Gerald Haslhofer 
Best place to work
Learnings from books:
Deep work
- Focus; repitition
Grit
- 0nly 20% of employees are actively engaged in their jobs
- Cultivate your passions –> give choices.
- It takes time and experimentation to find your true passion (applies to early in career employees). Before hard work comes play. –> facilitate engineers discovering their interests (need forums for that)
- “Most people stink at the things they love”.
- Deliberate practice - stretch goal; concentration; feedback; repitition and deliberation; routine
- Purpose
- need to connect actions to higher purpose
Learnings from articles
Article Engineering Culture:
- Optimize for speed (processes, infrastructure). Automate (deployment, testing)
- Design: simple abstractions
- Shared ownership of code
- 20% time
Google’s scientific approach to work life balance
- Clarity of most pressing issue; run experiments; ask employees
- “Company as community” vs. “constellation of stars” vs. “A cause” vs. “Small is beautiful”.
- What kind of team are we?
What the “Best Companies to Work For” Do Differently
- Life satisfaction as opposed to job satisfaction
- Help employees pursue their passions
- Encourage people to self-examine their interests
- Allow them to be themselves
The 3 Things Employees Really Want: Career, Community, Cause
Career is about work: having a job that provides autonomy, allows you to use your strengths, and promotes your learning and development. It’s at the heart of intrinsic motivation.
Community is about people: feeling respected, cared about, and recognized by others. It drives our sense of connection and belongingness.
Cause is about purpose: feeling that you make a meaningful impact, identifying with the organization’s mission, and believing that it does some good in the world. It’s a source of pride.
The Culture Code
- Small behaviors make all the difference
- Safety changes group performance.
- Concept of group as “Family”. Little moments of interactions. Lots of eye contact. Energetic exchanges. Intensive, active eye contact. Humor. Laughter.
- Share Vulnerability. “I don’t know what’s going on. Can you help?”. “Tell me what you want, and I’ll help you”. Awkward, painful interactions leading to smooth cooperation.
Put purpose at the core of your strategy
- Redefine the playing field. Purpose is the guide to get to a new playing field.
- “What is our purpose”. Through retrospective: “What is our DNA? Prospective: “Where can we go? What role can we play?”
Cracking the code of sustained collaboration
- Collaboration can be taught.
- Teach people to listen. Ask expansive questions. Self-checks. Comfortable with silence.
- Practice empathy. Expand others’ thinking.
- Be comfortable with feedback. Add a plus to others’ ideas
- Teach to lead and follow
- Speak with Clarity / avoid Abstractions
- look for Win-Win
Nine steps towards creating a great workplace - right here, right now.
- Purpose. Expect a lot. Don’t dictate the how. Be available. Get the word out. Everyone has what they need for their job. Say Thanks. Have fun.
- Purpose. Relevant for our customers? Unique? Can we excel at it? Do we actually invest in it?
Other reads:
https://firstround.com/review/the-engineers-guide-to-career-growth-advice-from-my-time-at-stripe-and-facebook/
Disruption