Related posts
Ben Kuhn x.com
New post! "Categories of leadership on technical teams:" https://t.co/qea715y2LA A writeup of a framework I reference a lot when talking about how to structure and staff teams:
The the words it uses that this site has seen least often elsewhere. Posts are matched on those words alone — nothing here is a summary of this one.
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20 September
18 September
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Their words
There are legitimate ways to improve our systems, but what they're likely planning isn't one of them.
16 September
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Their words
These mocha-ordering fellow humans must fall into one of these categories: They don't know that it's rude They don't care that it's rude They disagree that it's rude
8 September
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korrents.com
Marco Rubio is struggling to hire talented staff and is settling for loyalists who follow his instructions instead.Their words
This suggests that Rubio is having some difficulties hiring anyone with talent and is settling for a putz who will do what Rubio tells him to do on Latin America.
The Devolution of the Policy Planning Staffdanieldrezner.substack.com
7 September
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Their words
The AI jobs prediction so far is playing out the opposite of what many thought.
3 September
1 September
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korrents.com
Political actors, not scientific staff, are the ones altering official health agency data in this case.Their words
Clearly, scientists aren't updating the data. Politicians are.
28 August
26 August
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Their words
I also see people attacking major product categories now with performance-based pitches. Things like File Pilot or the Blick video editor, like things like this that have been coming out lately where it's like, oh, really performant software to try to take on uh incumbents in a space and they've been getting traction.
25 August
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korrents.com
Defunding public health surveillance systems allows foodborne disease outbreaks to go undetected.Their words
When the public health systems meant to catch and stop this stuff are cut (less funding, less staff, less historical knowledge, and less leadership), outbreaks can, and will, emerge between the cracks.
19 August
14 August
12 August
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Their words
You read that right: The cost of climate-worsened wildfire smoke alone is larger than what earlier studies said every other estimated cost of climate change would be, combined.
11 August
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Their words
One concern you might have is there are like large categories of reward hacks which humans can't detect well and which we consistently fail to detect and which consistently get reinforced and then this category is sufficient to cause the most natural behavior for the AI to learn to be like cheat when the humans can't find out
15 July
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Their words
there's a different kind of intuition that you that you develop over years as a software engineer and uh there's many categories of it but the one I'll I'll call attention to that is like a thing that you cannot teach you cannot do you cannot learn in a textbook. The only way to learn it is like I know bad patterns in software because I have debugged them at three in the morning.
9 July
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Their words
you've got these other generalists doing design, you've got engineers doing design, product staff doing design, but I'm actually pretty long on design or designers because they tend to have taste and I think that is something that is much more difficult to imagine being automated away.
22 June
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korrents.com
The traditional five-part POV taxonomy is organized around grammatical person rather than narrative effect.Their words
It's not that the categories are wrong exactly. But they are rooted more in grammar than narrative.
3 June
2 June
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Their words
it's this nonscalable way to scale your organization and it's through like passing your vampire blood. That's what inside Zinga they called it, Pinkis' vampire blood. What he did that I started to do is you pick someone from the organization who's promising. I usually pick the people who didn't fit in the smart misfits and they become your tech assistant which is not your chief of staff, not your executive assistant.
29 May
21 April
9 April
1 April
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Their words
we have a very clear definition and expectation of what it is at the staff engineer level because we benchmark ourselves to all the great company out there Google, Facebook and all that
24 March
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Their words
You can staff a school with the best teachers on earth, give them unlimited resources, and wrap the place in every evidence-based intervention imaginable, and it still won’t work if students are resistant, disengaged, or actively hostile to the enterprise.
5 February
24 January
1 January
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Their words
So, add all that up, 5%. In many categories, we're north of 50% in market. So, that just totally changes.
9 December 2025
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probably 50% of the time, I would advise to a client, take 10 to 20% of your marketing budget and spend it on upgrading the call center. Pay the people too much. Get the best practitioners.
21 November 2025
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Their words
It isn't easy dealing with peer pressure and a room of warm and friendly staff begging you say something, anything nice about their terrible product for fear of losing their jobs -- and realizing you must be brutal to their faces otherwise you're not helping the vendor or your own company.
12 November 2025
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korrents.com
Coding is a software-factory category that may end up bigger than knowledge work itself.Their words
this fundamentally this category of coding and AI is probably going to be one of the biggest categories right it is a software factory category in fact it may be bigger than knowledge work
18 September 2025
24 May 2025
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Their words
He might have amazing attention to detail, he might be able to understand, have an enormous capacity to remember units and where they are on a map, but he was only a half corporal in the First World war. He’s never been to staff college.
21 May 2025
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korrents.com
Giving local staff authority over more-qualified remote workers reduces a company's competitivenessTheir words
there's a power imbalance: the local worker is in charge and doesn't have to listen. This reduces company competitiveness.
23 March 2025
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Their words
you can classify anything that you build in a company into one of two categories. Solution deepening and market widening. Now solution deepening means making your product better for its existing users but not making it available to more users. Whereas market widening means making your product available to more users but not making the product itself any better.
13 January 2025
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korrents.com
AI will make public services more human rather than less, by giving staff back the time the paperwork takes.Their words
And in a way that’s the irony of AI… It will make public services more human… Reconnect staff with the reasons they came to public service in the first place…
16 December 2024
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Recommendsrcmnd.app
Staff EngineerTheir words
Leadership Beyond the Management Track. The best resource so far on what it's like to get - and perform - at the above senior engineering levels. A very good read.
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Recommendsrcmnd.app
The Staff Engineer's PathTheir words
A book I recommended after reading it, writing: “If you're a senior engineer wondering what the next level is, a staff-level engineer or a manager of staff engineers, this book is for you."
21 July 2024
5 April 2024
6 March 2024
28 February 2024
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Their words
The MVP as a practice of building a hacky product as quickly and cheaply as possible to validate the product does no longer work. Many product categories are already saturated with a variety of alternatives, and to truly test the viability of any new idea you need to build something that is substantially better.
9 February 2024
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korrents.com
Augmented reality and virtual reality are no longer separate categories, but points on one continuum.Their words
And it's a general reminder that AR and VR2 being separate categories is a thing of the past.
All My Thoughts After 40 Hours in the Vision Prowaitbutwhy.com
8 December 2023
2 September 2023
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korrents.com
A puzzle whose categories can only be seen by the broadly educated is elitist by construction.Their words
But it’s fundamentally elitist — it basically requires you to have a broad education to find the categories in the first place.
12 June 2021
1 August 2018
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Their words, before
One thing that I think hasn’t gotten enough attention is the fact that NuSI staff, particularly Attia, paid themselves enormous salaries while they were at NuSI
Their words now
NuSI executives didn’t set their own compensation, as I and others have implied.
17 June 2018
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Their words
Many folks try to move all teams at the same time, peanut buttering their limited resources, but resist that indecision-framed-as-fairness: no one getting anything is not a fair outcome.
11 February 2018
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