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…

We do a lot of interviewing at Triplebyte. Indeed, over the last 2 years, I've interviewed just over 900 engineers. Whether this was a good use of my time can be debated! (I sometimes wake up in a cold sweat and doubt it.) But regardless, our goal is to improve how engineers are hired. To that end,…

When I read over the report on Uber’s workplace culture by former Attorney General Eric Holder’s law firm , I felt an overwhelming sense of déjà vu, which probably isn’t uncommon for any woman who’s experienced sexual harassment and discrimination in the tech industry. The formula is almost…

In the wake of a terrorist attack in London earlier this month, a U.S. congressman wrote a Facebook post in which he called for the slaughter of “radicalized” Muslims. “ Hunt them, identify them, and kill them,” declared U.S. Rep. Clay Higgins, a Louisiana Republican. “Kill them all. For the sake of…

This was a talk I gave at an internal R&D conference my last week at Workiva. I got a lot of positive feedback on the talk, so I figured I would share it with a wider audience. Be warned: it’s long. Feel free to read each section separately, though they largely tie together. Why do you work where…

You Are Not Google Software engineers go crazy for the most ridiculous things. We like to think that we’re hyper-rational, but when we have to choose a technology, we end up in a kind of frenzy — bouncing from one person’s Hacker News comment to another’s blog post until, in a stupor, we float…

America has a pretty obvious problem preventing incidents where someone walks into a crowded area and starts shooting everyone in sight. A big part of that problem is that, at least when the person doing the shooting is white, we’re oddly reluctant to call these incidents acts of terrorism. Instead,…

T he “10x engineer” is a lead in the cast of characters for prevailing Silicon Valley mythos. Get a team of them and you could create the next billion dollar company. When WhatsApp was acquired it had 450 million monthly users, but just 32 engineers. Facebook acquired only 13 engineers when it…

The strangest part about the continued personality cult of Robert E. Lee is how few of the qualities his admirers profess to see in him he actually possessed. Memorial Day has the tendency to conjure up old arguments about the Civil War. That’s understandable; it was created to mourn the dead of a…

Immigrations and Customs Enforcement imprisons more than 10,000 parents of American citizens in California each year, according to a report released today by Human Rights Watch. The report, entitled “I Still Need You,” analyzes the impact of immigration enforcement policy on immigrant families in…

Here is the english version of my now famous “Fallait demander” ! Thanks Una from unadtranslation .com for the translation 🙂 Advertisements

Discord has seen tremendous growth. To handle this growth, our engineering team has had the pleasure of figuring out how to scale the backend services. One piece of technology we’ve seen great success with is Elixir’s GenStage. The perfect storm: Overwatch and Pokémon GO This past summer, our mobile…

Published on May 13, 2017 SALISBURY, Md. — Two hours before sunrise, Dee Matello joined the line outside the Wicomico Civic Center, where hundreds of people in hoodies, heavy coats and wool blankets braced against a bitter wind. Inside, reclining dental chairs were arrayed in neat rows across the…

The nation has spoken: weird useless $400 wi-fi enabled juicing company Juicero is the perfect symbol of Silicon Valley. So says the Washington Post: Juicero Shows What’s Wrong With Silicon Valley Thinking . So says TechCrunch, which calls Juicero “the absurd avatar of Silicon Valley hubris” . So…

A sample of the ransomware cyberattack on a laptop in Taipei, Taiwan, on Saturday. Ritchie B. Tongo/European Pressphoto Agency The path to a global outbreak on Friday of a ransom-demanding computer software (“ransomware”) that crippled hospitals in Britain — forcing the rerouting of ambulances,…

Getty Images As a computer science PhD student, I am a disciple of big data. I see no ground too sacred for statistics: I have used it to study everything from sex to Shakespeare , and earned angry retorts for these attempts to render the ineffable mathematical. At Stanford I was given, as a…

Sometimes, revolutions go backward. In the South, racist whites violently resisted the rise of black political power. AR Waud, Harper's Weekly /Library of Congress People deal with political trauma in different ways. After the 2016 election, yuppies who once scoffed at preppers found themselves…

If you asked me to describe the worst blind date ever, it would go something like this: We arrive at an abandoned warehouse for drinks. My date looks like a cross between John Malkovich and Britney Spears when she was struggling. I can tell I’m gonna need to get drunk to get through this. But first,…

Senior Engineers Reduce Risk If you read articles on career development in software, you’ll already know there are many things a senior engineer is not . They are not, for instance, just someone with ten years of experience. They are not just someone who maintains a popular open source project. They…

By Alice Dreger (Photo: xNstAbLe/Shutterstock) A couple of months ago, the sex education notice came home in my nine-year-old son’s backpack. I didn’t realize that, in our district, sex ed starts in the fourth grade. Another sign of the state having more access to my baby than I sometimes wish. When…

It’s 3 PM. The caffeine is kicking in from your afternoon coffee, but you can’t shake the feeling of dread as you drag yourself into your team’s weekly meeting. You know it’s going to carry on forever while simultaneously accomplishing nothing. You wonder, “Does it have to be this way?” Nay, my…

To collaborate with team members who are scattered across the globe, you basically have two options: Use communications technology, like instant messaging or video conferencing, to bridge the gap. Use aviation technology, or other modes of transportation, to meet in a central location and…

For anyone who hasn’t caught on: Remote work is here, it’s happening, and your employees are happier if they are given the option to do it. Whether it’s the ability to work from home some days to a fully scalable, entirely distributed team, the processes needed to accomplish this successfully are…

Speaker: Rich Hickey Conference: Clojure/Conj 2010 - Oct 2010 Hi. As I said yesterday, I swapped the talks around so this is the more philosophical talk. There's multiple titles. I couldn't decide. Some of them were semi-cranky. In those moments. And more [didn't understand]. So this is about step…

Photo: Eamon Queeney, Special To The Chronicle Zecole Thomas and sons Ezekiel, 7 (center), and Joseph, 9, moved out of state after her husband shot himself. Joseph Thomas thought he had it made when he landed a $170,000 job as a software engineer at Uber’s San Francisco headquarters last year. He…

Brian Rea A couple of years ago, it seemed as if everyone I knew was on the verge of divorce. “He’s not the man I married,” one friend told me. “She didn’t change, and I did,” said another. And then there was the no-fault version: “We grew apart.” Emotional and physical abuse are clear-cut grounds…

A Pythonist finds a new home at Clojure land Welcome back to another interview of Not a Monad Tutorial . In this opportunity I decided to interview Facundo Olano, a friend, a teammate, and a developer with a diverse experience . We talked about Python, Node.js, Clojure, Common Lisp and software…

I came to the United States as a six year old kid from Eastern Europe. One of my earliest memories of that time was the Safeway supermarket, an astonishing display of American abundance. It was hard to understand how there could be so much wealth in the world. There was an entire aisle devoted to…