Ben Kuhn
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25 April
24 April
From one piece You should try contra dancing 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
It's pretty common for people to use contra as a gateway into more difficult forms of dance.
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korrents.com
Most forms of dance require weeks of lessons before newcomers are welcomed to dance socially.Their words
Many other forms of dance require weeks of lessons before you're even encouraged to do it socially at all.
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Their words
The default mood of a lot of spaces is a sort of ironic detachment.
28 February
14 October 2025
21 June 2025
19 April 2025
From one piece Impact, agency, and taste 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
People who can be trusted to make something inevitable are really rare, and are typically the bottleneck for how many different things a team or company can do at once.
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korrents.com
Different people's areas of strongest judgment or taste rarely overlap much with each other.Their words
it's quite rare for different people's "zone of best taste" to overlap very much.
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Their words
most rewrites fail and most people are over-optimistic about how long they will take
2 April 2025
1 April 2025
From one piece Advice for time management as a manager 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
The stereotype is that new managers often micromanage, but at Wave, I've noticed that new managers often err on the side of undermanaging, or being too hands-off, perhaps out of a desire to signal that they trust their reports.
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korrents.com
A manager's own individual technical output drops by roughly 10-20% per engineer they manage.Their words
you should expect to have something like 10-20% less individual output per engineer you manage, depending on how experienced you are, they are, etc., and with substantial week-to-week variance.
16 March 2025
From one piece How I've run major projects 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
The best project managers are usually not the strongest technical individual contributors.Their words
The best project-managers are often not the strongest technical ICs.
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Their words
"Direction is more important than magnitude"-it's usually better to have a lower-velocity project that works on the right things, than a higher-velocity one that's pointed at the wrong goal.
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Their words
One of the most common megaproject failure modes is to not freak out soon enough, and having a concrete plan is the best antidote.
22 July 2024
21 July 2024
From one piece Categories of leadership on technical teams 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
Good project management is barely visible-it just feels like "things humming along."
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Their words
The bar I typically suggest is that the people manager doesn't need to have the most technical depth on the team, but they need enough depth that they can follow most discussions without slowing them down, understand who's correct in most debates without needing to rely on trust, and generally stay oriented easily.
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Their words
Team leadership covers a huge array of things-as you can see from how long this post is-and trying to find someone who can be great at all of them is often a unicorn hunt.
13 July 2024
From one piece Trust as a bottleneck to growing teams quickly 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
In a large, fast-growing company you'll probably never get to the utopian ideal of full pairwise trust between everyone-it takes too long to build.
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korrents.com
Trust between colleagues comes from shared mental models built through mutual investment.Their words
Trust comes from common knowledge of shared mental models, and that takes investment from both sides to build.
23 May 2024
16 May 2024
12 May 2024
10 May 2024
6 March 2024
26 February 2024
25 February 2024
From one piece How I build and run behavioral interviews 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
Most workplace problems have more than one person contributing to them, not a single culprit.Their words
Sometimes this is true, but usually problems aren't a single person's fault!
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korrents.com
Someone who can't name what they'd do differently is unlikely to be good at improving over time.Their words
if the person responds to "what would you do differently" with "nothing," or with non-actionable vague platitudes, it's a sign they may not be great at figuring out how to get better at things over time.
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korrents.com
Repeated vague platitudes without follow-up specifics signal weak first-principles thinking.Their words
If they don't follow this up with a more specific, precise or nuanced claim, they may not be a strong first-principles thinker.
12 February 2024
23 April 2023
From one piece Some mistakes I made as a new manager 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
Neglecting maintenance of infrastructure over time makes it degrade faster and become costlier to repair later.Their words
unmaintained infrastructure degrades more quickly, and is more expensive to fix in the long run.
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korrents.com
People with little experience at a task often welcome a degree of close oversight, provided it is given thoughtfully.Their words
People with low task-relevant maturity appreciate some amount of micromanagement (if they're self-aware and you're nice about it).
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Their words
Manage projects according to the owner's level of task-relevant maturity.
4 March 2023
28 February 2023
26 February 2023
1 February 2023
29 December 2022
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