Weekly Notes 43/24

Written by Danny Krämer

Date: 10/28/2024

Adam Ard described an interesting point about Management. There is a continuum between no managers at all and having everyone be a manager. The interesting point is, that having no mangers is effectively the same as having only managers, because everyone needs to do management. Therefore, Founder Mode, described by Paul Graham, isn’t that bad at all. If you have only one manager or benevolent dictator (as in open source projects), that means there is less bureaucracy and less surveillance - because how should one manager watch after everyone? The management role then becomes more about company culture than about micromanaging developers.

Also, there were two interesting quotes:

“It doesn’t make sense to hire smart people and then tell them what to to , We hire smart people so they can tell us what to do.” -Steve Jobs

Don’t listen to marketing people or designers or product managers just because of their job titles. If they have good ideas, use them, but it’s up to you to decide; software has to be designed by hackers who understand design, not designers who know a little about software. (Source)

I just finished reading Emotional Agility - Get Unstuck, Embrace Change and Thrive in Work and Life. One metaphor that stood out to me was the following: It is not helpful to set yourself unrealistic goals for your life, like being always happy, never getting hurt, never getting stressed, or never making mistakes. Do you know who the only people are that never make mistakes? Dead people. So accept yourself, but also life, as what it is: a mess with good, bad, and ugly parts, but also with parts that are beautiful and fun as hell.

Nabeel S. Qureshi post on Palantir is pretty interesting. Especially the concept of “forward deployed engineers” who work on site for companies to develop software products that those companies need to handle a specific problems, and engineers back at Palantir who take the lessons learned in those projects and build core products that can be sold to other companies. Also, the discussion of working for companies or organizations that handle morally thorny areas like defense was interesting.