#14 Engineers & Career Growth, Ben Horowitz and Working Backwards
Hey there đ
Hope youâre all doing well. Welcome to the fourteenth issue of my newsletter, in which I share the cool links I came across.
Articles Iâve loved
Architecture of Tomorrow: Interview with Ben Horowitz - Sotonye (28 min read)
Long-form interview with Ben Horowitz, so this one is for the fans of the book The Hard Thing About Hard Things.
Recommended read if youâre interested in a wide range of topics such as âbitsâ transforming âatomsâ, trust/communication equivalency, and the abundance vs. scarcity mindset.
Treat your writing like a product - Product Lessons (5 min read)
Some great tips for writing well!
George Saunders's Advice to Graduates - Joel Lovell (6 min read)
Writer George Saundersâs graduation speech is worth reading, with his biggest regret being failures of kindness.
Use Google like a pro - Marko (4 min read)
Periodic public announcement with 10 tips on how to use Google! I bet you didnât know all of them :- )
The Engineer's Guide to Career Growth - Raylene Yung (28 min read)
Yung details how she got into engineering management & gives advice from her experience at Facebook & Stripe. This article contains useful doâs & donâts for each stage of your career: from early engineers and individual contributors to domain experts & managers.
As a teaser, here are the three lessons that served as a foundation for every stage of her career:
Strive to be the most valuable, but least critical
Want to succeed as a manager? Establish an emotional equilibrium
Focus on growth & learning at every step - not on climbing the ladder as quickly as possible
Tweets
Podcasts
Eli Dourado & Patrick talk about the stagnation in labour productivity, system constraints & some of the innovative technologies (biotech, energy, transportation & AI) that could reverse this trend. The observant reader will remember Eli from his appearance in newsletter #10!
Amazing how you can find all the details of the podcast episode on Colossus - curated learning blocks, transcript & show notes.
For me personally, this is a huge improvement of how much information I learn from podcasts.
Books Iâve read
Working Backwards: Insights, Stories & Secrets from Inside Amazon -
Colin Bryar & Bill Car (ââââ)
Bill & Colin are 2 long-serving Amazon executives that reveal the codified principles & practices that drive the success of Amazon.
Itâs a great book detailing the following Amazon principles:
The Bar Raiser Process: how Amazon hires
Single-Threaded Leadership: A leader with no other responsibilities apart from the teamâs charter
Narratives & Six pagers, instead of powerpoints
Working Backwards: start with the press release & FAQ, then work backwards to the actual implementation
Controllable input metrics instead of output metrics = leading indicators instead of lagging indicators
Couple this with this great summary of Commoncog.
Thanks for your most valuable resources, your time and your attention! Which article did you like the most? Let me know!
Until next time,
Matthias