Week 39, 2024 - Old and New Gadgets
This week went by fast and busy. I’m in multiple interview processes, and the preparation takes considerable time. It’s weird to sit on the other side of the table again, I'm a bit rusty in selling myself, but some discussions were truly exciting.
Episode 9 of our podcast with my friend Jeremy, The Retrospective, is published. This time we discussed the last episode in the Getting Hired as an EM series that I co-authored with Peter Batiz, covering the final phases of an application, centering around The Offer. Check out the podcast episode on YouTube, or search for The Retrospective in your favorite podcasting app.
📋 What I learned this week
So far my job market experience confirms most of my expectations: a slowly growing number of engineering leadership positions; being hands-on is a frequent requirement, especially on lower levels; and fully remote (working from a different country) positions are scarce. An interviewer for an international remote job confessed that they get an overwhelming amount of applications. If you’re in an EM or similar position and consider switching, check my articles on the subject, but also, calibrate your expectations by doing a few applications before committing to anything irreversible.
If you’re looking for a simple, no-frills, out-of-the-box working Kanban board tool, Taiga is a great choice. I prefer it to other tools because I can self-host it, and because the lack of complex features forces me to focus on the work instead of finetuning the tool. We track the work of podcast episodes in a “2D Kanban” board, where columns are publishing phases from ideation and preparation, through recording, editing, and finally publishing; and rows are calendar weeks. A card represents an episode, and it “travels” from the top left to the bottom right as time passes. I like the simplicity of this setup, but time will tell how well it works in practice.
I saw a poll in a CTO Slack community asking members about the use of AI coding assistants like GitHub Copilot, Cursor, etc. Not representative at all, but still it was surprising to me that 90% of the responders said their engineering organizations are using some of these tools in their workflows. This is some fast adoption!
🎯 What I want to try next week
I’ll spend most of the week cycling in Austria with a good friend, so I’m not planning much work to be done, and might even skip next week’s newsletter issue too.
🤔 Articles that made me think
How do you build a non-electric TV remote?
Great piece of history and an amazing illustration of thinking outside of the box. This could also be a fun workshop object, asking people to figure out how it worked, or, task them to plan a remote control product without batteries, cables, etc. I was tempted to buy a used one, but the price felt a bit steep for something that has a good chance of ending up collecting dust in a drawer, next to my DYMO 1570 that I bought after a similar rush of excitement.
(Positivity over) Hope over Optimism
This was an interesting read, especially because I consider one of my strengths to be positivity (so I had to push down the urge to be defensive when reading!). However, I don't consider myself an optimist, because for me optimism is passive, while positivity has an active component. Optimism (and to be honest, in my vocabulary, hope too, to some extent) is sitting back and hoping for things to turn out the best. Positivity is focusing on the good stuff and using them to mitigate against the bad. Doubling down on strengths to compensate for weaknesses. Show what success looks like to inspire us to get there. I feel like positivity acknowledges (and needs!) agency, which optimism and hope lack. I don't think it's about ignoring "conditions leading to suffering and exploitation", in fact, it's not about ignoring anything, it's about focusing on the things we have the means to impact for the better. That being said, I love the message for middle managers. These parts also emphasize agency and the role managers have in pushing their teams to a better future. I use my positivity the same way.
Gregor Hohpe on quitting AWS
Surprisingly candid (considering how things usually go with people at this level at companies this size) share of the circumstances that led to Gregor Hohpe leaving his Senior Principal Evangelist position at Amazon. The comments section is also good, somebody bringing up this Steve Jobs video about companies becoming monopolies and losing their product sense. I guess this is also resonating well with all the Founder Mode discussions going around in the last few weeks. Amazon probably hasn't made the switch yet.
📱 Something cool: Storage update on an iPhone
Amazing aftermarket iPhone expansion video. I loved the extreme attention to detail, the precision, the custom tools, the care that’s best illustrated with the always-three-clicks on the torque driver (who uses a torque driver on a phone?!) — and the brutal contrast with the CNC machine that’s used to remove, in the most literal way, the old storage module.
That’s it for today, take the time to do a small thing perfectly this weekend,
Péter