Ben McCormick

@therufs Turns out that when houses aren’t all built on NC clay, they can have basements even if they’re not built on a hill

honestly i am more perplexed by how that much square footage fits into a house that looks relatively unassuming. maybe the scale is weird?

Spread the word: daringfireball.net/2023/03/tweetb…

Really enjoyed these reflections on LLMs: medium.learningbyshipping.com/ai-chatgpt-and… "AI, ChatGPT, and Bing…Oh My"

Setting Expectations: 4 key areas for performance management: benmccormick.org/2023/02/13/set…

Setting Expectations: 4 key areas for performance management: benmccormick.org/2023/02/11/set…

"Doing well at a start-up is not simply about skill, it is about mentality. A start-up mentality values action over correctness, results over process." via @joulee

3 Pillars For Effective Work: benmccormick.org/2023/01/13/pil…

Basically from a “quality triangle” perspective – execs can control costs or time, but holding the line on a minimum quality bar is essentially a core piece of my job, and nobody wins when you try to promise impossible combinations of scope/quality/dates.

In an ideal world, org leaders define goals and teams figure out what to do. But top down asks happen. How I decide whether to push back on top down asks as an EM: a. Fine to be asked for a date or a scope (not both) b. Never ship something likely to cause an incident

“Optimism 95% of the time, strategic pessimism 5% of the time” is a much smarter idea than optimism 100% of the time.

An epic battle between the growth PM, the revenue PM, and legal.

The idea that things become hits mostly due to a small number of large audiences rather than point to point viral sharing seems intuitively correct to me: lennysnewsletter.com/p/virality-is-… Or at least the large audiences “seed” the viral behavior

As employees return from holiday break, [Shopify] said it’s conducting a “calendar purge,” removing all recurring meetings with more than two people “in perpetuity,” while reupping a rule that no meetings at all can be held on Wednesdays. Big meetings ... benmccormick.org/2023/01/03/as-…

2022 Books: benmccormick.org/2023/01/03/boo…

I love this clear visual summary of a Staff+ Engineer’s role from Tanya Reilly’s The Staff Engineer’s Path amzn.to/3WEO8oq

Growing as an engineer is less about being right more often and more about finding ways to stop being wrong quickly

When working on a “stretch project”, it’s tempting to keep your plans high level when getting review / sign off. This sabotages feedback - the value of experience is in the details. Write out specific plans and then seek out feedback from folks who’ve done work like it before.

“God and sinners reconciled”. Merry Christmas everyone.

Both can be true at the same time: - software stacks have gotten way too complex over the last decade, and engineers who primarily were responsible for this get very defensive about it - it’s also unwise to make baseless claims like Twitter only needs 20 engineers to function

This is a nerdy but helpful way of explaining an important management concept – an org can’t prioritize if people don’t say no till its too late. twitter.com/benskuhn/statu…