One of my managerial beliefs that has served me well is that when people are doing the wrong thing, the systems are generally making it too hard to do the right thing It's easier to get mad at people and blame them for being lazy/stupid/whatever but usually they are just following incentives and affordances or lack thereof to their natural conclusion

What a difference one month makes in a model......... I personally would take people banging the COVID-19 worst case drum right now with a huuuuuuggeee grain of salt (as I took them one month ago)

Should blog this but instead will briefly tweet a thought that occurred to me recently: "user personas" are just as important for infrastructure/developer tools developers to understand as they are for product managers Too many infra/tools devs forget that their customers (other developers) are not exactly like them and struggle to build good systems for this reason.

Thinking today that the reason that Agile/Scrum are so persistent despite their shortcomings is that there is very little else that teaches engineering managers how to actually run their teams from an operational perspective It is, in fact, hard to get engineering teams to reliably get shit done in a focused manner. Despite your best wishes, smart people don't just magically poop out complex systems. You have to figure out how to coordinate them in some way.

Manager "readmes" or "user guides" are a bad trend. Managers: get the fuck over yourselves with this nonsense. No, writing self-serving docs about "how to work with me" is not a good way to build trust, especially since I promise you that you have some glaring blind spot that will inevitably show up in your behavior vs doc and undermine your credibility