Johanna

At a deep level, meeting inflation is about the outdated expectation that all office work ought to be synchronous, or happening at the same time for everyone. Meetings require synchronicity: Everybody be present now. But most white-collar labor can be at least somewhat asynchronous. We send emails and chats that don’t require an immediate response.... See more

We pay lip service to the idea of hiring the best people in the world — but in reality, we’re only hiring the best people who happen to be close by. Call me crazy, but I think if we’re going to talk about hiring the best talent available, we should actually try to do that. This means letting go of the idea, at least in IT work, that people need to... See more

Instead of reading mid-wit pop-sci books which just offer vague metaphors or irrelevant anecdotes, read books that are either pure fun (fantasy, sci-fi, manga, etc), or actual hardcore science (textbooks and review papers).

Whenever possible i recommend contract-to-hire for remote teams.Get them on for 1-2 weeks on a specific project. This will tell you more about them than any whiteboarding tests you will ever do.

What's the purpose of a scientific conference? I think its twofold. One is you want to learn new important things without having to read all those papers. And the second one is meeting other people, making connections, getting into discussions.

The best people in both groups spend a lot of time reflecting on some version of the Hamming question—"what are the most important problems in your field, and why aren’t you working on them?” In general, no one reflects on this question enough, but the best people do it the most, and have the best ‘problem taste’, which is some combination of... See more