1. All engineering teams need some "slack time" (not the chatting app)

2. All engineering teams should be slightly understaffed and perennially non-empty list of things to do

The biggest Engineering Management learning is to reconcile these two truths of work. There is this famous book by Tom Demarco called "Slack" which is great read on why teams need some 'slack time' - i.e. if the team's capacity is to produce 200 units of work per week, then only plan for 175 units of tasks every week, and kee 25 units free to pick up tasks that come along the way.

Things break.
Suddenly things get re-prioritized.
You encounter weird corner cases working on something, and it takes more time to close.
Shit happens.

Always have some spare time to keep bandwidth for that.

Declarative UI and one-way flow of state is something that invariably developers seem to prefer and all frontend engineering platforms have been progressively moving towards it.

The problem though lies that most developers starting out are not coached properly for it. Let's try to understand the problem here.

Classically how UI is represented and how it triggers logic is a bit like this

UI interacts with some "controller" like layer which in turn interacts with local DBs or APIs.

That's pretty much the basic 'structure' to this model.

How to travel if you're broke?

A thread 🧵 👇 1. Sell your Jaguar

Imagine you build a hyperlocal delivery app (like Swiggy/Delivery Hero/Uber Eats etc).

The top level API response for a user typically is all stores around them, typically paginated (infinite scroll etc) with info like name, rating, a thumbnail, estimated ETA etc At the top level response the information you show is a aggregated/derived from many deeper levels. For example -

Rating: this is avg cumulative rating, that is affected as more ratings come in

ETA: this might depend on time of day / traffic conditions and user's location

So I find myself taking 8-10 interviews a week right now, and whenever you're in a hiring storm - out comes a lot of insights into the interview process, and potential learnings for people (both on hiring and job-searching sides).

So thus starts a thread. This is my 3rd time in the middle of large, long drawn, hiring "campaign" for a big team about to expand into a large team. (Done it twice before at Zomato and Target - where you have a 50-60 headcount to fill, over a period of 2-3 months, across the usual job roles).

Cooking black zip ties today. For something called "squid ink spaghetti" turned out exactly as advertised.

When some of my juniors, and former students ask my about career dilemmas, often I hear the equivalent of "But I am at L4 here, and that offer is L3 only, should I try to get L5 in that other place", while the 3 companies are wildly different

Let's break it down. So the first thing that is important is to understand what these "L" levels even mean. And for that we will have to look at a generalised, most common, story of how the tech team pyramid grows in a company.

It often starts out with the 'Tech Cofounder' writing code.

Consulting rates:

$50/hr: I'll do what you ask me to do

$500/hr: I'll solve your problem somehow

$5000/hr: I'll tell you what to do (and slightly help in doing it)

$50000/hr: I'll tell you *why* you should do things differently Job Titles

$50/hr: Freelancer

$500/hr: Agency

$5000/hr: Strategy Consultant

$50000/hr: Management Consultant for Transformation

No amount of data science can prepare you for the kind of insights I just got from a guy I know works at an edtech company.

"Our founder proposed to our co-founder on stage and that caused a significant inbound volume and spike on course purchases this week". New Valentine's Day growth hack dropped - get your founders hitched to each other. 🤪

A thread of some informative videos on careers in software engineering I made over the last few months on @scaler_official's YouTube channel.

It is a series called "Refactor". Jobs at Startups vs MNCs

- what to expect in terms of roles
- compensation structure differences
- how to prepare for each of them

In the last few years some of the biggest mobile apps(in terms of users) have been built out of India. That has made this fertile ground for homegrown "app PMs".

And last year they all shuffled around all the new VC funded companies. Lo and behold all apps are the same now All buttons have mIcRoInTeRaCtIoNs now. Small multicoloured polka dots exploding from every little thing that you touch.

But no one has learnt to consistently put negative/positive CTAs always on same side on every dialog of the app.

Same PMs, same mistakes :)

Saw a Scorpio with Nazi emblem in Bangalore today. Things are getting wild out here.

(Cannot really give the 'hindu swastika' benefit of doubt because of the 45° angle, and red and black colors). People trying to pull a Hanlon's Razor here - you know you are part of the problem.

This is not an 'innocent' mistake for sure. It is a circular sticker, so the person had to have 'deliberately' put it up at 45° angle, which means they very well know what it is.

With 'spotifyd' (short for spotify daemon) you can run Spotify as a background service on Linux/Mac without installing the desktop app

Takes ~1% of CPU and <10MB of RAM to run, versus that godawful Electron monstrosity

You can control it from app/website like any other device Moreover if you use spotify-tui (Spotify Terminal UI) you do not even need to open the Spotify app on your phone or open Spotify\.com to change or search songs. You can do that from your Terminal itself.

Both are fantastic open source tools!

Imagine there are 6 founders, A, B, C, D, E and F.

They all invest $10M each into their own startups.

What is a very likely outcome, 5 years later is, 4 have shut down, one remains a $10M sized company, company, and one becomes a $100M sized company. Now, what if instead of each of them investing $10M into their own companies, they all invest $5M into their own company and $1M into the other 5 companies their friends have founded.

With similar company outcomes, the final result is different now.

Today's news has @gauravmunjal announcing NextLevel - a better credential sharing platform than LinkedIn.

@hey_yogini and @designerdada, very good friends, are also building @PeerlistHQ - a better proof of work.

Many are commenting on "better LinkedIn". So some thoughts... This is neither advice (i have no locus standi) nor verdict, either positive or negative (too early) on either of these products, or for that matter other products in this space like @Polywork or @TeamBlind

I have merely dabbled in this space, so just some personal learnings.

I've a mental model of levelling social media folks by enlightenment

L0: believe in BeerBiceps
L1: BeerBiceps crazy, but Warikoo
L2: Warikoo cringe, but Balajis
L3: Balaji weird, but Naval
L4: Naval too meta, but God
L5: fully self aware This is a politically bipartisan list. (Balaji a bit libertarian, but anyway)

What people think of Elon Musk or Trump or Modi or Bernie Sanders doesn't matter, on where they are on this ladder.

I have for a long time not been a fan of Elon Musk and actively detested that person. (And somehow everyone who worships him used to give out simp energy to me).

Never quite myself could put my finger on what made me think that way. It just seemed like a general vibe. But that recent "firstborn child died in my arms" tweet fiasco, I remembered what it was.

I had read @justinemusk's "I Was a Starter Wife": Inside America's Messiest Divorce which she published in 2010 (and I discovered from a Quora answer of her).

Yeah there are layoffs happening. But there are pockets where software engineering hiring is also in fact increasing.

From my unique vantage point I can see that those who got outcompeted in the hiring market in 2021 are backfilling now, at a fast rate.

Examples below. Big banks are all hiring (latest openings, within last few days)

Not the sexiest jobs on the market by the usual playbook, of going to bigtech and product startups, but these are good jobs actually, and pay near, or just above median.

Native Android and iOS development is sort of in the trajectory of where Windows or Mac desktop app development had gone a decade back.

While Adobe still will need to make desktop apps, no new startups are launching as a desktop app (Electron even if they do) The management perspective of "less developers, both platforms" is a bigger pull than anything else to go for Flutter or React Native.

The relatively easier migration path for React web devs to come and lend a hand to mobile app dev is a big factor too.

I was in USA, (specifically San Francisco and other parts of Silicon Valley) for the larger part of last month, and I talked to over 25 people, mostly Indian (but not all) and mostly working on big tech (but not all as engineers).

Here's a thread on the "vibe" I got First off, the famous perks and "playground in office" myth of most tech companies - got the most first-hand experience this time around, because I literally got myself invited to a bunch of companies to have free lunch most days (Uber, Google, Salesforce, LinkedIn and more)

Streaming records discussed on the upcoming episode of #ScalerPod with @akisaxena has since, already been broken last week 🥲

Should have probably shot the episode after T20 World Cup only 😅

P.S. This is coming out tomorrow at 5pm on @scaler_official YouTube! But no better time than during WorldCup or IPL to sit and discuss the history of Hotstar's tech and how the team and tech got built that has the world record on livestreaming sports events!

This is true made in India, planet-scale tech right here!