that was going through digital transformation (read how Google Bard defines that term).

So, I set up a call and as soon as he understood what it was about, he said:

— “No, thanks”!

— “Why?”, I asked in despair.

— “I know what this is about. Let me guess: Mckinsey has been in the house and convinced your top-level leadership that to catch up with the competition, you need to go through digital transformation and throw money at the problem.”

— “How do you know? I haven’t even started talking about my current company!”, I was surprised. Did he have inside knowledge?

— “I’ve seen many companies go through this so-called digital transformation. When you joined our company, we were in the middle of one such transformation too! Don’t you remember?”

Oh, yes! I do remember. Vividly. I wrote about it. But I still didn’t understand what’s holding him back. So I asked:

— “What’s wrong with that? It’s a great journey to lead change”.

— “What happens is that you’re going to hire people who are at point C and can take you to point D”, he used hand gestures to show the levels and continued: “but you’re in point A and have no clue how to get to point B”.

He then continued:

— “This is a frustrating position for talented people to be in. They lose many things that they took for granted. They will have to struggle educating you for the obvious. It’s a career setback for them. No matter how much you put on the table, I’m not going to be part of that”.

After sending the first public version of this article, Joakim shared some more interesting thoughts:

Something is missing about the friction between the existing point A people and the new point C people.

They are sold a rosy picture as: “we are early in the process so you alone can shape where this company goes”.

So, they set out to “fix all the things”. They join with a superstar reputation and a mindset that they can do whatever they want or need.

But as soon as they start, they face tremendous friction from the old body of the company. Think about it: there is a reason the company was at point A in the first place! Hint: it’s not people. It’s a friction problem not an IQ problem

This clashes with the older employees who know how things actually work but haven’t been given the toolset or opportunities to take it to the next step.

The people at point A are no less smart. The obstacles that slowed them down are systemic problems which we’ll get to shortly.

Challenge yourself

Well, that was an interesting perspective. Personally, I think the point A-D analogy may be true about the technical aspects but the distance between A-C makes a great journey for change leadership.

Many of those talented people who are at point C, have never been part of taking a company from point A to B. They just showed up when everything was ready.

It is a fantastic opportunity for everyone to take a point A to B challenge at least once in their career to understand how the sausage is made. It’s an empowering wisdom to understand that the best practices are nothing more than incremental steps to improve the system over time.

The main differentiator between the top environments and average ones is the amount of friction that these increments face. One needs to learn how to influence change and reduce friction.

A reader who has been through point A to B challenges for over a decade is not interested to do it anymore:

Plowing and getting rocks out serves a clear purpose but it’s in fact more rewarding to harvest and make bread.

The maturity level describes the environment (i.e., the company) not the people.

I like to use a house as an analogy: the skillset and experience of furnishing a house is entirely different than the skillset and experience of building it.

I’ve seen several talented people (both leaders and engineers) join a company in point A and ambitiously stretching themselves too thin to spread apart. They feel like a kid in the candy shop because every direction they look, there’s something “broken”.

Sometimes, people who are at C don’t know how to improve the situation from A to B. The reason is that they are often "spoiled" by the C environment.

Focus on a few problems and conclude them instead of attacking multiple problems at the same time. Don’t act like a child in the candy shop. The problems may look small and obvious, but there are deep roots in the organization. If you are going to sustain change, keep this in mind:

It’s a marathon, not a sprint.

Root Cause

This part is for the change leaders and top-level management of the companies going through digital transformation:

You can recruit all you want and bring people from environment C to environment A, but unless the systemic issues are not addressed at point A, you cannot pay your way to get to point C or D!

The hypothesis that bringing new blood into a company will help transfer its culture holds some truth. But it’s both an expensive and time-consuming solution to work around the root cause:

• Old school mindset

• Failure to catch up with market trends and modernize in good time

• Justifying the slow speed as a fact 🤦 instead of changing it

• Poor understanding of software products (calling it “IT” is the biggest symptom)

• Importing talent but failing to listen to them

• Eagerness to get quick results for throwing big money at the talent

• Ambition to extract estimates when none is possible

• Prioritizing deadlines and cost over quality

• Not practicing what you preach. Failing to be a role model.

• Poor vision & mission and/or communication

• Too much focus on following competitors instead of redefining the rules of the game with your own unique advantages

• …

Sadly, it doesn’t work like that. You cannot solve the problem with the same mentality that created it. Sometimes money is not the solution. Sometimes bringing in new people is not the solution. Sometimes, we have to start from the within and be honest about why one environment stayed at point A while others went to point C.

Look inside before gazing outside.

🪞Some leaders cannot understand that their underperformance is primarily due to their own mistakes and lack of competence.

They think laying off and hiring new talent is the key to catching up with the competition.

Sitting on the solution

The answer is usually within the company: the older employees who know the business and have firsthand experience with the challenges but are suppressed.

Just like Microsoft hit refresh with an old employee, a company that’s facing digital transformation needs to look inside for transformation. It is called transformation for a reason (and not replacement or purchase).

The problem may be:

• Broken and old processes

• Lack of trust

• Too much bureaucracy, gate keeping and compliance checks

• Tall silos with thick walls which clogs the flow of information and collaboration

• Ceremonial high-rank titles whose value doesn't worth their salary

• Management getting in the way of the people who know what to do

• Stressful workload that doesn't leave any time for learning and sharpening the axe

• Focus on efficiency (doing something right) instead of effectiveness (doing the right thing)

• And my personal favorite: broken ownership!

Fix those before going out on a talent shopping frenzy. Otherwise, your best talent leaves the door in frustration. Top talent has options. You'll be left with those who have nowhere better to be. And it makes the change even harder. You’ll be stuck in quicksand!

Joakim also introduced the book Sooner Safer Happier:

It covers agile transformation, among other things. It applies in this context too

Recruitment

In the case of my current company, this is exactly what we did actually. We got a new CEO last year and his first move was to refresh his management team, they in turn continued those transformations at each level which is close to commence.

Time will tell how this story plays out, but I have faith that the internal forces have the winning card. As for the recruitment, it has stopped for now until we figure out where we want to go. It’s been a great learning for me personally. Something that I’ll write about later.

When I interview people to join us, I always make sure to give them a picture of the challenges ahead. I want them to choose with open eyes and not be disappointed after joining us.

Many people take the chance, but some decline and that is OK. We should never fool people into joining a company only to be frustrated, demotivated, or actively fight against the business.

It’s not fair to them either, if the challenges don’t align with their growth trajectory, they are going to have a hard time getting out of bed every morning.

Unmotivated people can do a lot of harm, especially when they’re in a leadership position.

What’s your take? Would you join a company that is at the beginning of its digital transformation journey? Have you been part of such transitions, and do you have any tips to share?

This article is part of a series called Less Meetings, More focused work.

Inspiration

Performance budget is a concept familiar to front-end developers. The idea is amazingly simple: to guarantee a great user experience, you:

1. Identify key time periods that matter to the user's experience.

2. Decide what is the maximum time limit for the user to experience those time periods. This will be our performance budget.

3. Optimize the code to stay within that budget and never go over budget because it will hurt the user experience. This means to add some computation, you may have to remove something else.

For example, if your user interface is animation heavy, you may decide to have a buttery smooth animation at 60 frames per second.

The amount of computation you can fit between two frames cannot take longer than 16.6 miliseconds because 1000 ÷ 60 = 16.6. That is the budget.

🔥A powerful processor can do a lot in that time but to guarantee a decent user experience for the average user, we need to test our code on an average processor. Now it’s a challenge!

For the average processor, we still want to guarantee 30 frames per second. This means on the average CPU we have 1000 ÷ 30 = 33 miliseconds.

We set different budgets for different classes of processors. Keep that in mind. We’ll get back to it. This clear metric makes the programmers optimize for efficiency and think about the trade-offs.

If this budget is violated, some frames are skipped, and the users experience janky animation. The more often the budget is violated, the worse it will hurt the user experience.

The same idea can be used to optimize the “animation” of an organization; its productivity and flow:

1. Identify key time periods: for example, a day or a week

2. Decide the max time spent in meetings

3. Set a policy and communicate it to the individuals to optimize their time. Normalize “Sorry it doesn’t fit into my meeting budget” without feeling guilty.

The goal is to shorten the time spent in meetings in favor of focused work.

My experience

I heard the term “meeting budget” just a few months ago but in retrospect, I recall exercising it a few companies ago. The idea came out of a team retrospective where we engineers were unhappy about the amount of time lost in meetings.

After long discussions, we decided to pilot the “meeting ratio”. The idea was simple and started with even a simpler question:

On a given period, how much time can we spend in meetings and still deliver the results we promised?

We picked 2-week sprint as the period, because at the end of the sprint, we had could assess our outcome. We didn’t want to hear “I lost too much time in meetings” anymore.

So how much time can we spend in meetings and still deliver? The answer depends on the job function. We all looked at our calendars for data about what a “good sprint” looked like.

If I recall correctly, we landed on something like this:

• Engineers: 12 hours (or 15% of the 2-week sprint). That’s an average of 72 minutes per day.

• PM: 40 hours (or 50%)

• EM: 55 hours (or ~70%)

Out of 80 working hours in 2 weeks.

We did this experiment for 6 months before I found another job and had to leave the team. Last time I checked, an iteration of the idea was still running.

Learnings

• The meeting budget worked great for recurring meetings like stand-up, planning, demos, retros, 1:1’s etc. Not so great for unpredictable meetings that landed on short notice like a company all-hands, incident postmortems or a support call from an adjacent team. We ended up shortening the recurring meetings to open space for those unpredictable meetings.

• Inside the team, it worked great and reduced our meetings. It even built habits like using async communication more effectively and reduced the meetings even below the budget. We were all more mindful about the meeting budget. “You become what you measure”, they say! 🗨️

• Since it was a team-level policy (rather than a company-wide policy), we could not use it to repel or reduce the meetings that were scheduled by people outside our team. We could negotiate and introduce the concept, but it usually didn’t help.

• Even though the team-level policy clearly set a max for the meetings, some team members spent more time on meetings. We did not control each individual and certainly didn’t measure the numbers scientifically. However, if someone complained that they lost too much time at meetings, we would ask them to check their calendar and give more insights about what could be done.

• This policy did make us thrifty with the time spent on regular meetings. For example, our standup took N x 2 minutes where N was the number of participants. We had some funny sign language (hands up) when one member forgot their time limit. Same with retros. We shrunk the allocated time to 45 minutes to begin with, but also set a timer for each part of it to stay within the budget. Actually, now that I think about it, we heavily used timers! ⏲️

If I could retry the idea, I would say the biggest improvement is to pilot this policy at an organizational level so that everyone is mindful of the time spent on meetings.

But that requires buy-in from the management, and that’s exactly why I’m documenting this experience to help you motivate it at your job.

Personal level

You don’t need to wait for the organization to adopt this idea. You can still gain some of the benefits at the personal level. Indeed many people do that.

These days, I still use that idea on a personal level. As a tech lead supporting a large organization, my calendar tends to be crammed with meetings very quickly. When I was just promoted, it was an overwhelming experience.

I ended up working after hours and the weekends to cover the time I lost in meetings. But it was hard to joggle being a dad of two and having my own personal growth plans with hobby projects, music, drawing, writing, and reading books.

Besides, how many hours can one spend in front of the computer before the body collapses?

In my case, the answer was “not too long”! 😔 3 months into the job and I lost sleep and had back pain. My mood gradually became bitter, and it started to negatively impact my work.

It’s only fair to get work done during paid working hours. I decided to set a limit on how much time I spend in meetings:

• Max 4 hours/day

• Max 10 hours/week

My calendar is open way in advance but as soon as a day is close to hit limit, I book the rest of the day with a meeting slot that reads:

Focus time: please don’t interrupt with meetings

I also booked my lunch break and before/after working hours so my colleagues from other time zones accidentally don’t book me.

Turnes out my colleagues are super nice and respect those limits. Occasionally I have to ask someone nicely to reschedule a meeting but overall, I’m much happier, have more energy and get more done. For me, in my current role, 4 hours is a good trade-off.

Other articles in this series

This article is part of a series called Less Meetings, More focused work.

Knowledge workers require focus to complete complex cognitive tasks.

The interrupts are enemies of focus. Meetings are interrupts too, even though they are planned!

Inspiration

You may remember disk defragmenter from older versions of Windows. It was a program that would move blocks of data next to each other to optimize the performance of the hard disk.

The same idea can be applied to meetings. We just accept that certain meetings have to happen and it’s less likely to get anything meaningful done in the gap between them.

My experience

We try to put them next to each other to create longer periods of focused work.

Learnings

• An interesting side effect of lining up meetings one after the other is that they need to stop on time. They cannot drag after the allotted time because we’d be late to the other meeting! 🙏

• Our company usually had the all-hands meetings on Fridays. So we moved our retro and demo meetings right after that.

• If we did have other meetings that we had to schedule on short notice, we tried to put it right after the stand-up or another meeting.

• There were certain days when we had multiple meetings. Those days we all tried to be at the office to meet face to face and use the opportunity to have a team lunch or after work. Those “meeting days” turned into a team building activity.

• Again, since this was a team-level policy, we could not affect the meetings that were scheduled out of our control. We had to work around them by moving our meetings next to the ones organized outside the team. And those meetings were not always happening at a known cadence. They also had a tendency to be rescheduled with a note saying, “Please prioritize”, as in “skip your other meetings and join this one”. Sigh! We did, however, try to reschedule our meetings after those to benefit from defragmentation. It was a bit inconvenient, but we appreciated the longer focus times.

• It is important to book “Focused time” slots for the clean part of your day, otherwise they are an easy grab for those who aren’t aware or care about your effort to optimize your calendar.

Personal level

I do practice this technique even today. As a Staff+ Engineer, I have several dotted reporting lines, mentees, and people that I need to regularly sync with. I clump all those meetings to a morning and get them done back-to-back. As a bonus most of those meetings cannot run over because they have hard deadlines.

In practice, I use the higher bandwidth of the meetings to build or re-establish relations and continue the communication async (e.g. on Slack) as needed. The collaboration doesn’t stop outside the meeting.

This helps keep the rest of my day “clean” so I can focus on cognitively demanding tasks like document reviews, coding and reading.

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An unwanted side effect of hybrid work is more frequent and longer meetings. This leaves less time for focused work.

Meeting-free days acknowledge that issue and aims to provide undisturbed time for focused work.

Regardless of the number of meeting-free days instituted, employees subsequently reported improvements in factors like autonomy and cooperation and decreases in stress and micromanagement. But arguably, the best results were achieved at companies that had three meeting-free days per week. — MITSloan

Inspiration

Again, the world of computing has a good inspiration: CPU throttling. When the CPU becomes too hot, its frequency is lowered to reduce power consumption and heat.

The idea is super simple (but hard to execute):

• Decide one day as meeting-free day and ask everybody to clean it up from meetings. Which day and how frequent, is up to you. It can be once per week or it can be once per month. The more knowledge workers you have, the more you need these uninterrupted focus times.

• If you cannot afford to have an entire day meeting-free, you can experiment with meeting-free slots. For example: every Tuesday and Thursday no meeting shall be booked before 12 o’clock.

AWS allegedly has meeting-free days practiced by some 20-30k employees.

Surveys show that 47% perceive Monday as the worst day for meetings, while 40% choose Friday as the worst day.

It will only work if the entire organization picks the same day (e.g., Wednesday), therefore it’s good to state it in an organization-wide policy document that can be referenced to fend off unwanted distractions.

My experience

At one company every other Friday was meeting-free. At another one, every Wednesday. Surprisingly, in both cases, the engineering leadership took the initiative to roll-out this counter-intuitive productivity hack.

The one that was meeting-free every Friday was more structured. It was called 10% lab day (because it was literally 10% of the paid month). I’ve written more about that here. TLDR; the greatest perk!

The one that was meeting-free every Wednesday was less structured and more free-form and trust-based. Sadly, it got axed because the top-level leadership didn’t see the value in it. The ones behind the initiative didn’t gather any meaningful metric to be able to motivate any positive impact. The developers liked it but, it might be for the wrong reasons! It’s hard to assess something without reliable metrics or no metrics at all.

Learnings

• It is important to communicate this policy inside and outside the organization. “Sorry, I can’t join because it’s meeting-free day” won’t work when the reply is “I don’t know about such a tradition!”. Especially when there’s a power asymmetry (e.g. a manager booking a meeting with developers), it’ll be very hard to push back. Having it as a written policy helps fight such exceptions. It will only work if all parties respect it because it is well motivated and well communicated.

• The thing that really fights against the meeting-free days is a meeting-heavy culture. You may have to start from the step below and remove some meetings to be able to roll out meeting-free days.

• Formulate it as a hypothesis and identify metrics that you want to improve as a result of meeting-free days (e.g. employee engagement). Narrow minded leadership may not see the bigger picture and categorize it as waste. Cover your bases by deciding on some metrics to optimize for.

  • Measure and monitor those metrics and have a channel to get feedback

  • Adjust based on feedback and if t here’s consensus that it’s not useful, stop it

• There is always something “important” that is waiting to seize that unbooked day. And once it gets hold of that day, it tends to swallow more than the allocated time because there’s usually no other meeting to compete with it and put a deadline on its end.

• In the WFH (work from home) era, the meeting free day may be abused, and a fraction of employees may not work at all. I believe that everyone should not be punished for a few outliers and instead we should look at why it happens (e.g. overwork or stress) and what’s the solution (e.g. set clear expectations and have a mechanism to control the outcome).

• The meeting-free day also serves as a guaranteed day to take a day off with minimum impact. This is especially useful for private meetings that can be scheduled like a doctor’s appointment or a bank errand. Without meeting-free days, team members are more likely to miss important meetings due to personal reasons.

Which day?

You can pick any day of the week. Monday and Friday are the most popular options as the surveys suggest. These create longer “weekends”. On the other hand, Wednesday can be a good option to because it divides the work week into two halves with a little “break” in between.

If this is the energy level on a normal week:

Keepin Fridays meeting-free gives this (at least for introverts and/or knowledge workers who need focus to get deep work done):

If Mondays are meeting-free:

And meeting-free Wednesdays are the most efficient time investment:

Personal level

This is by far one of my favorite productivity hacks. In the past 3 companies I have consistently tried to keep my Fridays free from meetings. I really look forward to it. I may be stressed and overworked Monday to Thursday, but I know that Friday is the day I can compensate.

Impacted by The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, I “Sharpen the Saw®” on a daily basis in the form of reading newsletters, blog posts and hobby projects that allow me gain hands-on experiment with new technologies.

However, some days I miss it due to meetings or more urgent tasks. On Fridays however, I get a good chunk of reading and working on my coding projects. This is particularly important because as a Staff+ Engineer, I spend more time than my Senior Engineering years in meetings. Yet my impact directly depends on my technical skills. Personally, I learn better when I’m alone and I have those Fridays to thank for. Without those Fridays I would quickly fall into the trap of becoming an ivory tower architect or something (my worst professional nightmare, as my regular readers know). 😄

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Many of the problems with the meetings stems from the fact that they are synchronous:

• You have to maintain focus for a long period of time even when it’s irrelevant

• If you miss the meeting, you’re out of the loop by default

• It’s hard to get airtime to raise your concerns, especially if the meeting is not well-moderated and/or there’s a loudmouth in the room that just loves their voice 🔊

• It is hard to contribute meaningfully, especially if the meeting didn’t have an agenda or you didn’t have enough time to prepare

Inspiration

System Reliability engineering has an inspiration! In this case it is queues and messaging. We need to take a quick side track to tightly coupled systems. Particularly the “cascading failure”.

Suppose System A depends on System B. Every time any of them fail, both fail:

Now suppose we use a queue in between where System A sends a message and System B processes it whenever it is up and sends the results back to the queue:

That’s the core idea: instead of expecting everyone to be at the meeting, let people contribute at their convenience. In other words: asynchronously.

Over the past years, I have been using this technique for almost all meetings that I’m hosting and there are a lot of tips and tricks that I’ll share in a future posts.

Over the past years, I have been using this technique for almost all meetings that I’m hosting and there are a lot of tips and tricks that I’ll share in a future posts.

The idea is simple to explain but takes practice to master:

• Use the higher communication bandwidth of meetings to kick start the initiative and have a dialogue around that

• Continue the work on a live doc where everyone can comment at their convenience

• Have a dedicated async communication channel (e.g. Slack or Teams) for conversations that are not urgent but could use a dialogue

• Use the meetings as needed (for example when there are long comments on the doc or Slack)

• If a decision needs to be made, use meeting if needed

My experience

• Async setup gives more time to think and generally yields more thoughtful conversation as opposed to the rushed setup of the meeting. The quality of the async discussions is usually higher because one gets the chance to think things through and do some research if needed. The written words tend to have a higher bar than spoken words blurted under the pressure of a meeting.

• People who typically don’t speak up in the meeting (e.g. introverts or marginalized groups), have a fair chance to raise their concerns or questions in the async channels and contribute. This provides a more inclusive collaboration setup.

• The downside of this method is that it takes longer to make a decision. That’s a general problem with async communication, especially if the organization hasn’t built the habit of taking Slack/Teams/Live docs as seriously as the meetings. You may find yourself poking and nudging people more than you’re comfortable with.

Other articles in this series

And the numbers show: According to research from Fuze, unproductive meetings waste 15% of an organization’s collective paid time. For middle management, that figure increases to 35%. For upper management, that figure is 50%!

In fact, 70% of all meetings keep employees from working and completing their tasks.

According to The State of Meetings in 2020, 78% of workers believe that their meeting schedules are chaotic. 38% assign fault to the upper management, while 16% blame their direct manager.

Think about the percentage of people who didn’t have to be laid off in the name of productivity if only we could tame the meetings!

Meetings are an excellent tool for communication and decision making when they are used correctly. They provide a high communication bandwidth for quick back and forth dialogue around a topic. For everything else, there are more efficient tools.

Unfortunately, meetings are often overused and too expensive for what they achieve. This article won’t get into the nominal and real cost of meetings, but I hope you can relate.

Research from Atlassian found that the average employee attends 62 meetings per month, with half being considered “time wasted”.

Meetings as a misused tool is especially troublesome for knowledge workers (like programmers, designers, or writers) who require undisturbed focus for longer periods of time to produce any meaningful results.

Research shows that it takes 10-15 minutes for programmers to get back to work after an interruption. (Solingen, Parnin)

Today’s knowledge workers typically spend more than 85% of their time in meetings, which studies show negatively affects people’s psychological, physical, and mental well-being. — MITSloan

The underlying issue with meetings is three simple facts:

1. Human time is a finite resource

2. Quality time is even rarer

3. Quality time with undivided attention is rarest

Due to economic challenges, many companies are in “war time” mode with a strong focus on efficiency.

Can we use this momentum to improve the efficiency of how we spend our work hours?

70% of all meetings are a waste of time, 70%! That is a lot of unproductive time that could have been better spent doing the actual work. The University of North Carolina surveyed 182 senior managers in various industries: 65% said meetings keep them from completing their work. 71% said meetings are unproductive and inefficient. 64% said meetings come at the expense of deep thinking —Forbes

Articles in this series

In this series I share my experience with a few ideas at organizational and personal level along with my learning.

Amazon is not the first company to enforce RTO (return to office) policy. It was the notable exception that resisted the trend until 2023:

• Microsoft kicked it off in February 2022

• Apple followed in April

• Google and Meta joined the club in March that year

Some believe RTO is a push for the old-fashioned way of working and a failure to catch up with modern trends. Others believe RTO is about control and letting managers feel good about themselves. Yet another group believes that it is a way to get people to quit without the company having to pay a severance package and deal with the negative effect of mass layoffs.

While all the above might be true, we need to look at the longer time horizon to make sense of it.

What happened?

The RTO (return to office) is the last in a series of events that unfolded after the pandemic. If we expand our time horizon, a pattern starts to emerge:

1. Pandemic: WHO (world health organization) declared Public Health Emergency due to COVID-19 on 30 January 2020, and characterized the outbreak as a pandemic on 11 March 2020.

2. Lockdown: effective immediately countries went to lockdown one by one. There were some rare exceptions, for example here in Sweden we didn’t do that.

3. WFH (work from home): to continue to operate while respecting the national emergency regulations, companies hesitantly allowed the employees to work from home.

4. Unemployment: the jobs that could not be done remotely or simply weren’t viable due to lockdown (e.g. restaurants) were temporarily lost.

5. War: Russia invaded Ukraine on 24 February 2022. Many companies pulled out of the Russian market, while the food supply chain was disrupted. Turns out Ukrainian farming industry fed a significant number of people in the world. Western countries started channeling resources to support Ukraine.

6. Pipeline sabotage: due to its heavy dependence on Russian oil and gas, Europe could not fully boycott Russia. It would imply a larger blow to the European economy which already showed signs of slowing down. US was not happy. The Nord Stream Pipeline that transferred Russian gas was sabotaged on 26 September 2022.

7. Inflation: The pandemic, supply chain disruptions, war in Europe and energy crisis, led to inflation.

8. Overemployment: To cope with higher expenses, some people had to work more to earn more. Some even started working multiple full-time jobs. According to a survey by Monster 37% of the one thousand respondents have more than one full time job! And of the remaining 63%, more than half (57%) are considering doing so. (I could not find more dimensions to their survey data for example business sector, age group or geography.)

9. Surveillance: There was a rise in employee activity tracking products during the last year. Legally speaking, companies can monitor computers, phones and even social media activities to gather data on their employees.

10. Layoffs: Former Googlers speculate that Google used AI to decide the layoff, but the company denies it. Regardless, if the mass layoffs are based on mass employee surveillance data, AI would be a reasonable tool.

Almost every layoff followed this script:

1. CEO identified “productivity” as an area of improvement.

2. People are seen as cost.

3. A percentage of them are let go just like extra rows in some spreadsheet.

4. CEO accepts “full responsibility.”

The bar for responsibility is so low that billionaire CEO, Eric Yuan, got a lot of praise for saying this while laying 15% of employees:

I am reducing my salary for the coming fiscal year by 98% and foregoing my FY23 corporate bonus

To my knowledge Sundar Pichai (Google), Satya Nadella (Microsoft), Andy Jassy (Amazon), Mark Zukerberg (Meta), or Daniel Ek (Spotify), did not even come close.

And for Zoom CEO, this short video does an excellent job explaining what’s happening:

And you cannot blame them. Many companies are run like little kingdoms. They are not charities or democracies.

The real problem is the short-term thinking and prioritizing share-holder interests above the people who help those shares exist in the first place.

The broken trust

It is not exactly news but if the layoff season clarified one fact for the masses, it is this:

Loyalty is a one-way street. At the end of the day, the employee is compensated to do a job and regardless of what is written on the company website about its impressive culture, the human factor is always secondary to the monetary factor.

During the lockdown, companies trusted that the employees did their best work at home without supervision.

Or did they?

The state mandates did not leave any options. Most managers were not fully onboard with the idea. A Microsoft study from Sept 2022 showed:

85% of managers say that the “shift to hybrid work has made it challenging to have confidence that employees are being productive.”
49% of managers of hybrid workers “struggle to trust their employees to do their best work.”

Microsoft researchers coined the term productivity paranoia: to refer to managers’ struggle about outcome (productivity) not matching the increased output (number of hours worked, number of meetings and other activity metrics).

Another study by Citrix showed:

half of business leaders believe that when employees are “out of sight,” they do not work as hard.

Is it just baseless paranoia or is there data to back it up? Same study suggests:

34% of employees believe their company has installed monitoring software on their computer, when in fact, 48% of business leaders say they have.

Let those numbers sink in:

The problem with data is that it can be weaponized: one who has an assumption, gathers data, filters the “irrelevant parts”, or finds an angle on the data that proves their point.

Measuring productivity (outcome) is inherently a hard problem. Instead, proxy metrics are used (output). For example: number of active hours, number of messages sent, number of cases/issues handled, number of commits made, number of deploys, etc.

Fake work

As far as the subjective views go, it is not about the actual work; it is about the perception of work.

There is always a group of people who dread work, but I like to think that most people who do work actually enjoy it. Work can contribute to a sense of purpose and support social needs.

Would bringing people to the office solve that problem? I would argue that those who don’t believe in working will find a way to dodge work whether remote or at the office.

Pretending to work is a payable skill. It is easier to fake work when there is an audience.

Alas, dragging fake workers to the office can disturb other people’s productivity with chatter, gossip, politics, pointless meetings and what not.

There are two types of workers:

1. 🗣️Those who talk sh*t (gossip, show off, pretend).

2. 💪Those who do sh*t (do the actual work).

The former is a cost, while the latter creates value.

1. 🪙Let the cost control the value and the product will be cheap.

2. 💰Let the value set the price and the product will be worth it.

To set a meaningful RTO policy, we need to be careful about whose needs we are catering for. If the minority that breached trust are the target, the majority should not pay for them.

Forget the majority, the company has a stake in this too. The top-talent has options and less tolerance for bulls**t. If RTO does not make sense to them, they’re first in line to leave the company. This doubles the damage.

If top-talent is golden-handcuffed, they may stay but think about the damage an unmotivated but impactful employee can cause.

Layoffs are not the solution either. Fake work is often a symptom of a bad culture that fails to clarify the expectations and remove obstacles.

Treat people like adults and they will behave like adults. Treat them like children and the adults leave the room so you will end up babysitting.

If employees are motivated and aligned, they do not need to be watched to get the job done.

But if you have unmotivated and misaligned employees, the easiest workaround is to get them to the office. A study conducted 11 years ago shows those office workers who were assigned boring tasks performed better and faster in the regular office setting. Home-life distractions are more likely to prevent productive work when you don’t enjoy the work.

Open office

18 years ago, Google popularized the open office workspace. The hypothesis was that if you enclose humans in large rooms without any physical boundaries, they will be forced to interact, and magic will happen.

Soon cargo culters across the planet picked up the practice hoping to get Google-level results. 10 years later, most of us were trapped in large noisy and crowded open offices full of distraction with a striking resemblance to the early industrial revolution factory floors.

Knowledge work requires undisturbed focus. It is fundamentally different from the factory belts. If you want to model it for factory work, the closest analogy is the period when a product is being designed. But unlike designing physical products, knowledge work can effectively be done remotely. A big part of the job (depending on the function) is deep work and requires prolonged focus.

In practice, people created mental barriers to compensate the lack of the physical ones:

We found that face-to-face interactions dropped by roughly 70% after the firms transitioned to open offices, while electronic interactions increased to compensate. --Harvard Business Review

The lockdowns helped the masses internalize this fact and there is no going back.

Fused work is objectively more productive when done remotely:

• Stanford study of 16,000 workers over 9 months found that working from home increases productivity by 13%.

• 77% of those who work remotely at least a few times per month show increased productivity.

Although onsite collaboration provides more bandwidth, digital tooling has come a long way and offers some superior advantages. For example:

• Zoom or Teams allows recording a meeting for those who did not make it. Its transcripts make it very handy to search through the discussions.

• Google Docs or Office online make it easy for a large group to simultaneously collaborate on the same file.

• Slack or Teams make it easy to have long-running discussions as a problem or solution area is in discovery mode.

The list goes on, but as soon as people meet on-site, we see less of these advantages and more of these defects:

I am not saying working from the office is all bad. But it is far from the rosy picture they are selling us as the ultimate productivity hack.

My personal unfavorite: a feeling of “us vs them” is developed on the basis of the physical geography, architecture of the workspace and proximity.

Home office

As a tech lead, my work can be divided into 3 categories:

1. Focused: learning, reviewing, or writing documents and code.

2. Collaborative: using the higher bandwidth of meetings to build alignment, evolve ideas, transfer, or acquire knowledge, 1:1, sync, mentorship, conflict resolution, etc.

3. Waste: commute, time & expense report, managing my personal backlog, scheduling meetings, etc.

Personally, I do my best focused work at home. I have been working remotely on and off since 2016. Over time I have built a customized ergonomic setup based on my needs for peak performance.

I have paid for everything from my own pocket because I do not feel comfortable tying my personal setup to any employment contract. Besides, no company will match this setup. Good luck expense reporting a Google Home or thermometer! 😅

BTW, there are people with much fancier home offices if you want to check them out.

Focused work is half the story. I do not work in isolation. Supporting hundreds of people across multiple hubs, 40-60% of my time goes to virtual and physical meetings. I may start the day meeting my colleagues over at the west coast of Sweden and jump to another meeting with Germany right before talking to a group of people based in China, Sweden, and Poland. I may end the day virtually visiting my peers on the east coast of the US.

It is the ultimate teleportation experience unlocked by hundreds of kilometers of fiber cables!

A 2020 study of 1300 US workers by Harward Business Review shows that skipping the commute saved more than 40 minutes per day on average.

But different types of workers used that time very differently: Independent employees (i.e., those without managerial responsibilities) reallocated much of it to personal activities, whereas managers just worked longer hours and spent more time in meetings. For managers, the increase in work hours more than offset the loss in commuting time: Their workday increased on average by 56 minutes, and the time they spent replying to emails increased by 13 minutes.

Gone are the days of having to burn gas/jet fuel or waste megawatts of electricity for a train ride. Skipping the time and energy waste of commuting is just a bonus.

🔓 Remote work usually unlocks the flexible working hours. In simple terms, it allows the knowledge workers to bring their best hours to work instead of doing 9-5. Productivity is not about the quantity of the hours, but rather the quality of those hours.

Onsite

Despite a productivity boost, working from home for an extended period can be quite boring and downright dangerous. As humans we need a dose of social interaction and physical activity to stay mentally and physically fit.

I have tried remote fikas and online games with colleagues, but nothing can replace good old face to face interaction.

Once a week I drop by the office for a day packed with onsite meetings, lunch with different people and occasionally water cooler chats. I do not get to do any focused work on those days. One day amounts to 20% and for me at my current role, it is a good balance to get some work done while getting a dose of social interaction and some physical activity (when I can, I bike to work).

The key point to emphasize is that this is my own personal preference based on my current role.

I do not see the point of forcing everyone to make the same trade off with a blanket policy. Especially when that blanket policy is catered for the need to control a small group of untrusted employees and even a smaller group of managers who have trust issues.

Economy

It is not illegal to work multiple full-time jobs in many countries, but it is a breach of many standard contracts. It is risky, exhausting, and unproductive. Most people do not willingly work more than 8 hours. It is not sustainable and leads to burn out.

However, working more than one full time job is just a symptom.

The real root cause is a system that has failed people. It abandons people when they are vulnerable.

The cost of living has consistently increased over the past years while the salaries have not been able to catch up. In practice, most people took a pay cut due to inflation. Although some may be able tolerate it, different people have different financial obligations and risk tolerance.

Sweden for example recommends employees not to ask for a raise (although our beautiful ex-prime minister from the social democrat party decided that she is more equal than others and gave herself a big raise).

In the US where money shapes everything from the elections to the lobbying for legislation, the situation is even more grim. America’s poor are worse off than elsewhere.

Assuming the employee monitoring data is used to lay people off, it hurts the ones who need the money most.

Firing them is just a short-term solution.

Putting more people on the unemployment payroll eats up the tax money that could go to better use. When fewer people work, it impacts the national GDP eventually.

Besides, when more people have less buying power, less money is spent on buying goods and services which impacts the companies.

Short-term thinking just backfires and hurts the long-term prosperity of the country.

Tax

The municipalities push for dragging people to the cities. There are multiple reasons:

Cities and states grant billions in tax incentives to US companies every year to open offices in their area. Buried in the fine print of many agreements is the expectation that companies will deliver something in return: full-time jobs, done primarily on-site and support nearby businesses and pay state and local taxes (Bloomberg)

For example, 25% of the tax revenue of New York City comes from commercial real estate. The prices drop when there is less demand for those properties.

Tax benefits have more to do with the company’s bottom line than individual productivity levels.

You probably have seen this animation?

Think about all the jobs and services that will be redundant when you don’t go to the office. If mayors and state legislators can twist the CEO’s arm using tax leverage, RTO it is then!

The data

That survey from Monster claims 37% of people work more than one full time job. Does that sound too much? Is the data biased?

I do not know anyone in my circle who does multiple full-time jobs and I have worked at 3 companies since the pandemic started.

Just because we don’t see something does not mean it is not there.

• Considering the risks of being exposed, don’t you think people are going to be super secretive about their side hustle?

• I have come across a handful of individuals whose performance just does not match 40 hours of work per week no matter how you cut it. They have the knowledge and skills but a task that could take two hours, takes two weeks. Meanwhile they are not super responsive on async communication channels like Slack either. They do a decent job flying under the radar, but the outcome speaks volumes. I give them the benefit of the doubt. Everyone is fighting a war I know nothing about.

• I also believe that focusing on the averages dilutes the information. A while back I got anonymous feedback that “Alex is all over the place and involved in too many things”. There is some truth to it because I came in super pumped and for a while worked overtime but as I received some warning shots from my body, I scoped down my work. When I got that feedback, my first response was “If people work their 40 hours, they should not feel threatened by my performance”.

• My point is that the data is not terribly off. Maybe 37% is too much, but 10% is the least I can agree with.

But it is this very group that kickstarted the layoffs in the name of “productivity.” It does not matter that Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and others had their best year. Companies optimize for shareholders and if they can reduce the waste by 10% (or 37%) they’ll go for it.

Today after 23 years, I have a relatively high level leadership position but it wasn’t always like this. As an introvert in a world that’s optimized for extroverts I had a long and painful learning curve.

Like most people I’ve failed more interviews than I made. Sometimes I walked out, most of the time, I was rejected. In this post, I will go through my top 3 favorite interview lessons hoping to shorten the learning curve for some of you who may be in the job market.

Disclaimer: I linked the names of the people that I had a great experience with (for recognition and appreciation). I also do acknowledge the risk of oversharing and accept the consequences because I believe as an industry, we’re better off having more transparency. If you want to share your experience without being personally identifiable, I highly recommend Glassdoor and Blind. Those platforms, however, have rules against how much information you can share and how long you can write. I wanted to pack these 3 together because there’s a theme here.

Datadog

Let’s get this out of the way: I ❤️ Datadog!

I believe one can tell a lot about the people behind a product just by using it. As we’ll see, Datadog didn’t disappoint.

Back in 2019 I’ve been their user for 3 years. I had great interactions with their sales engineer Misiu and sales executive Philip. As an engineer obsessed with performance, great UX and fantastic documentation I was inspired by their work and could totally see myself working at Datadog. Datadog leads the pack and won many awards!

OK, enough about Datadog. It’s starting to sound like a sponsored post 😄

If I recall correctly, I applied for a senior Node.js position to work on their OpenTelemetry and dd-trace open-source project. My team heavily depended on dd-trace. I had investigated their code extensively due to some bugs and had some ideas for improvement.

This was around the time I had learned Golang enough to feel confident using it as the weapon of choice, but my background was 8 years with JavaScript. Datadog agent was in Golang, so I saw the Node.js job as a chance to get my foot in the door and gradually shift to work on the agent.

My first point of contact was with the sales executive who referred me to their talent acquisition. The recruitment team were friendly, quick and the process was one of the best I had seen. In less than 1 week from the application, I went through the phone screening and tech screening.

Then I met my to-be team lead for a technical interview. Nice young engineer based in New York. He talked about the challenges they are facing and all of it sounded good. Their dd-trace relied on monkey-patching the Node.js API so I talked a bit about my ideas for improvement. Then he asked my opinion about working with the Node.js core team to introduce performance hooks that would allow APM (application performance monitoring) and enable OpenTelemetry integration in ES6.

I’m paraphrasing here because I don’t remember the details from 3 years ago. At the time I considered myself well-versed in JavaScript and had read both the good parts and bad parts.

So, I knew it well, but not well enough for the bar they were aiming for. They needed a JavaScript master AND C++ developer who could contribute to Node.js core on DataDog’s behalf. They needed a specialist. Alas, that wasn’t me. I had worked with frontend, backend, serverless, mobile, even graphic design and UX. But not exclusively with Node.js core. I knew how to make a product e2e but my understanding of the event loop wasn’t beyond what you could Google and read on blogs.

I was rejected for that position but still got kept in the system. The feedback was that they liked my attitude, but my skill level didn’t match expectations. When I’m hiring, I go for “Hire for Attitude, Train for Skills”.

I got to meet Alison who scheduled me with Marcus (this is not your average Marcus, he’s one of the founders of the company that developed the JRockit). He too knew a lot about performance and hinted on a new project (at the time) that would dramatically improve performance monitoring at the JVM level.

Unfortunately, they wanted a JVM pro (or someone who is at least interested to become one) but I kissed Java goodbye when Oracle bought Sun and had no intention to go back. I was deemed unfit for that position too.

I was constantly amazed by the amount of brainpower and talent that DataDog has amassed and my respect for their brand grew even more. This reveals that their success is less of an accident and more of a deliberate plan backed by hard work.

Key takeaways

• I got to meet people behind my favorite product and had many inspiring conversation

• I learned that my talent and skill profile is generalist, and I should not waste time on specialist positions

• Datadog job site

• Read more Datadog interview on Glassdoor

Spotify

OK, this is gonna look like it's going sideways but bear with me. 👌

It is hard to work in the Stockholm software market without ever bumping into someone from Spotify. You may bump into people from many famous brands without ever knowing but Spotify is different. With a strong employee branding, proud identity, and loudspeakers on full volume, you're sure to know if you had the pleasure to meet someone from Spotify.

I had my share of experience until I got a chance to work closely with Patrick who had been an EM and PM at Spotify.  Patrick’s narrative was more balanced. We used to talk a lot about the Spotify culture, how it evolved over time and lessons learned. Later I briefly got a manager who was an agile coach at Spotify and tried to rub some of that goodness on our team before throwing the towel.

This was when the Spotify model was hot. So, cargo culturs from across the planet were adopting it as the ultimate solution to all their dysfunctions. Jeremiah did a nice piece here if you’re interested. Anytime someone says, “the Spotify model” I can’t help but to think of this Karl Marx quote: "If anything is certain, it is that I myself am not a Marxist” (context).

Speaking of the father of communism, here’s the Spotify manifesto which is probably one reason behind the strong employer branding.

Note: I noticed the effect of employer branding is stronger on those who have just this one big brand in their CV, or their majority of their career has been at one company. Those who have experienced a few big brands are much more open-minded, modest and down to earth.

So, I had an idea what Spotify feels like from the inside and more importantly why I'd never work there.

Never say never! 😄

Fast forward to 2019 and an ex-colleague of mine who had recently joined Spotify invited me for a tour of their new office at central Stockholm. I worked close by so I figured it wouldn't hurt. I was curious.

I'm glad I went. It was jaw dropping. Every detail was stylish, thought through and to be brutally honest a bit like a golden cage. You can take a virtual tour here. Free food, regular hackathons, games, I don't recall everything, but one detail stuck with me: a VR room! Yes, a room fully dedicated to virtual reality… at a music streaming company! It was every bit obvious that they had money to burn. But how? Spotify hadn't been profitable for a long time. Artists have been complaining about how little they get paid. Some say, “all PR is good PR”. I don’t agree. To me it didn’t add up and wasn’t ethical. A VR room?

I don’t know if it was the magesty of their office or the free food my ex-colleague offered on behalf of Spotify; I ended up talking to his manager because they needed someone with my profile. Nice and friendly lady but I managed to make it awkward. I suck at hiding my thoughts (guess it's obvious to my readers 😅). The best strategy I came up with is to be me and shine my silliness in full glory!

Still touched by the VR room, I asked her what she thought about the artists who are not paid fairly. I don't remember her answer. Some corporate politically correct mumbo jumbos. The semi-interview ended with me saying that I'm interested in a staff engineer position. At the time I was working at Staff Engineer capacity without officially having the title. A promo was on the way, but I figured if I’m going to join Spotify, it has to be with a title bump or else I have to start from scratch and build a case, which could easily take a couple of years.

A few days later their TA (talent acquisition) set up a call. She said they like my profile but for a senior engineer position, not staff engineer. So, I politely declined.

I emailed my ex-colleague to see what's going on and whether he can get me some feedback from his manager who met me at their office. She wrote that she assessed that I don't “talk like their staff engineers”. I understand. One doesn’t question the whole business model of the company on the first interaction! 🤐

Key takeaways

• If you go in with negative prejudice and your heart is not with the company, it'll leak out during the interview. Don’t bother applying to a company you don’t resonate with. (But it’s totally fine for interview practice)

• Practice, practice, practice. Having a friend interview, you are one thing, going to an actual interview is another. There was one year I did 20 rounds of interviews and in total I think I’ve been at least to 60-80.

• Don’t miss an opportunity to be promoted while applying. This time it didn’t work, but at my current job I got promoted from Staff to Sr Staff when changing jobs.

• Don't take rejection poorly, especially if you're in a small market where people are connected. Reflect on what went wrong and move on.

• Spotify job site

• Read more Spotify interviews on Glassdoor

Shopify

This story started a decade ago. I was at the TicTail office back when they were a tiny Swedish startup. I won a silly competition called “CSS in the dark'' (basically you’d try to style a few divs to match a JPEG template without seeing the monitor).

After the event, I ended up talking to their founder and CTO who was hiring. I wasn’t interested. My problem? The office was too far. Now before you judge me, I have to say something about Stockholm's geography. Stockholm is composed of 14 islands. The most pragmatic way to connect these with public transportation is a star topology centered at TCentralen. I lived at the polar opposite side of town, which would translate to 2 hours commute per day, unpaid! Plus, I had a history of missing the change stations, so it'd occasionally add up to 45 minutes to that time. So, I politely declined.

Fast forward to 2020 and TicTail was part of the Canadian giant, Shopify, led by Tobias Lütkte, the second richest man in Canada (2 years later, 11th, after a layoff).

I was gearing up to leave Sweden. After elaborate research we decided on Toronto, Canada. The full reasoning can wait for another post but what I did was to reach out to my contacts on LinkedIn who were based in Toronto. Remember that CTO from a decade ago? He kindly replied and put me through the process for Shop Pay. Having worked at Klarna and living cashless for quite some time, I knew a thing or two about the domain and user experience.

My recruiter wasn’t the friendliest. She tried her best, but you could say she’s not passionate about the job (or me, it could be either or 🤣). It doesn’t matter but if you’re an employer reading this, please get your first impression right.

Every company has their own process. What was new to me at Shopify was the “life story” part. It’s documented here under “The process”. I was basically sitting for 1 hour talking to her about my life journey while she was taking notes. It was a bit unusual to say the least. I don’t know how my non-professional life would be relevant to the job, but hey, it was a data point they were gathering.

They also did an online reference check which is way deprecated in any company worth their salt (basically they send an email to someone you introduce to fill out a form about you). I called a friend and we got that sorted.

Then it came to salary negotiations and although my salary would almost double compare to Sweden, my life standard wouldn’t improve, all expenses considered.

Their mobility package was nice: they would pay a moving company to pack my sh*t and deliver it to a storage in Toronto. Meanwhile a legal team would fix the visa and residence for me, and my family and the company would pay for the family trip to Canada. 🍁And they’d provide 2 months free accommodation till I find a place.

The catch? If I get fired or quit during the first year of moving to Canada, I would have to pay back all the expenses for the nice mobility package. As it turns out Shopify did do a layoff later, so I consider it an a** saved!

I didn’t have to wait for all of that though. I could start working from Shopify’s Swedish office right off the bat till the visa is sorted out. In Sweden, I’d be getting paid a Swedish salary which was computed from my Canadian salary.

Those who’ve read my salary negotiation strategy know that I don’t put all eggs in one basket though. In parallel, I started the process with Discovery networks (through a connection) as a backup plan. Unlike the Shopify recruiter, Ana from Discovery was super nice and over the course of the interview I really felt guilty for not being too serious. Discovery had a great recruitment team, and they really got the first impression right.

As it turns out, I joined Discovery with a better pay than what Shopify would offer in Sweden. Part of it was my gut feeling, part of it was practical reasons that has nothing to do with Shopify.

This one wasn’t technically a rejection but goes to prove that building options puts you in power to choose your destiny.

Key takeaways

• Join meetups professional events to expand your network. Your network opens new doors. Options give you power over your destiny.

• Reach out to your network for advice and help

• Read through the terms of your contract. In this case, a friend with more experience told me it’s rather unusual for the employee to have to compensate the mobility package if they get fired/laid off.

• Never apply for 1 job. More about that on my salary negotiation strategy

• If you have the luxury of options, don’t ignore the gut feeling

• Shopify jobs

• Read more Shopify interviews on Glassdoor

Pro-tips

The job market is tough. Gergely did a good piece recently (🔒paywalled). TLDR; it’s the employers’ market and the bar is higher now. With the rapid advancements of AI, it is just the beginning for all practical purposes.

I sincerely wish this post will help you be more prepared, but I want to close with a few high-level takeaways:

• TA (talent acquisition) has an oversized role in the direction of the company —more than the C-suit (e.g. CEO). That’s because they get to pick what DNA adds to the company and where the culture gets its next meal (referring to the famous quote “culture eats strategy for breakfast”).

• You learn a lot about a company just going through the recruitment process. Just like dating, any positive or negative factor will be an order of magnitude more positive or negative after marriage (once you start working there). So keep your eyes open and ask the questions you want to learn more about.

• If you are part of the interview loop, take extreme caution to represent your company properly. Not only do you represent the face of the company, but you also build the first impression that shapes the candidate’s decision to join your company.

• The average applicant feels honored to even get an interview or job offer. Top talent plays a whole different ball game. Top talent has options (they have worked on it to earn their options: network, talent, education, etc.). If you’re after top talent, you need to make sure that your talent intake is optimized for a great first impression and a smooth interaction to filter the right ones that not only fit your company but add to your company.

• Our life on this planet is limited. Pandemic, war, climate, AI, … it feels like the threats never end but remember that every crisis is also an opportunity. Assess, Adapt, Act.

• If you haven’t, get a copy of Who Moved My Cheese (or watch this crappy animation on YouTube) do it please! That book is more relevant now than ever.

• There’s no failure. There are just lessons to learn. There are only two ways to learn: 1. make your own mistakes, 2. learn from the mistakes of others.

• Never take anything for granted. You may have a job today, but you never know when you’ll be back on the market again. Build options already. It is 10x easier to find a job while you’re already employed. My experience complies. Don’t waste that multiplier.

• For all 4 companies mentioned in this post, networking opened a door. I can’t stress this enough: if you want to guarantee your career, make sure to build connections and keep those links alive. You never know where someone ends up and what doors they can open for you. Also, if someone reaches out for help, do your best to open a door for them. It’s tough times, we could all use a bit of help.

• Note the “declined politely” part. You don’t want to burn any bridges even if you have no intention of working for that company again. The reason is because people move across the industry, and you never know where they’ll be when you’re in the job market again. I usually elaborate with honest reflection because a particular position is not a good fit at the time. More about feedback in an upcoming article.

• Instead of wasting time mass-applying for jobs, use your time to learn what’s hot in the market and apply deliberately where you want to work. Use Glassdoor, Blind and a few reddit groups like r/careeradvice and LinkedIn job ads to learn about the job market and companies. Choose with open eyes. Read the career site of the company. Many good companies (all 3 in this list) have enough detail about how their process looks like.

• When you get a job, be kind to candidates. Everyone applies with a lot of hopes and dreams. If you reject them, give them some feedback (in a future post I’ll discuss how to give feedback on the spot).

• Every time you’re rejected by something good, you’re actually being directed to something better. If you go in with this attitude, it’ll help to see rejection as a step toward success. Feedback and reflection are critical for it to work.

• If a company is interesting, apply even if it’s not 100% matching your criteria. The least that can happen is to practice interview in a real setup. The best thing that can happen is that you learn something new, and they actually are a match. You never know till you try, and the more you try the more you learn.

• If you screw up an interview, most companies don’t want to see you for a grace period (usually 6-12 months). However, they are obliged to remove all your personally identifiable information per your request. I live in the EU so after a failure, I request data erasure according to my GDPR rights, but there are similar rules across the world. Read about your right to be forgotten (or forgiven!).

• Interview is a sales and negotiation situation. There are many books in this domain that can help to both present yourself better but also get your worth.

• Companies are not charities. They have every intention to maximize profit by paying you less than the value you create. So do your homework and go prepared.

If you don’t want to subscribe, I’d still love to hear your feedback. Here’s the comments on HackerNews and here’s on LinkedIn. I liked DataDog’s reply there.

I used to read a lot, but there was always more to read.

Reading books is one of the greatest ways to acquire knowledge. It feels good to know and that’s exactly why many are addicted to books. There is such thing as “too much reading” and here are some symptoms:

• Craving to read a similar book not too long after finishing one

• Having not internalized the knowledge to shape behaviors and not practicing the wisdom of the book

• Name dropping and quote dropping out of context mostly shift the burden of proof to the author of a book that’s external to a given situation

• Not being able to recall key points from a book read in the past

• Brag about the “score” (vanity metrics like number of the books read per year, number of hours spent reading, etc.)

I used to read quantities

As a kid I had access to my dad’s large bookshelf. I used to build book towers with hard-covers and get lost in the world of pictures and illustrations before I could read. My dad, a university lecturer, author, and avid reader used to say:

People have many ideas, but they only talk about a few. Out of those spoken ideas, only the greatest are written down. And only a few written ideas get published. Books contain the distilled wisdom of humanity.

I grew up to be a bookworm with a big bookshelf of my own. I regularly hung out at the bookshops to hunt for new ones. Up until I got a kindle back in 2013, I bought hundreds of books per year and read at least half of them cover to cover.

With Kindle, everything changed. The convenience of effortlessly discovering new books, buying them with the touch of a button and reading them on a device that’s made for distraction free reading experience was one of the best things ever happened to me. Plus, I could carry my entire digital bookshelf with me.

I still bought some paper books but not as many as the digital ones. Later I came across Audible and bought many audio books too. For years I listened to audiobooks while commuting and before going to bed.

With all the paper books, kindle books and audible books I bought, I had a humble role in sending Jeff Bezos to space!😁

The incident that changed it all

4 years ago, I started working with a 3D web application. I looked at my bookshelf to see if I’ve got something about it and sure enough, I still had a paper book about that.

As I browsed the book, I saw that I had underlined many pages and even left some sidenotes (this was a habit I had with paper books but gave up on Kindle).

If I knew enough of the topic to have taken notes, I should have remembered reading the book. I didn’t! The book itself was printed in 2014 so I knew I must have read it sometime between 2014 to 2018, but I had no recollection of it whatsoever.

It was the kind of book that had coding exercises. Maybe I had read it too shallowly without doing the exercises. So, I searched my NAS and sure enough, I had some exercise code from the book in my backups.

It was a scary discovery. And a bit sad. As far as I was concerned, this was time wasted. And I asked myself: how many other books had I forgotten?

One possible reason is because I used to read fast. I even read a couple of books about how to read faster. That’s a habit from the time I was focused on gulping in as many books as possible: quantity-driven reading.

Something had to change.

Quality not quantity

That incident fundamentally changed my approach to reading. Instead of quantity, I switched focus to quality.

I carefully select only a few books and read them inside out. Multiple times. I read Kindle books on the computer and took notes in an app on my phone. Occasionally I buy the whispersync audio version and even the paper version of the book. I don’t want the medium to limit how I consume the content. With fewer books, I still spend less money buying different formats.

I no longer measure or break any quantitative records like the number of pages per week or number of books per year.

I only read when my brain can absorb new knowledge. I don’t listen to audiobooks when I cannot solely focus on the book. And when I read, I am very slow! I spend more time reflecting and digesting what I read. I read a little, think a little, take notes if needed and repeat. Sometimes I read the same paragraph multiple times to internalize what I’m reading. I prioritize understanding and critical thinking over vanity metrics. 🤔

This way, the information gets a better chance to sink in. And when a book is finished, I take a break before moving to another one. I will reread a book after a while just to refresh my mind and reflect on the new knowledge and experience that I’ve acquired after the last round.

I haven't read many books since 2018, but the ones I read, I understand very well. That’s why I’m picky about what book I invest in.

That is not to say that I read every book so slowly. Occasionally I come across a book that isn't worth rereading or even finishing. I still do shallow reading but mostly when it comes to news and trivial blog posts. ⌛

Quantity can be dangerous

When it comes to learning, quantity is not just a vanity metric, it can be downright dangerous.

Let’s see some examples:

• Bob says something that doesn’t align with what Alice has read in a top-selling book. Alice’s brain automatically categorizes Bob as an idiot and shuts her ears to whatever Bob has to say. It prevents Alice from understanding Bob’s world, his concerns, values and how his ideas came to be.

• Bob has picked up a few great ideas from multiple books and can confidently sound smart! Bob gets promoted at a mediocre company betting on him to lead the rest to a better world. A year into the new position, it turns out Bob doesn’t have a clue. He is full of quotes but not too much substance. The company lost a year, morale is low, and some key employees have left.

• Alice is facing a new and interesting challenge at work. Being the book nerd she is, she’s trying to do the best thing for her company and starts reading most of the books available in that realm. Time goes by and Alice hasn’t taken any action. She’s busy reading and coming up with a perfect plan. This is what Matt Sandrini calls “infocrastination”: “Looking for more information is often a buffer to put off taking action and avoid any possible mistake. Reading a book is safe, taking action is hard.”

• Bob is a hard-core fan of leadership, management and “agile” books. He loves to read about how great managers “turn the ship around”. But at his day job, he has little success even nudging the ship. Unless we reach Matrix level knowledge transfer, written words (or even multimedia) can only transfer part of the author’s knowledge. Bob needs to put the book aside and gain some experience for the situation he is in and maybe write a book of his own someday. Bob thinks his ship is too bulky to move and switches ships (jobs) hoping for better luck.

• Alice just finished a great book about how Google uses OKRs to align the focus of the organization. So, she starts cargo culting what worked at Google at her mid-size company where software is not a first-class product. Equipped with smart words and the wisdom of the book, Alice manages to convince the leadership to set some OKRs but the developers who are responsible to measure and act to those metrics see no value. Even when they do measure, Alice has little to no practical methodology to make the best out of it. Everyone grows out of OKRs. Everyone but Alice. Alice knows that every quarter she should scream louder till others “get it”.

• Bob is a C-level leader. He has a set of dogmatic principles that are never to be broken. He kindly formulated them into short proverb-like chunks that are easy to remember and quote. “Don’t build what you can buy”, “if you don’t trust the data, bring your own data”, “nail it before scale it”, “if you can’t measure it, it isn’t worth improving”, etc. These quotes are supposed to contain distilled wisdom but unfortunately, they are often used to evaluate complex situations to make the right decisions. Frustrated by the confused org, he buys a copy of his favorite book for the entire organization. The hypothesis is that “if you drop your favorite books on people, they’ll grow to become your favorite people”. The company loses time and money while more people become like Bob: experienced in the world of the author, confused in the reality of their company’s world.

• Alice was depressed many years ago until she came across a self-help book that made her feel better. After finishing the book, the old feelings crawled back to her life as well as the old habits that drove her into depression. She managed to keep them at bay by reading more self-help books. She even went to self-help seminars. Most people saw her as a confident, smart and joyful person to be around. She saw her self-help book addiction as a medicine, a tax to feel good. She made a commitment to read at least 10 pages per day to “get high”. Only a handful of very close friends knew that deep inside, she was still struggling. Alice herself denied it because “to make it, you have to fake it”. Unfortunately, the worst lie is the one we tell ourselves. No one saw it coming when Alice took her life. Had she sought medical help instead of covering it up with books, probably she would have survived.

Bob and Alice are fictional names, and this is not a DM but I can go on writing more scenarios where a quantity driven shallow reader gets hurt or worse: hurt others.

Learning < Practice

When I used to read a lot, it was common to crave more when I was done with one book. I rarely gave myself the time to internalize what I had just read and practice to master it.

What I needed wasn’t more inspiration or insight. It was to build new habits based on what I learned.

Motivation is what gets you started. Habit is what keeps you going. —Jim Rohn

Summary test

Reading books is no guarantee to make one smarter. One can easily fall victim to the illusion of knowledge. Combine that with the Dunning-Kruger effect and you get someone who knows enough to be confident but unwise enough to cause catastrophic damage.

Without taking the time to internalize a book’s ideas and giving the brain a chance to rewire itself, the new knowledge remains external to the brain (one symptom is not being able to remember it, like in my case). One way to make the new learning useful is to act on it.

One does not have to wait to learn everything before using it in work. It’s in fact better to learn and act on learning incrementally.

If a person cannot write an accurate summary of the book that doesn’t pass by the author, they haven’t understood it.

If you liked a book in the past, try to write a summary to see how much you remember. If you don’t remember much, maybe it’s time to reread it.

Diversity

If you read many books there's a good chance that the same message may be repeated over and over again. That’s because a good book is a bit like a magnet: it attracts similar books to you (or you to them, depending on how you look at it 😁).

To acquire better wisdom, you can read books with opposite views to actively expose your brain to different sides of the argument. Nonetheless, there is a likelihood that if you haven’t really understood one view, you will have a hard time analyzing and evaluating the second one or be biased toward the view that’s presented or elaborated better.

You don’t need too many books to learn more, you need the right books (efficiency) with the right combination (effectiveness).

Tips

• It is better to read some books than none.

• Too many books can lead to the opposite effect. Read in moderation.

• There’s a point of diminishing return when reading the same type of book. Diversify what you read.

• The pace of reading varies from person to person but also for the same person depending on what else is going on in their lives as well as the type of the book. Don’t measure pace. Focus on quality.

• Slow reading (reflecting on the insights) is better than fast reading.

• Slow reading does not mean spending less time reading, but striving to get deeper.

• If you can’t remember audiobooks that were read to you, stop filling your “free” time with them. Set aside some focused time to listen distraction-free.

• Dedicate focused time to reading for maximum efficiency

References

• The Power Of Reading Less

• Read Less But Read Well : Why Reading More Isn’t Always the Best Thing to Do

If you’ve read this far, maybe you can help me learn something new by sharing your thoughts and counter-arguments. 🙏You can also follow me on LinkedIn. I write about technical leadership, software, growth and productivity.

This is fundamentally wrong! The quality of experience cannot be measured with a quantitative metric.

Year in nature

Let us start with what we know: a year is the time it takes for the earth to go around the sun one revolution. Some animals sleep half of that time while others go through multiple generations. A hard year may wipe out a species while making another one stronger.

The point is: not all years are the same and not all years are experienced the same.

Take trees for example. Seeds become saplings (young trees) in a year. Trees get thicker with each year.

Growth is more significant at the start. After that, time adds strength but not necessarily in a significant way. With enough time, the tree decays and falls under its own weight.

There is a point of diminishing return where more time doesn’t mean more strength.

We humans tend to think of ourselves as separate from nature, yet our growth path is not that different from a plant!

This is how the career growth of knowledge worker looks like:

Not everyone gets to see the end but it’s inevitable. If not for the ever-evolving tech and domain landscape, the brain (our core tool) diminishes over time. At some point we fail to unlearn the old and learn the new. At some point, it is cheaper to hire a fresh graduate with up-to-date education, unlimited energy, and ambition but less pay demands and baggage (past experience and opinions).

The inability to let go of old knowledge and adopt new knowledge blocks the growth of many senior engineers. 🧀🐭 For knowledge workers, the ability to unlearn is as important as the ability to learn.

Where are our elderly?

In what resembles the fermi paradox of a knowledge worker career, it’s fair to ask:

where is are our elderly?

Does the demography present at our workplace really represent the demography of knowledge worker graduates 40 years ago?

I know of some former programmers who ended up as taxi drivers, antique dealers, or stock investors.

The lucky ones climb the corporate ladder high enough not to be threatened by fresh talent but avoided by the very people they are supposed to “empower”.

They function as the wise elderly that our species has evolved to look up to in times of uncertainty. They have mastered the art of delivering advice that is vague enough to apply to the common pain but not specific enough to justify the pay.

Those are the lucky ones. There is also a champion minority. I know of a handful of them who defy the laws of nature and still code at the age of 60+.

I have immense respect for any knowledge worker who is still in the game in an industry that is known for all sorts of bias including ageism.

If you are aiming to be among the champions, think again! Are you in the top 1% of your industry right now? If not, it doesn’t hurt to have a backup plan.

Stimulus and response

Back to where we started. Year is the wrong metric to measure experience.

The quality of experience depends on two main factors:

• Stimulus: the challenges one is exposed to

• Response: how one handles those challenges

Being exposed to the same type of stimulus reinforces the response. Variations in the stimulus leads to mastery. Practice makes perfect.

There’s a point of diminishing return where longer exposure yields minimal improvement.

That’s the best time to change and jump on faster growth tragectory:

If we internalize the fact that there’s an end, why passively wait in fear instead of actively taking control and embracing change?

We are notoriously bad at understanding exponential change.

Nature is efficient. It is natural to want maximum pay for minimal effort. Why quit at the peak?

We all crave comfort, but life has other plans.

Artificial death

You’ve probably heard:

What doesn’t kill you make you stronger

It’s a testimony to the impact of challenges on our very essence. We are an adaptable species and that is key to our survival and evolution.

The thesis is: exposing ourselves to challenges, even synthetic ones, makes us stronger. i.e. more experienced.

Read more

My right to freedom of expression isn't an entitlement to offend others. But the right to get offended is not an entitlement to bend reality.

There's only so much lipstick you can put on a pig before the pig gets lost. Pig doesn't even like lipstick! 💄

While I can't control how others feel, I can try to clarify the obvious.

There are two main reasons I share my thoughts or links publicly:

1. To inspire others

2. To grow through the feedback

The second reason is equally important for me personally. But every message demands an appropriate channel to maximize the return. My motto is this:

Praise publicly 📢, criticize privately 👥️

Our understanding of reality is limited by our senses and perception. I do my best to seek and speak the truth as I understand it. If I have a blind spot, please reach out to shine a light to your perspective. Let’s have a dialogue. Together we can evolve, separated we devolve.

For me personally, truth has a higher priority than social contracts.

We humans are not really truth-seeking animals. We are social animals.

... take you back in time 10,000 years and you’re in a small village. If you go along to get along, you can survive. You can procreate. If you’re the village truth-teller, you might get clubbed to death in the middle of the night. Truths are often… They don’t want to be heard because important truths can be uncomfortable, they can be awkward, they can be exhausting.

They can make people defensive even if that’s not the intent. But any high performing organization, whether it’s a sports team, a business, a political organization, an activist group, I don’t care what it is, any high performing organization has to have mechanisms and a culture that supports truth-telling. One of the things you have to do is you have to talk about that. You have to talk about the fact that it takes energy to do that. —Jeff Bezos on Lex Fridman podcast

However, as I often say:

Don’t confuse common narrative with the truth.

Truth is like a mirror. There are two types of people who look at a mirror:

1. Those who get angry at the mirror or try to change it to see what they want

2. Those who use it to improve what they see and be what they want

Action points

If you read something public that feels like a criticism to you, stop and reflect:

1. Not everything is about you. Where was the message posted? If the audience was larger than 1, there’s a good chance it wasn’t intended as a personal attack! Why would someone use a public platform to send a message that should have been private? To raise confident kids, many parents refrain from exposing their children to a colorful picture of reality. Guess what? Those snowflakes grow to believe that they are the center of the world and interpret everything as a celestial signal targeting them. Let those kids grow.

2. There are better ways than going through the chain of commands! As I’ve written previously picking the right manager is my most important career decision. If you play the hierarchy card, I’ll hear about it, but the feedback will be so anonymized and unspecific that I’ll not be able to take it seriously. Instead of abusing side channels to enforce the cancel culture, why not take your thoughts directly to me and deliver that feedback constructively? That way we can have a dialogue about intentions and feelings.

3. Forgive the mistakes. There's always a risk of hurting some feelings when saying something or doing something. The more significant the consequences, the higher that risk. The only people who don’t make mistakes are the ones who don’t do anything! I do therefore, I make mistakes. You can forgive or hold a grudge. The choice is yours, and if you don’t let me know through appropriate channels, there’s a high risk that you’ll feel sad again.

4. Life is evolution and vice versa. Personally, it is worth it when it can drive evolution. But naturally change triggers resistance. Evolution doesn’t happen in vacuum. You are part of the environment that hammers ideas to move forward. Share your counterarguments and let's evolve together. You cannot make an omelet without breaking some eggs.

5. Internalize the fact that one cannot please everybody. People are different and that diversity is the strength of society. Even one person's feelings fluctuate depending on what they're going through. Everyone is fighting a war you know nothing about. Be nice but lying nice. Just civil and polite! It is OK to have a disagreement. What is not OK is to skip a logical argument and go directly to back stab. “You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life.”

6. Use that as inspiration to improve. Unbelievably, I too feel insecure reading random thoughts from time to time! Sometimes, I just think about a counter argument in my head and move on. Sometimes I share my thoughts and try to learn more. Some other times, I see the opposite point and get inspired to improve. It depends. Pick your fights!

7. Feel free to ignore. Don't let your insecurity take the best of you. 💔 Scroll on, unfollow, and ignore if you don't find value in exploring diverse views and opposite ideas. I am not going to sacrifice my integrity just because someone chooses to misinterpret my message. I exercise my freedom of speech to the extent it doesn’t conflict with the law. However, I’m not the only person in the world. There are many voices, and it may take a toll on the brain to focus on every single one.

8. Try to get me fired. Obviously, this is not the first time someone goes behind my back, so I’ve built a safety net to minimize the negative impact of getting fired. Cancelling and removing people is an option that has been exercised throughout history and I’m not dumb enough to think it’ll not happen to me. So, if you think l have malicious intentions, please go ahead, and do your best fighting it. If the people in power buy into that without giving me a chance to defend myself, I’m 100% fine with that and in fact want it. You’re doing me a service; thanks in advance 🙌

9. Get help. Reading everything negatively might be a symptom of a deeper issue like depression. I know it sounds like I don’t take accountability for my action, but if I’m not the only one you take things personal from, please visit a certified psychologist to get professional help (yes, hearing it from your “enemy” is the last thing you want to hear, but you don’t have to tell the Dr where you got the idea from). Peace ✌

10. Words ≠ Actions! Words can hurt. Words can lift. But it's important to remember that they're fundamentally made of a different material than actions. Decoupling the words from actions shields you from manipulation. No compliment or insult will impact you. 📝 The words can only complete your mental image of who emitted those words. 💡 A mental trick that helps is to add "in my opinion..." at the start of everything people say. Unless it's math, what's said is usually an instant emotion mixed with random quotes disguised as fact!

On self-censorship

There are many types of censorship: state censorship, corporate censorship, religious censorship, etc. The worst type of censorship is self-censorship.

If someone thinks others should bend reality avoiding a sensible argument, they will be disappointed. If calling bullshit is not nice, creating bullshit is the ultimate crime.

Life is too short to feel hurt about someone else's opinion. They're too busy living their own lives anyway. Live yours. 🎁

The cost of freedom

Freedom has a price. I hope this post will get me a discount but if not, here are some tips to maximize it for me:

1. Build a case. Having a link to this post is handy but gather more evidence from social media or internal communication channels.

2. Build an army. Find allies. Speaking behind my back can help identify other people with the same grudge.

3. Use formal leverage. HR is your friend. Do your homework and take the evidence out of its original context and put it in the context of a new story. We humans have a thing for stories.

4. Be a victim: go to the “authorities” with a victim mentality. Make it personal and about you. Before meeting HR or any person of influence, do a self-affirmation: “I am the victim and with your help I’ll make the world a better place.”

5. Have an end in mind. Is the goal to get me fired or change team or something else. Think about it beforehand because if everything is working your way, you are going to find yourself in a position to deliver the final sting. Be deliberate.

Good luck! 🙌

The payment

Every organization needs truth tellers. They act as canary in the coal mine.

Good decisions need good data and insight. They need truth. Truth is not always pretty. There are ways to make it pretty, but someone you need to stare into its ugly face and do something accordingly.

I like to think truth-telling is part of my brand. This attitude, as risky as it may sound, has generated more opportunities than it has taken away.

If you manage to send me the bill, I’ll happily pay it because I rather not work with leaders who want to run blind.

My experience shows that there’s always a place which values truth and frankness so don’t worry about me.

• Peace time: the focus is on effectiveness, doing the right thing

• War time: the focus is on efficiency, doing the thing right.

In times of stress, companies go into war mode, i.e., the focus is on efficiency and productivity.

The only way for the company to make a profit is to have a margin between the money it makes from its customers and the expenses. And employee payroll is usually the main chunk of those expenses. When that balance is threatened, layoffs are in order.

In the software sector, these were the headlines just in the last few days:

• Oracle gears up to lay off thousands

• Microsoft sells its lay off as reorg

• Facebook (being nasty as usual) hides the lay offs behind performance reviews

• Tesla being Elon’s show, lays off due to his “super bad feelings”

• Ford lays off 8K

• Rivian 5%

• Google? keep reading…

Google has been a respected leader in the software industry for a long time. This internal memo from their CEO reveals some interesting bits:

1. Even a giant (both in terms of number of employees and revenue) is going into cost saving mode. The sh*t is serious! 😬

2. Although they're slowing down recruitment due to "uncertain global economic outlook", when they do hire, the focus is on "engineering, technical and other critical roles". Phew! 😅

Disclaimer: this post is by no means an endorsement of Google or layoffs. The goal here is to elaborate how war time strategy brings focus to a company.

"Scarcity breeds clarity"

Apart from slowing down hiring, Google asks employees to "consolidate where investments overlap and streamline processes".  This is a call to focus on "pausing development and re-deploying resources to higher priority areas".

In the memo, Sundar Pichai says “scarcity breeds clarity” which really resonates with the story I am about to share.

My story from the days of glory

Back in 2016 I joined a media company. Little did I know, I was part of a newly established product and tech organization which was created solely to compete with Google and Facebook.

The reason? Media traditionally relied on advertisement revenue but since Google and Facebook knew way more about their users, they could deliver targeted advertisements. This was a more effective way to reach consumers and yielded a higher bang for the buck for advertisers. Google and Facebook ate the media's lunch!

But this media company wasn’t going down without a fight. Equipped with advice from McKinsey and enjoying deep pockets at the time, it threw money at the problem and hired some of the smartest people I had the honor to work with.

It was there where I first met an actual xoogler (ex-Googler) in the flesh! There were many, including the CTO. And a few from Facebook, Spotify, and other media companies. It felt like we took a page from the “Art of War”:

The opportunity of defeating the enemy is provided by the enemy himself.

—Sun Tzu

Fast forward 2 years later (2018) it became apparent that a media company focusing on the small Nordic countries (Norway and Sweden) is no match for American giants all while traditional media was losing popularity.

The company broke in two halves and the CEO took the “better” half with him. You see, this wasn’t your average media company. It had diversified its portfolio through buying many startups, most of which were in the so-called “classified marketplaces” (like eBay or Craigslist). Most of those brands went to a new company led by the original CEO. The media part (where I was working) remained and got a new CEO.

The new CEO

Disclaimer: this is my recollection of the events written 4 years later. And just to clarify, I wasn’t in “the room” where these decisions were made. My information is based on hearsay. My narrative is about my experience being part of this transition.

It took a few months for the new CEO to find the ropes. Then came a benign announcement about some reorg in her immediate leadership team.

To us engineers at the leaf nodes of the organization tree, it wasn’t particularly big news. CEO could do whatever she pleases.

We couldn’t care less about those high-level changes. If anything, we were eagerly waiting for more to see a tangible change that justified breaking the company into pieces.

And more came! Over the next few months, the CEO reports started renovating their own sub-orgs and the changes eventually trickled down to our level.

Expect fast results

Throughout my time at that company, I remember “innovation” being a constant motto. In one form or another, it was everywhere, at every high-level communication, product planning and even the company slogan!

I didn’t see much innovation in the old days before the company split. We were just creating “yet another…”: yet another login screen, yet another CMS, yet another ad inventory, yet another news site.

I remember seeing an Oculus Rift VR headset at the office one day. I tried them for the first time. What an amazing experience!

I asked: “Why do we have these?”

I was told “to experiment with new ways of telling stories”.

Yet by the time I left 5 years later, I didn’t see any VR content on our news sites.

On retrospect, one of the main reasons that the company failed to capitalize its investment on the fresh top talent was time. It naively threw money at the problem and burned through its budget.

But it takes time for the new people to get to know the business, tech and organization. We had very smart people, but they didn’t get the time to deliver an impact. The market pressure was intense, and this last push was too late, no matter how expensive.

The failure of the new product and tech org and the ensuing collapse of the company was as much an external factor (traditional media losing popularity, market competition) as it was internal.

This was a classic example of “culture eats strategy for breakfast”. Becoming a smaller company and focusing on media was a step in the direction that matched the culture.

The culture that ate

In a truly Scandinavian spirit, each team enjoyed a high degree of autonomy. We were heavily siloed. Each team had their own tooling, process, plans and (depending on who you asked) different definitions of the company mission and vision.

Aligned autonomy is the holy grail of productivity. More on that in a future article.

I wouldn’t go as far as calling it “total chaos”. Somehow, through the good will, blood and sweat of engineers implementing e2e features across teams, it worked. Those handful of engineers cross pollinated between the silos and broke free from the thick walls of their silos.

It wasn’t a smooth ride though. The end users could see the consequences of the silos when they navigated the site.

The focus

It makes sense in retrospect: the new product and tech org was filled with smart people with high salaries. And when it came the time to lay people off like extra rows in an Excell sheet, it made sense to sort them by salary to maximize saving while minimizing head count loss.

At the top were the consultants. Nordic countries have very strong job safety laws that protect the workers. But for companies to stay competitive, they need a mechanism to cope with fluctuating needs in the market demand. And that’s where consultants come in. The laws are not as strict when hiring and firing consultants. For the most part, they are treated like regular employees, but they enjoy higher pay due to the higher risk that they take.

Layoff put their neck on the line first.

To do it in the most humane way, the consultants were offered a choice to either convert to full-time employees or leave. Many left, but a few took the offer.

As the company was inevitably slowing down its innovation, many ambitious skilled people jumped ship. There was a period where we got goodbye emails almost on a weekly basis. “It was an honor working with you, but now it’s time to take new challenges, blah blah”.

It’s a huge red flag when respected leadership leaves the company, and we had many. With every great leader we lost, a dam that was holding back shit broke. We were exposed! It was demoralizing.

It’s a lie to say I wasn’t speculating about leaving but the vacuum that was left by some of my smart ex-colleagues provided a great opportunity to learn and grow so I stayed and grew a lot just by filling in their seats.

One thing I really liked about the new CEO was her monthly live all-hands which ended with questions and answers. We used Sli.do to ask any questions anonymously, and the CEO answered honestly. Thanks to those monthly all-hands, we started to have a better alignment at a high level. It helped the entire company to get the same memo. It greatly facilitated our collaboration across teams because we were sailing towards the same north star.

I work with strategies these days. A proper strategy has a clear diagnosis paired with a guiding policy and coherent actions. At least that’s the format I operate upon based on the Good Strategy Bad Strategy. I didn’t see a single document with those elements, yet the entire company was aligned with the CEO.

The unwritten cost-saving strategy turned into a great opportunity for people across the board to bring their best and collaborate.

Smash them silos

I worked at the Core Platform team. Not to bore you with the details, we made a white label news site platform which could be used by any of the 20+ brands the company owned. We were at the epicenter of the action (or so it felt). But in every direction we looked, we saw silos.

We were sandwiched between the brands pursuing their own objectives and the upstream CMS teams which didn’t give what we needed in a timely manner due to being too distant from the end users. This was a symptom. The root cause was our tech fragmentation and lack of product-minded engineers.

Inevitably those silos followed their own objectives and priorities —sometimes conflicting. There was a lot of duplicated effort. For example, two brands had two different paywall implementations all the way to the edge CDN layer.

You cannot collaborate when you don’t coordinate —I used to say in frustration

The cost-saving initiative was an objective sent from heavens!

Gradually, the cost-saving strategy smashed those walls. It started with an initiative to consolidate our observability tooling which gave us great visibility into what’s running across the stack from the users’ browsers all the way to the CDN, rendering engine, API, config, and CMS.

We cross-referenced that data with our cloud bills to spot opportunities for cutting costs. Over the course of the next 12 months, we killed many servers, rewrote some to serverless and re-architectured part of the stack.

Generalist vs Specialist

The company terminated the expensive contractors and we, the regular employees, had to fill in. They also deprecated the specialized QA (quality assurance) or DevOps titles, which forced us, engineers, to put the operation hat on and fully own the quality aspects of the code.

There was an uproar internally, but as the time passed by, what didn’t kill us made us stronger. Personally, I learned a lot about operations and cloud computing during that period and took multiple courses on AWS and learned Terraform, Kubernetes, Datadog, etc.

I entered the company as a front-end specialist, dug into backend and quit as a fully grown SRE (site reliability engineer).

Up until that job, I had always written the code and thrown it over the metaphorical wall for the “DevOps” (operations in actuality) to handle. For quality control, I relied on the QA when it was available, and left it to unit tests when it wasn’t.

The new “generalist profile” that the situation grew us into, was indeed very empowering.

Not only could I touch anything from the CI/CD pipeline to the integration tests and performance monitoring, but I was also expected to. Hell, I had admin access to the most critical accounts behind the face of the company. My entire team did!

I’m sure the end users saw the benefit too because the sites became snappier as we did less behind the scenes and the things we did, we optimized for performance and maintainability.

FinOps

By the end of that year, my colleagues Emil and Martin and I practically acted as FinOps.

I remember that I provisioned an AWS Lambda for a hack day project and 2 weeks later, Emil was tapping my shoulder to shut it down. This would save us a grand total of 2.1 cents per month! We were savages like that!

What’s more, we started collaborating with other teams to find what tech stack they are running and whether there are different solutions to the same problem.

Previously our collaboration stopped at the API level. Now, we were taking a peek behind the curtain.

Sure enough we found a bunch of opportunities, which were mostly remnants of the good old autonomous days of that McKinsey-inspired product and tech org. We killed them when we could and rewrote them when we couldn’t. It’s not like we had anything better to do.

Our primary objective was to keep the lights on and the heads above water. This was existential. We were determined to cut the costs or a lay off would be inevitable.

Sidenote: a Swedish lay off is not as dramatic as it sounds. There are tons of safety nets in place to make sure you don’t end up sleeping in the streets during the harsh Nordic winters. The strong presence of unions also makes sure that companies don’t fire people out of spite.

The layoffs didn’t happen, but that year we got a 0 Kr raise. Yes, that means we essentially got a pay cut considering inflation. But hey, it’s not like we were innovating. It was a great learning and growth opportunity.

Quit

That period of cost saving work eventually turned from a fun investigative work to a routine chase-and-kill mechanical chore. There was no sign of light at the end of the tunnel either. The company was stable at a level that it was comfortable with.

Growth and comfort do not coexist. — Ginni Rometty

Eventually I decided that I’ve had enough of FinOps and got a full-time position as a SRE at a global media company. Emil and Martin quit within a few months after me.

The story didn’t end bad though: the sites are still up and despite us three removing our salary burden from the company, we all got higher salaries offsetting the impact of the inflation on our own pocket! win-win!

Unsustainable

When the body is under stress, it goes into fight and flight mode. Adrenaline and cortisol increase the blood pressure to the muscles while limiting growth. It makes evolutionary sense. There’s no reason for the body to spend resources on growing your nails when you’re running from a tiger. Longer nails do not impact the tiger’s appetite! 🐅

When Sundar asks Googlers for "pausing development and re-deploying resources to higher priority areas", he’s sending clear stress signals. When he’s saying that new recruitment is limited to "engineering, technical and other critical roles", he’s talking about pumping blood into the muscles.

But this level of stress is not sustainable long term. Companies can only go so long in “war time” mode before the employees get exhausted and leave for a “peace time” company.

The final paragraph from Sundar’s memo is interesting:

Scarcity breeds clarity. It’s what drives focus and creativity that ultimately leads to better products that help people all over the world. That’s the opportunity in front of us today, and I’m excited for us to rise to the moment again.

Conclusion

We took the following steps to optimize for cost:

1. Reduce the consultant workforce and open an opportunity for the regular employees to fill in. You don’t need more people. You need clearer objectives. Give people mandate to execute the high-level cost-saving strategy.

2. Set up proper metrics in place to have a clear picture of the spending. You cannot improve what you don’t measure. For cloud costs, we set up observability metrics (read Are You Tracking the Right Metrics?)

3. Systematically start reducing costs from the most impactful to the least impactful (not from low hanging fruit). Approach the cost optimization like a product. This means a prioritization framework can come in handy.

4. Have an end in mind. “War time” has an expiration date and a cost to pay afterwards. It’s a bit like borrowing from the future growth of the company to fix the immediately burning fire.

This is my first post to Substack. I’ve been writing on Medium since 2015 and prior to that on Wordpress since 2012. If you like what you read, why not follow me on LinkedIn or subscribe here? I’m still trying to figure this thing out but I write about technical leadership, web architecture and JavaScript.

Update: Also read Layoffs Don't Tell the Whole Story

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