No particular agenda here, just a good, wide ranging set of ideas to check out to help you and your team work effectively in a distributed setting.

More practical notes on how to effectively manage video conversations.

A really nice piece on the realities of working at home, from getting your mic and video right to not having embarrassing junk behind you in video calls and more.

“The whole situation is obviously far from optimal. Let us try to make the best out of it!” (Truer words have never been typed)

Julie Zhou on confidence as an accelerator, an enabler, and how to generate it in yourself and others. A typically insightful post.

How to deal with bullshit! Ed lists a ton of bullshit moves in conversations and then suggests how to manage them (and yourself). Note: bullshit is not lying, or, rather, not just lying. It’s more insidious than that, and harder to deal with. Take a read.

A fairly frequent, and rather disastrous, failure mode of difficult conversations is “pulling back” on your opinion because you are sure the other person can “see what you meant”. Often they can’t, with the result that you leave the conversation thinking they heard something difficult, and they leave the conversation not having heard it at all.

A nice summary of research that describes what’s going on here.

A cool summary of mental models to go to when a conversations starts to go off the rails, starting with Hanlon’s Razor - “don’t attribute to maliciousness that which is more easily explained by incompetence” (just remembering this one will get you a long way). Good, informative read.

Interesting to read to consider Elon’s leadership style. Super hard-charging, deeply audacious and ambitious - the stories in this post are vivid. How does it compare to your own leadership style? What would you take from it, what would you leave out? What works, what might be the downsides?

Reposting this, since it’s relevant to the issue of tech vs business. Creating software is inherently a creative act, more like writing than building (say) a bridge. Hence is inherently unpredictable, dependent on craft, the whims of creativity. But most software is written inside a system that values predictability. How to square the two?

On the endless issue of “why can’t we do more, faster??”. Some new ideas here - cool.

“the generation of new feature ideas is easy and cheap. It’s usually a couple of lines on a ticket, or worst, a verbal promise made during a sales pitch. On the other hand, executing these ideas, making them, building them, is hard and expensive.”

Memo from Sequoia Capital to their portfolio companies about the current situation. Very much worth reading, whatever your eventual opinion turns out to be.

Short and clear explanation of what’s going on in negative and positive conversations. The brain chemically reacts very differently in each case. Simply understanding that something different is going on inside another person when you treat them well may help you get there in the moment.

A nice exploration of why disagreement is not only common, but necessary.

“We rarely appreciate it when someone is speaking out rather than fitting in. But whether it is as trivial as a rug, or as vital as a fuel gauge in a circling aircraft, we need people who see things that we don’t. We need them to speak up. And we also need to listen when they do”

Looks at conflict, in particular what our defaults are and how to change our knee-jerk response. Conflict is unavoidable, learning from it is always available.

“We use all four of them under different circumstances, yet there is one “primary conflict habit” which is our default.

1. We blame other people.

2. We shame and blame ourselves.

3. We avoid or shut down in the face of conflict with other people.

4. We relentlessly seek to collaborate with other people, even when they refuse to cooperate with us”

Yep - good, practical stuff on communicating things that may be hard to hear. In particular the emphasis on curiosity (rather than just hammering the message harder) and repetition across the organization are spot on. (The clip-art pic at the top of the article is particularly generic - please ignore it).

Just that: a useful list of books and articles on engineering management. Wide-ranging, worth browsing.

Another fun title, and not a bad article - about the necessity for a VPE to translate the complex creativity of a software department into something a time-challenged, non-technical group can relate to. (note: this is bit of a marketing piece, but it’s a useful POV all the same).

I had to admit I smiled a bit when I read the title. How many times was I asked this when I was running software groups (a lot)? How many times have I sat with my clients as they try and wrestle with this question - or, more usually, wrestle with being asked this question by a CEO or Founder or Board (a lot).

There’s no silver bullet (if there was, I’d blog about it, and VPE would no longer be such an interesting job). But this post has a good list of things to consider.

My colleague, Karen Catlin, has become a leader in tools and thinking for building inclusive workplaces. This is a nice breakdown of a workshop she delivered recently and covers a ton of practical, actionable advice.

The post is actually about how to hire a VP Engineering, but the principles and thinking extend to hiring Directors and Managers. What do you look for? What questions do you ask? How do you know it’s going to work? Take a look.