joshuago’s management Bookmarks

Being awash in money blinded Yahoo to the fact that their revenue model was precarious and unsustainable. Being ambivalent about being a technology company and considering programmers a commodity led to the hiring of mediocre programmers, which then resulted in products that weren't very good.

Strong opinions, weakly held.

If you want to dramatically increase your programming skills you need to be reading other people’s code.

When programming in higher level languages that allow for increased productivity by orders of magnitude, running into rare but important cases -- where abstractions leak -- will eventually force you to drop down and understand things at the lower level anyway. It's helpful to know how the underlying thing works.

Business literature is packed with advice about worker motivation—but sometimes managers are the problem, not the inspiration. Here are seven practices to fire up the troops.

It would be good if more women got in the habit of raising their hands and saying “I can do that. Sign me up. My work is awesome,” no matter how many people that behavior upsets.

It has been reported that a full 40% of executives describe themselves as introverts, including Microsoft's Bill Gates, the über-investors Warren Buffett and Charles Schwab, Avon's chief executive, Andrea Jung, and the late publishing giant Katharine Graham. Odds are President Barack Obama is an innie as well. What does that mean? That introverts, not just extroverts, have the right stuff to lead organizations in a go-go, extroverted business culture.

"We aren't creating computers. We are creating bicycles for the mind."

Designers need to be there start to ship: from strategy to launch. This is different from other companies. Share early and share often. Sharing with the team and users helps make the design better. Don’t fall in love. Software is impermanent –it is always changing and you need to accept that.

You’ll be a much better manager of roles that you’ve already held than when you’re completely in the dark about what it takes to perform. You’ll have empathy available when the going gets tough and it’s not their fault — and a stern voice when it is.