A phrase I’ve heard quite a bit lately when discussing roles on a product engineering team, or whether a given engineer should be on a team at all, is “well, surely someone is better than nothing. We’re still getting more done than if we didn’t have them”. The context varies, but the assumption…

One of the underlying truths of the wave of #MeToo stories is that when human beings are reduced to sex objects—whether they’re directly preyed upon or merely undermined—it doesn’t just cause them personal trauma. It also influences the industry they’re in by driving smart people to take their…

In the spirit of Adam Wiggins’ inspiring list of Herokuvalues which was published when he left the company that heco-founded, I wanted to publish a list of my own now that I’ve transitionedaway. My time at Heroku was easily the most valuable learning experience of my life,and I’ll always remember my…

One of the areas I often see senior engineers struggle with, is raising junior engineers to the next level. Often this is because we don’t give them the space to explore, learn and understand how to approach problems for themselves. We’re going to look at three different scenarios to illustrate how…

O ne day last summer, around noon, I called Athena, a 13-year-old who lives in Houston, Texas. She answered her phone—she’s had an iPhone since she was 11—sounding as if she’d just woken up. We chatted about her favorite songs and TV shows, and I asked her what she likes to do with her friends. “We…

I recently read a story here titled “ We fired our top talent. Best decision we ever made. ” Lets have a seat, you and I. We need to talk. If you haven’t read the story I linked to, take about 10–15 minutes or so, read up, and soak it all in. Done? Fantastic. Lets dissect this, because there is so…

“You will never be able to understand any of what I’ve created. I am Albert F***ing Einstein and you are all monkeys scrabbling in the dirt.” And so our resident genius, our Dr. Jekyll, explosively completed his transformation into Mr. Hyde. He declared this in front of the product design team,…

Neasden Control Centre for HBR I was at a dinner with eight highly successful professional women recently, ranging in age from 35 to 74. Their stories were typical of research I have been conducting on dual-career couples. One had just been given a huge promotion opportunity in another country, but…

In 2014, Monroe was a trafficking victim in California. She found her clients by advertising on SFRedbook, the free online erotic services website. One day, she logged into the site and discovered that federal authorities had taken it down . Law enforcement hoped that closing the site would reduce…

A couple of days ago, I had the opportunity to assess prospective new people managers, or Talent Leads, as they are called at trivago. There were 24 candidates in total, and I got to interact with eight of them. The judges teamed up in pairs. My colleague Anita and me did a one-on-one simulation…

Marion Barraud for HBR Gender equality remains frustratingly elusive. Women are underrepresented in the C-suite , receive lower salaries , and are less likely to receive a critical first promotion to manager than men . Numerous causes have been suggested, but one argument that persists points to…

Your coworker asks you a slightly unclear question. How do you answer? I think asking questionsis a skill (see How to ask good questions ) and that answering questionsin a helpful way is also a skill! Both of them are super useful. To start out with – sometimes the people asking you questions don’t…

Rebecca Garcia was 12 years old when she bought her first domain name. She asked her dad for his credit card to purchase the address. He didn't think she knew how to actually buy a site. "When my parents saw the credit card bill and it had, like, XoAeriesGirloX or something, they called the company…

#Antifa and #Berkeley were hot topics last weekend in America — and in Russia Social media has an important role in shaping perceptions of current events, as well as influencing mainstream news coverage of those events. Platforms like Twitter provide real-time access to events going on around the…

When we asked Fidji Simo what she wanted to share with our readers, she polled her team at Facebook to see what they would highlight as her core competency. What attribute or habit has prompted her rocket-fueled rise through the company’s ranks? There was quick and enthusiastic consensus: Simo has…

In the past week, Dr. Jennifer Conti has seen two patients who would be perfectly screwed if House Republicans had their way. One, Conti told Vogue, was lied to at a crisis pregnancy center posing as an abortion clinic: told that her pregnancy was 12 weeks along when in fact she was 21 weeks in, and…

Techniques for collaboration Asking for help can be hard, but it’s a great chance to practice collaborative problem-solving. Photo by Samuel Zeller . You reboot your development server, but it happens again: err_node_unsafe . This wasn’t here yesterday. What changed? It’s 9:48 in the morning and…

All my models start messy. Yet, I find that my messy models are actually quite useful. It forces me to acknowledge my ignorance. The longer I feign ignorance, the longer it takes for the mess to surface. The more I appeal to my ego with “Hey, look! My model is very cool!”, the longer I delay…

Writing declarative, readable and flexible React components using render props instead of HOCs Yes, I’m breaking up with higher order components in React. Mostly. I’d been seeing this other composition pattern on the side for a while. We met initially in some libraries like React Motion and the…

J ustin Rosenstein had tweaked his laptop’s operating system to block Reddit, banned himself from Snapchat, which he compares to heroin, and imposed limits on his use of Facebook . But even that wasn’t enough. In August, the 34-year-old tech executive took a more radical step to restrict his use of…

Facebook’s News Feed. LinkedIn’s 'Who’s Been Viewing Your Profile' feature. And now Twitter’s move toward 280 characters per tweet. Before these features saw the light of day, there were long debates. Take it from Twitter Group PM and Slack Director of Core Product Paul Rosania , who has made a…

The past five posts explored what it means to be a team, the five levels of teamwork, how to build performance, the four major team player types, and the four stages of team development. It’s important that leaders set the proper context–the atmosphere–for teamwork. Remember, team work is not an end…

“Cada cabeza es un mundo” — Street Art by Juegasiempre / DjLu in Bogotá, Colombia As an engineering leader, I value trust and believe that individual contributors should be involved in architectural and high level technical decision making. I consider every line of code to be a decision made on…

Las Vegas police stand guard along the streets outside the Route 91 Harvest Country music festival grounds on Sunday. David Becker/Getty Images Implicit in all political coverage by the media is the belief that political actors matter. That what they say and do shapes the larger landscape of…

Last night, the United States experienced the deadliest mass shooting in modern American history. At least 58 people are dead and over 500 more wounded. No, that’s not a typo: More than 500 people were injured in one single incident. As tens of thousands enjoyed a music festival on the streets of…

T here were six hours during the night of April 10, 2014, when the entire population of Washington State had no 911 service. People who called for help got a busy signal. One Seattle woman dialed 911 at least 37 times while a stranger was trying to break into her house. When he finally crawled into…

Now is exactly the time to talk about climate change, and all the other systemic injustices — from racial profiling to economic austerity — that turn disasters like Harvey into human catastrophes. Turn on the coverage of the Hurricane Harvey and the Houston flooding and you’ll hear lots of talk…

MITCH MCCONNELL was visibly distraught after the Republicans’ “skinny repeal” of Obamacare was defeated in the Senate, but he was not too out of sorts to get in a dig at Europe. The majority leader wondered acidly what ideas Democrats might have for fixing American health insurance, and noted that…

When employees don’t trust managers to make good decisions or to behave with integrity, their motivation is seriously compromised. Their distrust and its attendant lack of engagement is a huge, unrecognized problem in most organizations. This issue has always mattered, but it matters now more than…

At The New York Times we have a number of different systems that are used for producing content. We have several Content Management Systems, and we use third-party data and wire stories. Furthermore, given 161 years of journalism and 21 years of publishing content online, we have huge archives of…

I wrote a book on using OKRs called Radical Focus: Achieving Your Most Important Goals with Objectives and Key Results Get it on Amazon or Gumroad As well, I run OKR workshops to get you started if you want to adopt this powerful technique. Contact me. Cwodtke eleganthack.com The OKR approach to…

It’s one of the biggest pieces that will make or break us as we try to become a great company, and I only recently realized it. We’ve been back and forth a number of times about the topic of feedback, and it’s an area where we still have a lot of work to do to get right. People often say, “You have…

Bethanye McKinney Blount has a very particular set of skills, skills that she’s acquired over a very long career. But unlike Taken ’s Bryan Mills , her ability as a “fixer” extends to corralling troublemakers at technology companies. That guy who decides to rewrite an entire system in his off-hours…

The origins of Luna Asana product vision When developing the initial Asana application, cofounders Dustin Moskovitz and Justin Rosenstein imagined a web app that was as easy to use as paper. The early vision for Asana was that users could create and update tasks at the speed of thought and share…

If you’ve spent any time looking into Google’s “Accelerated Mobile Pages” ( AMP ) project , I’m sure you’ll agree: it’s wonderful to hear the AMP team talk about how using their framework (and hosting the output on servers owned or approved by Google ) creates faster sites, and happier users. Few…

What I’m about to tell you is the most painful, traumatic, outrageous, outlandish, over-the-top story of government sanctioned police brutality, wrongful imprisonment, wrongful convictions, forced testimony, widespread corruption, money, lots of money, and deep, deep, deep soul-snatching…

The crew over at Tilde started the year with a new somewhat uncommon policy: new parents (mothers or fathers) could bring their immobile infants to work with them. Your new little one was (is!) welcome to tag along to work until six months, or until they start crawling. The first baby started…

A fellow I admire just asked me why it’s so easy to be a bad manager. Goddamn, that’s a fantastic question. I made some bonehead moves myself yesterday, so I’m in the perfect position to answer this one. Because I didn’t want to overthink my answer, I told him I’d write something up this afternoon…

I t had been a long night for Shanta Sweatt. After working a 16-hour shift cleaning the Tennessee Performing Arts Center, in Nashville, and then catching the 11:15 bus to her apartment, she just wanted to take a shower and go to sleep. Instead, she wound up having a fight with the man she refers to…

Women invented the field. Then men pushed them out of it. In this week’s mashup episode of Scandal: Silicon Valley , James Damore, a newly-fired Google engineer , wrote a 10-page memo arguing that the company’s efforts to improve diversity were misguided. Damore based his thesis on ideas from…