Dave Anderson @scarletinked Twitter profile

Pinned Tweet

Dave Anderson

1 year

If you're a software engineer, your main job is maintaining legacy code. Why? Because building a system doesn't take long, in comparison to how long code will last, assuming the code/business are successful. Here are the 10 commandments of maintaining legacy code. 🧵

25

376

2K

Last Seen Profiles

@LuckyRoss31VGC

@Boss_StudioRBLX

@MoehringKatja

@Alenaeee_

@punktum3K

@KirsoVer

@jahnocap

@TXSTATEFOOTBALL

@jugodecaigua

@DefenseBaron

@tiaradaabratt

@velvelitas

@LolaKasa

@JustMrBurns

@BlaineCrook53

@TheDobenWhale

@ShibaniMahtani

@FCB_Maxi_69

@palkisu

@GodysseyPodcast

@BurnieSenders

@FranceTravail

@DaniellsBarrett

@HassanSZNN

@FaithBruyning

@therealgodcloud

@_teonamarie

@kurorobeast

@neilorpen

@CrushDaddy

@Karivayu

@CJRC_UoN

@DioniScarpin

@Hiroki_SSBU

@jessicaflatcat

@flrr_s

Dave Anderson

@scarletinked

5 months

As a Director at Amazon, I repeatedly saw that big tech career incentives basically guarantee cycles of too much growth, and then layoffs. I just had someone email me, and say that they're worried about their career as a development manager. 🧵

95

543

4K

Dave Anderson

@scarletinked

5 months

I know this for a fact: If you ask a random HR Partner if a person is ready for promotion to Director, do you know what they're going to ask first? "How many people are reporting to them?" This system is broken.

15

97

2K

Dave Anderson

@scarletinked

1 year

Amazon expects a lot out of their engineer managers. They expect them to run projects, mentor employees, design systems, architect platforms, manage operations, communicate with customers, and evolve products. But they don't expect them to code. 🧵

36

162

1K

Dave Anderson

@scarletinked

1 year

The most efficient way to run a team / organization is not to keep it fully utilized. Hurts your brain, but it's true. When you're 100% booked, any delay causes ripple effects across every single project. It's oddly more efficient to keep some of your team idle.

30

161

819

Dave Anderson

@scarletinked

1 year

Moving from software engineer to senior software engineer is a big step. Most engineers get hung up on assuming that their technical depth is the key to growing their position. But is that really what's holding them back? 🧵

24

125

785

Dave Anderson

@scarletinked

5 months

A level 6 manager with 20 reports is almost guaranteed a level 7 promotion. A level 6 manager with 8 reports cannot be promoted to level 7. This continues through every level. I was given explicit numbers of headcount I needed to get my promotion approved as a Director.

12

762

Dave Anderson

@scarletinked

5 months

That number is almost always in the first line or two of any promotion document for managers. When the *most influential* metric available for a manager is "number of people working for them", it means that the strongest incentive for those managers is finding more headcount.

3

39

756

Dave Anderson

@scarletinked

5 months

The anti-incentives for cancelling a project are massive. Early in my career, I suggested a few times that my organization could cancel a project as it had low ROI. I quickly learned that it was hugely counterproductive to career growth.

7

18

664

Dave Anderson

@scarletinked

5 months

To read more about big tech culture, and how it incentivizes growth (and inevitable layoffs in the future), read on!

How Companies Incentivize Layoffs—A Study of Corporate Career Incentives

Managers at growing companies are incentivized to do one thing more than anything else. Grow their teams. Is it mysterious that most tech companies seem to have over hired?

www.scarletink.com

20

47

645

Dave Anderson

@scarletinked

4 months

Communicating concisely is a skill. Listen to an SVP or VP at Amazon talk. They don't blather with buzz words. Their communication is data rich, and generally short. Unless they're at an all-hands. No one is concise at an all-hands meeting. Learning how to be concise is…

9

69

617

Dave Anderson

@scarletinked

5 months

That might be through political infighting (steal someone's organization), pretending a project needs more headcount than it does, requesting / approving a project simply because it gets more headcount allocated to an organization, and so on.

7

16

513

Dave Anderson

@scarletinked

5 months

Yes, they'd delivered on multiple important projects. Did they make visible mistakes? No. Did they have trouble earning trust with peers? No. What was their performance issue? Literally, that their team was smaller than their peers.

2

12

474

Dave Anderson

@scarletinked

1 year

12 simple lessons from my time at Amazon. Each of them seems like obvious wisdom to me now, but I know I didn't fully grok them until I'd been through the school of hard knocks. I hope that at least one of them will make you think a little. 🧵

8

61

409

Dave Anderson

@scarletinked

1 year

"I used to manage 100 people, and now I have a single team!" If you talk to new employees at companies like Amazon/Facebook/Google, you'll regularly hear from people who feel they were under leveled. I'll walk through what mistakes they likely made, and how to avoid them. 🧵

3

42

364

Dave Anderson

@scarletinked

5 months

They only had 6 engineers reporting to them, but all their peers had more. Their manager agreed that it might look bad to their leadership team if they couldn't find more headcount for this person to manage. I asked how they were delivering on their projects.

2

5

340

Dave Anderson

@scarletinked

1 year

Software engineering is not "writing code". In a few months, a team can write an application or service. Yet if it doesn't fail, it will be supported for years. Mathematically, most of the job is supporting software, not writing it.

A Couple Decades of Unlearning — Lessons on the Path to Director

Over the couple of decades of my career, I've unlearned quite a few things. I decided to share some beliefs I've since decided were wrong.

www.scarletink.com

3

44

341

Dave Anderson

@scarletinked

1 year

If you quit your job due to getting burned out, it's quite likely your fault. Oh yeah, I bet I've really made some overworked engineers annoyed. Why? Because it's much easier to blame others, rather than recognize the actions you can take to improve your life and career. 🧵

10

40

324

Dave Anderson

@scarletinked

1 year

Commandment One: Thou shalt not complain about the code. Your co-workers wrote the system. They had good intentions. When you presume that it was built wrong (not knowing their situation), you insult them. Respect what came before.

8

24

296

Dave Anderson

@scarletinked

1 year

New managers commonly make the same mistake. When you're moved into management, you'll run into tasks you're not comfortable with. You're writing docs, presenting, or evaluating business opportunities. You'll be stressed. This feels harder than your IC job. 🧵

7

24

250

Dave Anderson

@scarletinked

5 months

Have you ever worked with a manager who dictated, instead of lead? At Amazon, we were blessed with some really brilliant managers and leaders. But not every manager was a leader. Managers can get confused, thinking that the responsibility and authority given to them by the…

5

34

234

Dave Anderson

@scarletinked

8 months

@rakyll Same thing for promotions. Most people get promoted by building something new (a new feature, a new service). Rarely do you get a promotion by simplifying / removing. The industry needs to figure out how to recognize the value of simplification.

6

34

214

Dave Anderson

@scarletinked

3 months

Office politics. If you can't beat them, join them! A guide for managers on winning office politics! * Keep busy! Busy people look important. Just like a busy restaurant looks like the place you want to eat, a busy leader is the leader you trust with more work. Promos come…

14

23

211

Dave Anderson

@scarletinked

1 year

What do managers do with all their time? I remember having a skip-level meeting once with a junior engineer, while I was Senior Manager (before my promotion). The engineer, innocently, asks what I do. "Since engineers do all the work, what do managers do?" Fair question. 🧵

7

17

206

Dave Anderson

@scarletinked

1 year

Big groups make boring decisions. If 25 people need to buy pizza, you're getting cheese pizza. Perhaps a few pepperoni pizzas, and a few vegetarian pizzas. Why? 🧵

6

24

191

Dave Anderson

@scarletinked

1 year

I was chatting with someone from Alexa recently. I complained that ChatGPT was so much better than Alexa. They had some thoughts about why it was hard to fully integrate AI into a smart device. I was thinking about it later, and I realized that what you really need is a…

16

10

174

Dave Anderson

@scarletinked

1 year

When teams estimate work for a product, there's a HUGE GIGANTIC ERROR that they almost always make. What's that error? They only count the cost of building a feature. "This feature will take 4 engineer weeks to build." That's just the beginning of the cost. 🧵

9

33

175

Dave Anderson

@scarletinked

1 year

Commandment Two: Thou shalt not permit tight schedules to ruin your system. "Doing it right would take 6 weeks, but we could probably hack it in 2?" No. Never provide that option. You can skip features, launch later, add engineers. But never make your job harder in the future.

2

11

166

Dave Anderson

@scarletinked

4 months

"No one ever told me!" - Said by many employees when they run into performance problems. Giving feedback is hard, and many managers are trash at it. Fair enough. But feedback isn't only explicitly said. Feedback can be implicit as well. Implicit feedback means implied feedback.…

11

16

163

Dave Anderson

@scarletinked

1 year

Commandment Four: Thou shalt not re-write thy system unless thou have considered all other options. Seriously. Engineers love rewriting. Existing systems are hard to understand, and modifying a system is mentally harder than re-writing it. It's rarely necessary. Don't be lazy.

2

10

161

Dave Anderson

@scarletinked

1 year

How you build something is rarely how you fail. The worry is that things will go badly if the manager is not monitoring the code the team is writing. Except that code isn't how projects fail. Projects fail due to bad product or scheduling. The manager should focus on those.

7

6

160

Dave Anderson

@scarletinked

10 months

Happy legacy code day, everyone! Just a reminder that maintaining legacy code is a sign of success, not failure. Keep up the good work! 👍

The Ten Commandments of Maintaining Legacy Code

Maintaining legacy code is a major part of software engineering. Learn how to do it well.

www.scarletink.com

2

19

153

Dave Anderson

@scarletinked

1 year

@LBacaj Come on Louie, you've got to know that article is clickbaity garbage. It's a few recruiters saying they weren't told to do anything.. but the vast majority of employees have lots of work at all these places. You see people exercising because that's what you can see in public. I…

4

3

137

Dave Anderson

@scarletinked

4 months

I get bored easily. Changing jobs frequently as a senior tech leader is not the best trait. But I realized that I didn't have to change my personality. Instead, I could build compensating skills which would allow me to do new things regularly, but still be (very) successful. 🧵

5

16

135

Dave Anderson

@scarletinked

1 year

Managers are often challenged when growing to bigger roles because they're stuck on directing action, instead of setting direction. With ICs (individual contributors), you can get away with "directing the next action". Not so with managers. 🧵

1

16

133

Dave Anderson

@scarletinked

1 year

We don't achieve great outcomes by trying hard. Jeff Bezos is famous for saying that he doesn't care about best intentions, he cares about mechanisms. We all have best intentions, but that doesn't create better outcomes. Trying harder doesn't create better outcomes. 🧵

4

14

135

Dave Anderson

@scarletinked

2 years

Rule of thumb I learned years ago. My boss was ambushed by another team complaining about a decision I made. She didn't know about the decision. I apologized. She said, "Just imagine I'll be asked about it. If I'll look dumb for not knowing, make sure to tell me."

3

13

130

Dave Anderson

@scarletinked

5 months

Procrastination is short-term mood repair. There's research that shows that you're not avoiding the work, but the negative emotions related to that work. Those emotions include boredom, frustration, a lack of meaning, stress about ambiguity, fear of people's reactions, etc. 🧵

4

16

124

Dave Anderson

@scarletinked

1 year

A manager's team needs to grow. What is the next step for a mid-level engineer? Leading other engineers through execution. What stops someone from being able to lead? Micromanagement. You need a void in leadership to be a leader yourself. A manager coding *is* micromanaging.

6

12

129

Dave Anderson

@scarletinked

1 year

Commandment Seven: Thou shalt repair windows, not break them. Every code you touch should look better than when you found it, not worse. Add tests, refactor, update variable names. Every single estimate should include non-stated non-negotiable time to progressively fix things.

2

6

128

Dave Anderson

@scarletinked

1 year

In most situations, I have argued for work-life balance. Work is a marathon, not a sprint. Except for when it's a sprint. At rare times, there's huge value in sprinting. In breaking your work-life balance. Many careers are built on a few critical, pivotal moments. 🧵

2

6

123

Dave Anderson

@scarletinked

7 months

I once let a manager on my team screw up something significant. At Amazon, we were heading towards Q4 peak. Part of our organization's process was that each service owner (area of technology) would present their readiness for peak to other senior leaders.

4

19

120

Dave Anderson

@scarletinked

2 years

@levelsio I thought the email was quite polite. I understand it had some opinions in it (particularly #3 ), but #1 / #2 were totally reasonable. Were they "picky"? Sure! But holy crap is it hard to get people to give you feedback. When someone writes detailed feedback like this, I love it.

0

114

Dave Anderson

@scarletinked

1 year

Set direction rather than directing action. This is one of the biggest lessons for moving from a line manager position to a manager of managers. 🧵

3

12

111

Dave Anderson

@scarletinked

1 year

Junior engineer: Take this design, and implement it. Mid-level engineer: Vague requirements? Design, and implement them. Senior engineer: A problem? Break it down, get it solved. Principal engineer: In your org, choose the most critical goal, and identify how to make progress.

2

13

110

Dave Anderson

@scarletinked

1 year

Commandment Nine: Thou shalt use tests to refactor safer and easier. Don't understand a system / refactoring? Add tests as you learn it. Tests are a great way of adding predictability to a complex system. They're often the best documentation on how a system should work.

3

8

110

Dave Anderson

@scarletinked

1 year

Commandment Five: Thou shalt not be afraid to create new systems. When you have a new customer/feature, consider creating a new system to support them. Complexity is the root of expensive maintenance. 5 simple systems are *far* easier to maintain than a single complex one.

3

6

110

Dave Anderson

@scarletinked

1 year

Commandment Three: Thou shalt not put orphan features in your system. Keep your code simple, and purpose built. New requirement which doesn't fit your system? Hacking it in regardless is rarely the right answer. Keep systems simple and purposeful. Make new ones when necessary.

1

5

101

Dave Anderson

@scarletinked

2 years

1\ If you're offered the opportunity to become a manager, should you accept it? More money, more power. What's to regret? Turns out – potentially a significant amount. 🧵

4

21

102

Dave Anderson

@scarletinked

1 year

People - Issues between folks, and attention for great and poor performers. People take time. Product - You need to understand what you're building, and why. Tech - Your existing and new tech needs to be solid. Project - Everything needs to get done, and properly communicated.

4

5

100

Dave Anderson

@scarletinked

7 months

My lesson? It's important to let people fail, but they need to fail safely. Don't protect them from failures because you learn from failures. Yet, you can't let people fail in a way which damages them long term. Read on in my fun newsletter article!

Discover the Painful Mistakes I've Made Which Were Key to My Career Success

The biggest mistakes drive the biggest growth. Read about a few anecdotes of painful mistakes I've made, and what I learned along the way.

www.scarletink.com

1

9

97

Dave Anderson

@scarletinked

1 year

Many people (including Twitter's owner) believe otherwise. They say that an engineering manager can't do the job well if they're not an active and skilled individual contributor. I'll explain why a manager shouldn't code, and other things they should be doing with their time.

5

1

96

Dave Anderson

@scarletinked

1 year

What you build is more important than how you build it. "We might be going the wrong way, but at least we're making great time!" It's a horrible waste of time to build the wrong thing well. The manager needs to focus on ensuring their team is building the right thing.

8

4

95

Dave Anderson

@scarletinked

1 year

Commandment Ten: Thou shalt build the minimum to gain the value. One way systems become hard to maintain is by building to be infinitely extensible. Strangely enough, that makes them less flexible because future engineers can't understand them. Think ahead, but build for now.

2

5

93

Dave Anderson

@scarletinked

1 year

An operational disaster happens. The site goes down. All hands on deck until it's fixed. Once it's fixed, the leadership team asks for a COE. What's the way we can stop this from happening again? This is a 🧵 on doing *something*, and how much that decision can cost you.

6

18

93

Dave Anderson

@scarletinked

1 year

Commandment Six: Thou shalt learn the system before changing it. Never accept a mystery system. It can be grokked with some effort (do that), or It makes no sense at all (you can fix that), or It's so huge that no human could comprehend it (break it into smaller pieces).

1

10

90

Dave Anderson

@scarletinked

1 year

My favorite interview question – "Tell me about a recent conflict with a co-worker." Some people respond, "I don't have conflicts!" “The absence of conflict is not harmony, it’s apathy.” - Think Again by Adam Grant We need leaders with strong convictions. Conflict isn't bad.

4

11

89

Dave Anderson

@scarletinked

2 years

@alexxubyte I also think programmers need intuition around human thresholds. 1. 100 ms is *instantaneous* for a user. 2. 1 second interrupts the user, and they start to feel like they're waiting. 3. 10 seconds is the end of most user's patience. Anything longer is essentially an error.

2

14

87

Dave Anderson

@scarletinked

11 months

As a manager, you'll hopefully end up managing people who are so spectacular at their job, that you can't match their skills. How can you be a useful manager to them? 🧵

4

6

87

Dave Anderson

@scarletinked

1 year

Commandment Eight: Thou shalt not neglect the framework of thy system. While teams will sometimes improve their legacy code, they'll often neglect the build processes, deployment, or testing framework of their systems. Refactoring is not just about code. Update everything.

1

5

85

Dave Anderson

@scarletinked

1 year

Knowledge worker management isn't about task management. If a manager is personally monitoring and assigning tasks to individual employees, something has gone off the rails.

A Couple Decades of Unlearning — Lessons on the Path to Director

Over the couple of decades of my career, I've unlearned quite a few things. I decided to share some beliefs I've since decided were wrong.

www.scarletink.com

1

12

83

Dave Anderson

@scarletinked

1 year

All that being said, what does an actual day look like? I wrote up a representative sample for my latest newsletter article. I had some fun with it. Enjoy!

A Day in the Life of a Senior Manager at Amazon

A representative log of what one day might look like for a Senior Manager at Amazon.

www.scarletink.com

2

6

83

Dave Anderson

@scarletinked

1 year

Significant disagreements are rarely about code. Engineering teams don't need an expert engineer to solve disagreements. They need their leader to listen, and help them find common ground. Picking the right answer is rarely more important than building a strong team.

7

82

Dave Anderson

@scarletinked

4 months

Quick trick for getting feedback from peers, or those who report to you. Why would you need a trick? People are often reluctant to give constructive feedback. There's little upside, and frequently downside to criticism. It's much easier to say, "You're doing great!" One thing…

0

9

81

Dave Anderson

@scarletinked

1 year

Why is it important you disagree with senior leaders? Because senior folk recognize how rare it is. I noticed fewer disagreements as I became more senior in my roles. This was a particular problem when I stated an opinion, and they took it as fact.

12 Things I Learned in Big Tech

A list of 12 things which stood out to me as things I didn't originally understand before working at big tech.

www.scarletink.com

2

16

80

Dave Anderson

@scarletinked

1 year

The manager should interface between the engineers and business teams. Every engineering team needs an educated and practical leader to negotiate with various stakeholders. That person needs to earn trust with multiple teams. It is hard to do that job while coding.

4

2

81

Dave Anderson

@scarletinked

1 year

Why does Amazon favor disagree & commit? Because making *any* decision in most cases is better than no decision. If you're deciding between A and B for too long, you've essentially chosen C (neither of them). This means employees need to learn how to decisively move on. How?

7

9

80

Dave Anderson

@scarletinked

8 months

Your manager is rarely in full control over your career. They can't promote you, give you a raise, or fire you without the approval of others. This means you need to know how good they are at their job. The job of helping you get properly rewarded for your work. 🧵

1

5

76

Dave Anderson

@scarletinked

1 year

I've been thinking about newsletters vs news sites recently. I click on links to news sites, and if I see a paywall, I click away. However, if I click on a link to a newsletter, I'll often read a few of their free articles. I'll sometimes subscribe to their free newsletter for…

3

73

Dave Anderson

@scarletinked

1 year

4. Have a point of view Don't just provide options. Always provide an opinion. Providing options is delegating work to a decider. Providing opinions is offering to let the decider delegate to you. Providing your point of view = creating opportunities to lead

1

73

Dave Anderson

@scarletinked

7 months

Managers should prioritize resiliency in teams, just like you prioritize resiliency in software. For example, if the manager always assigns tasks, they're a bottleneck. If employees self-choose tasks, everyone can operate independently. 🧵

2

0

71

Dave Anderson

@scarletinked

11 months

Some of the largest disasters I witnessed at Amazon were the result of trying to fix things. Restarting servers for an overloaded service. Adding servers to a system which was breaking because of too many servers. Change management during high-severity events. 🧵

1

12

69

Dave Anderson

@scarletinked

1 year

Train your team members so that they could get another job. Treat them well enough so that they never want to.

4

5

67

Dave Anderson

@scarletinked

1 year

To optimize your team as a manager, you should spend most of your time on your top performers. Improve your top performers 10%, and your team does 30% more work. Improve your bottom performers 20%, and your team does 5% more work.

A Couple Decades of Unlearning — Lessons on the Path to Director

Over the couple of decades of my career, I've unlearned quite a few things. I decided to share some beliefs I've since decided were wrong.

www.scarletink.com

1

4

68

Dave Anderson

@scarletinked

2 years

@jessegenet @_kaizensoze I disagree with your viewpoint of what 1:1s are for. If you're updating on a project, that doesn't belong in a 1:1. Do that in public. If you have questions about work, you can email/Slack them, standup, etc. Continual up and down performance and career feedback? Weekly 1:1s.

1

0

66

Dave Anderson

@scarletinked

1 year

From @GergelyOrosz 's latest newsletter: "Another topic that comes up: what to do with all the 'free time' leaders now have as they are not hiring as much!” An insight I hadn't thought much about. I often spent at least a quarter of my time working on recruiting in some way.

4

9

66

Dave Anderson

@scarletinked

1 year

It's stressful to start at a new company, particularly one like Amazon. I've seen people attending meetings and drifting for weeks, waiting to "ramp up." Don't wait. Waiting is passive. Actively take control. How? Learn about your Product, Partners, and Systems. 👉

3

8

65

Dave Anderson

@scarletinked

1 year

For more on this topic, take a look at the related newsletter article.

"Can't Code! Not inclined to Hire?" - Why Engineering Managers Don't Need to be Great Coders

An explanation of why managers do not need to code, and probably shouldn't.

www.scarletink.com

3

64

Dave Anderson

@scarletinked

1 year

Like this thread? Want to read more on this or other leadership/engineering topics? Head on over to my newsletter.

The Ten Commandments of Maintaining Legacy Code

Maintaining legacy code is a major part of software engineering. Learn how to do it well.

www.scarletink.com

3

5

61

Dave Anderson

@scarletinked

10 months

Who you know matters. Thursday the 27th, Gergely from The Pragmatic Engineer and Alex from ByteByteGo each posted one of my articles on their newsletters. I ended up with a pile of new paid subscribers. And I know a couple of great guys. Let's talk about knowing people. 🧵

1

7

62

Dave Anderson

@scarletinked

2 years

One of the best things you can do for your manager is remove things from their plate. Write briefly. When bringing options, always propose your preferred option. Help them say "ok". Give summaries, not all the data. Always think to yourself, "How can I make their job easier?"

1

9

62

Dave Anderson

@scarletinked

4 months

There are 3 major areas for ramping up in a new team. Product - Customers, finance, features, metrics. Partners - On your team, on other teams, externally. Their experience, priorities, and areas of ownership. Systems - How are they connected? What tech is used? Current state?

1

5

61

Dave Anderson

@scarletinked

1 year

I've repeatedly heard complaints that my writing is too optimistic. "Everyone plays politics in my org." "Why don't you acknowledge the *real* way people get ahead?" "My manager doesn't coach me. Why do you keep pretending that managers aren't slimy and horrible?" Ok. 🧵

6

7

58

Dave Anderson

@scarletinked

1 year

Leaders never say, 'That's not my job.' One of my favorite parts of the Amazon LPs (courtesy of @EthanEvansVP ). When it comes down to it, leaders fill in the gaps. 🧵

3

4

59

Dave Anderson

@scarletinked

7 months

"I don't agree with this." "Wait a second. Your team agreed to this 3-months ago!" "I don't remember that." Sound familiar? It's astonishing how often we run into this. You have a discussion. Come to a logical agreement. Everyone is happy. Until they aren't. 🧵

6

9

59

Dave Anderson

@scarletinked

1 year

You have a new job. It's day one. Who do you meet with, and what is your meeting agenda? Meet with: 1. Your manager. You want to show that you're on the ball. 2. Your teammates. At least say hi immediately. 3. Your key partners. First impressions matter. What's your agenda?

3

7

57

Dave Anderson

@scarletinked

1 year

Less well known aspect of the frugality leadership principle: Processes are expensive. Avoid them if possible. At all times, you should hate that you need processes. Every single process should be regularly questioned. Why? Because they're a cost. They're a bottleneck. 🧵

2

6

58

Dave Anderson

@scarletinked

7 months

@KevinNaughtonJr If you know programming, you know most languages. In general 😀 In college, a guy down the dorm hall asked me for help on his programming assignment. I fixed a few bugs for him. Only then did I realize the syntax was strange. I asked what language it was. Turns out it was…

9

2

58

Dave Anderson

@scarletinked

2 months

The idea that AI will steal software engineering jobs is naive. LLMs (e.g. ChatGPT) produce remarkable results. They mimic language to write poetry, create videos, and write computer code. It's that latter capability which has social media and the press all excited.

2

7

58

Dave Anderson

@scarletinked

1 year

Amazon's websites and services rarely fail due to heavy customer load, or the inability for Amazon's servers to scale. Rather, the majority of major outages are caused by manual human error. After a major incident, our SVP got a number of us together to discuss the event. 🧵

3

6

56

Dave Anderson

@scarletinked

3 years

@JeevunSidhu Consider when buffing Lissandra to give her the jungle treatment? She'd be a fantastically interesting jungle mage if you'd do some jungle style buff.

5

0

53

Dave Anderson

@scarletinked

1 year

Makes the team around them better. Senior engineers are often not the most productive engineers. Why? They're spending their time on coaching and mentoring their co-workers. • Code reviews. • Design reviews. • Feedback on PM requirements. Team growth > Personal code

1

2

55

Dave Anderson

@scarletinked

7 months

When people explain their accomplishments, they mistakenly focus on the cool work they did, rather than the value they added. In interviewing, we're looking for someone who doesn't just do complex / cool work, but someone who understands business value. Let me give an example.

1

5

55

Dave Anderson

@scarletinked

2 years

@businessbarista Eating Meat. 25 years might be aggressive, but I'm convinced it's coming. I'm convinced once lab meat and/or plant substitutes become cheaper than meat, our outrage at factory farms and eating meat in general will grow enough to legislate it away.

4

0

52

Dave Anderson

@scarletinked

1 year

11. Wait, and see if the work disappears A lot of what people ask us to do is ephemeral. It goes away if we wait. Take advantage of that. If you don't feel work is necessarily important, don't do it. None of us have time to do all of our work. It's a legitimate strategy.

1

0

54

Dave Anderson

@scarletinked

1 year

How does Amazon use org structure to improve decision-making? At every level, where high-quality and fast decisions should take place, Amazon puts a single leader in place. That ensures that every decision has a clear owner. Where are these leaders in the org structure? 🧵

2

5

51

Dave Anderson

@scarletinked

1 year

3. Speak up You might be wrong. You might look ignorant. You might stick your foot in your mouth. You might have missed something. Leaders speak up. It's a huge mistake to worry more about risk, while missing opportunities to be a leader, gain visibility, and set direction.

1

0

53

Dave Anderson

@scarletinked

1 year

6. Simpler is better In almost all cases, simpler is boring, but better. The proven technology is simple, and less risky. The simple UI is boring, but easier for customers. The simple technical design works fine, and can be built quickly. When possible, choose simple.

1

4

52

Dave Anderson

@scarletinked

1 year

12. Attitude is almost everything Act like a jerk, and no one will work with you. Act like a great co-worker, and you'll build a reputation. Act confident, and people will listen. Act nervous, and people will find someone else to decide. Act how you want to be treated.

2

51

Dave Anderson

@scarletinked

1 year

It can feel lazy to delegate well. An otherwise top-performing manager can feel awkward when giving away hard tasks. Why? Because we were often moved into a leadership role due to our work output. Then it suddenly becomes necessary to (in some ways) avoid work. Hard transition.

1

51