tl;dr in tech - Issue #100

If you can believe it, we’re at the 100th issue of this newsletter! A massive shout-out to all of you who’ve stuck around, and essentially turned this into a distributed think tank. Couldn’t have debugged this journey without ya. 🚀 Alright, let’s do this 100th issue justice by diving in.

Estimation Isn’t For Everyone#

By: NYTimes Open Team

tl;dr: The NYTimes team says ditch story points. Instead, count work items your team completes per week. The goal is throughput, not how well you can guess your future workload. It’s like measuring the speed of your car, not the time spent guessing how fast you can go.

Amir’s 10 Laws Of Tech#

By: Amir Shevat

tl;dr: “These are my personal observations working in tech for more than 20 years”. Amir covers a mix of moral, practical, and downright comical truths in tech. Think of it as Newton’s laws but for the tech universe.

Building Personal And Organizational Prestige#

By: Will Larson

tl;dr: Your brand isn’t just your logo on a hoodie. Will Larson discusses the playbook for building prestige through high-quality content. And yes, you should care about prestige if you want to play in the big leagues.

2023 Engineering Salary Expectations Trends Report#

By: Sam Graham

tl;dr: Engineers are lowering salary expectations due to market conditions and valuing non-monetary benefits more. Watch out for the gender pay gap; it’s still a monster we need to debug.

Compensation Heuristics#

By: Saasy Management

tl;dr: Money can’t buy happiness, but lack of it can cause drama. The article outlines heuristics for thinking about compensation strategically. Let’s call it the psychology of salary in code comments.

Bottlenecks vs Bandpass#

By: Andrew Bosworth

tl;dr: Stop the bottlenecking madness. Horizontal teams should set up guidelines so that vertical teams can sail smoothly. It’s like cleaning up your codebase so your future self doesn’t hate you.

How To Make Hard Decisions: Even / Over Statements#

By: Lara Hogan

tl;dr: Decisions, decisions. Hogan’s “even / over” tool is like a GPS for tough choices, forcing you to articulate trade-offs for clarity. Debugging your decision-making, one choice at a time.

How To Do Great Work#

By: Paul Graham

tl;dr: Want to innovate? Choose crazy good ideas and break some rules. If you always solve “fashionable” problems, you’re following trends, not setting them.

Executive Compensation#

By: a16z

tl;dr: Late-stage companies, listen up. This post talks about balancing base, bonus, and equity in executive compensation. Executive compensation: the Ferrari of pay packages.