From the TL;DR in Tech archive, originally sent on Substack. Some links may have died since.

tl;dr in tech by Joe Karlsson - Issue #42

silhouette photography of person

Photo by Greg Rakozy on Unsplash

tl;dr: “I want to share how my team at Etsy recovered from failing really slowly. We launched a high-profile product that didn’t meet customer needs after doing a nine-month waterfall buildout, and senior leadership decided that we needed to rethink our approach from the ground up. We didn’t know exactly what the end result would be, but we agreed to pivot the product over a three-month timeline.”

tl;dr: “There’s no point in going into details about what exactly led to it, but I have to assure you that it wasn’t anyone’s fault. It was more about the direction that my role drifted in. In other words, I was no longer doing the work that I wanted to, and that made me unhappy. It was not fun.”

tl;dr: “To achieve this rapid release cadence, we’ve optimised our engineering culture, tooling, and architecture to make the path from idea to production as frictionless as possible, all without sacrificing safety. We believe our approach gets us the best of both worlds: less friction encourages smaller changes, and smaller changes are less risky.”

tl;dr: “Bob is a sleek and compact countertop dishwasher requiring no plumbing and minimal space.” One of the features is the Bob Cassette, “an all-in-one detergent cartridge… no need to manually measure and add detergent to each wash.” It’s very convenient and outrageously priced. The author explains how they engineered these cassettes to preserve convenience at a fraction of the cost.

tl;dr: A formula to work on any aspect of your own self-improvement. All steps work in parallel, in a continuous loop.

1) Awareness: Being aware of a problem is not enough, you have to accept it, believe it is worth fixing, and now is the time.

2) Understanding: Asking and understanding why you act in this way.

3) Overcoming: realizing when and how your behavior is in conflict with your values and goals.

tl;dr: “Somebody once described balance to me as three buckets filled with water. One for career, a second for physical health, and a third for social and family life. At any point, one bucket might be running low. But as long as the overall water level is high enough, things should be fine,” Scott discusses how the events in his life, in this context, guided him to leave Google.

tl;dr: “Executives are evaluated based on their perceived outcomes rather than actual outcomes.” Will discusses this common issue and how it’s hard to force a poorly run company to become better run, but easy to make local improvements on your team. It’s a bit harder to allow those local improvements to spread organically.

tl;dr: “Many leaders mould the organization in their image or the image of the past workplace. Engineering leaders brought into embattled organizations tasked with stabilizing the chaos are often heavily incentivized to do this. Many a time these folks, in my experience, tend to fail harder and more often than those who try to learn the organizational ropes and tailor their leadership style to fit the organizational culture.”