Ben McCormick

Thu, 01 Jan 2026 22:28:58 -0400

Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky, The flying cloud, the frosty light: The year is dying in the night; Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.

Ring out the old, ring in the new, Ring, happy bells, across the snow: The year is going, let him go; Ring out the false, ring in the true.

Ring out the grief that saps the mind For those that here we see no more; Ring out the feud of rich and poor, Ring in redress to all mankind.

Ring out a slowly dying cause, And ancient forms of party strife; Ring in the nobler modes of life, With sweeter manners, purer laws.

Ring out the want, the care, the sin, The faithless coldness of the times; Ring out, ring out my mournful rhymes But ring the fuller minstrel in.

Ring out false pride in place and blood, The civic slander and the spite; Ring in the love of truth and right, Ring in the common love of good.

Ring out old shapes of foul disease; Ring out the narrowing lust of gold; Ring out the thousand wars of old, Ring in the thousand years of peace.

Ring in the valiant man and free, The larger heart, the kindlier hand; Ring out the darkness of the land, Ring in the Christ that is to be.

In Memoriam, [Ring out, wild bells]

Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Happy New Year to all

Coding is deciding

Fri, 22 Aug 2025 21:09:00 -0400

We often talk about computer programs purely as collections of “code”. Lately I’ve been thinking about it a bit differently: a computer program is the encoding of a huge series of nested decisions, made intentionally or otherwise.

Let’s say we’ve decided to build a calculator app. That overall goal is the first decision, but there are many more decisions nested underneath it.

What features does our calculator app need? (Just basic arithmetic or are we buliding a graphing calculator?)
What platform are we building for? (web, mobile, desktop, VR?)

Once we know generally what we’re trying to do, there’s still a bunch of fundamental decisions to be made before we write any code

Is this a client only app or is there a server component?
What framework should we use?
How will the app be hosted and distributed?

Then once we start actually writing code, we find even more nested decisions.

How are we going to structure our files?
How will we break functionality up into components, classes and/or functions?
Is this a single file, a single app, or some sort of distributed system?

And then even within a given class we nest even more decisions

What functionality should the class have?
What is the high level logic of each function?

And then we come down to the lowest level of decisions

What syntax will we use for that? (For example: for loops or iterators to run through a list)
Will we use a library or write some functionality from scratch?
Tabs or spaces? Single quotes or double quotes?

We can think of these as functional, infrastructure, architecture, logical and syntax level decisions.

The history of computing has mostly involved changing which of those decisions a software developer needs to make as tools have changed. Many of those changes have removed the need to make decisions in favor of a generally acceptable standard implementation. The vast majority of programmers no longer worry about the details of the bytecode or assembly definitions of programs — those have been standardized by higher level languages. Most modern languages also remove or significantly reduce decision making around memory management, cloud platforms reduce¹ the decisions many devs need to make around infrastructure for their apps, and API frameworks like Django or Ruby on Rails reduce the decisions somebody needs to make about how to structure their API code.

Each of these abstractions have allowed developers to focus more on the decisions around what their program should do and less on the implementation details of how it does it. They’re also all leaky abstractions to varying degrees, and there are times and situations where a developer will need to go without or work around the standard tool to make a different decision.

Applying this model to think about LLM based coding tools, it’s useful to talk about the use of LLM in terms of what decisions we’re making vs offloading to the coding tool. LLMs are essentially tools for replacing decisions that you might have had to make while generating text with a reasonable standardized option. However the way we use them can lead to different sets of decisions being made by the tools.

Vibe Coding

Vibe coding, the buzzword of the year in tech, is commonly understood to mean that you’re creating an application solely through prompting and iterating based on the observed output without reading the code. This is effectively choosing to make decisions at the functional level (and maybe the infra level) and let AI handle the rest.

Tab Complete

We can contrast this to a tab complete interface like those provided by Github Copilot or Cursor, where an IDE will offer to insert a chunk of code based on context. Here AI is mostly deciding on syntax, with more ambitious implementations like Cursor possibly moving up to the logical level

Feature Development With Agents

There’s a lot of room between these 2 extremes. Tools like Claude code, Cursor and Copilot can take on tasks at a variety of levels depending on how they’re prompted. You can ask a coding agent to generate a new feature for instance, which might live completely at the logical / syntax level or could end up infringing on architecture if the feature has new architectural considerations or the coding agent introduces a new pattern or dependency.

Who decides what?

As I’m personally moving back into more of a heavy coding role this month, I find this framework of who is making decisions helpful.

While building enterprise software at work, I’m ultimately responsible for the quality of all the code I write, so while I find it helpful to move faster by using AI tools to get a rough solution in place, I encode some decisions through the prompts I give and end up reviewing and tweaking everything to make sure what comes out of PRs I open represents my decisions. I’m also quickly building an intuition for which tasks a coding agent is likely to produce a useful output for that I need to tweak, vs one where I’m unlikely enough to agree with the decisions that its faster to just write it myself².

On the other hand if I want to experiment with something quick and dirty or prototype a concept, the freedom these tools give to ignore every level below the functional one is wonderful (I just don’t want to maintain such a system).

Working with these tools has reminded me once again that reality has a surprising amount of detail. There is no magic in the world and decisions are always going to have to be made. If coding tools help us to go faster by focusing more on the decisions that really matter, I’m excited to see what they help us bulid.

Ok given the huge ecosystem of choices and configuration in cloud computing its probably more accurate to say that it changes the decisions devs need to make ↩︎
Given the rapid evolution of the tools of course, this is something that needs to be checked over time. Claude Sonnet can do things reliably that Chat GPT3.5 would consistently fail on, and the agentic system seems to have a good deal of impact on quality as well. ↩︎

Fri, 25 Jul 2025 09:16:19 -0400

This is a good summary of the state of AI takes right now I think

No one knows anything about AI

AI is important. But we don’t yet fully know why.

AI currently has all the “noise” and incentives to hype that crypto had a few years ago, but underneath that is clearly much more “real”. It makes things hard to evaluate for now.

Retraining our Brains To Review LLM-augmented work

Tue, 22 Jul 2025 10:05:07 -0400

Something I worry about with generative AI in business and commercial use: almost no one fully reads anything in those environments.

Now imagine when even the author hasn’t read what was written… yikes. How does AI writing and reading impact this reality?

Steven Sinofski has an interesting post here about “slop” at work. I think about this in terms of heuristics. Our brains are lazy and we all naturally develop “shortcuts” to evaluating a piece of work. Historically seeing a PRD or tech spec that was fully fleshed out with diagrams and clear explanations of context was a good indication that some serious work and discovery had gone into the document. A PR full of detailed test cases indicated attention to detail, and that thought had gone into all the possible edge cases. But with LLMs it is easy to take a few half thought through bullet points and make them look credible, or generate plausible test cases at scale.

We’re going to need to retrain our brains.

2024 Lifting Recap - A better year

Sun, 09 Feb 2025 16:41:00 -0400

After a frustrating second year of consistent lifting, 2024 brought much better progress, though mostly along some different directions than I’d been focused on the first 2 years. My goals were more focused on health/consistency/functional strength and less on pure powerlifting strength and I read/ran a lot of stuff from Dan Johnand Pavel and it took my training in a different direction.

What I did

I ran 5 programs at various points this year

5/3/1 FSL
Easy Strength
General Gainz
Mass Made Simple
Deadlifts & Kettlebells - with a heavy KB Press focus added on

In the spring I saw good progress on shoulder health running an easy FSL program and doing a lot of direct shoulder rehab work. I then ran easy strength for a few weeks with an intent to focus on fat loss. The weight loss didn’t happen and this time was probably a net loss for my powerlift numbers, but I was able to make significant progress on chinups for the first time in my life, and that additional pulling work seemed to do wonders for my shoulder health.

Over the summer I ran a few weeks of GZCL 5x a week, which worked great for a few weeks and let me set a few PRs on the big lifts until I could no longer recover from it. I then transitioned to easy strength for the rest of the summer and finally saw some progress on fat loss, my first pain free bench pressing in 2 years, as well as continued pullup gains.

In the fall I did another month of easy FSL work and saw continued body comp improvements, before trying out Mass Made Simple, which I enjoyed but did not quite finish as craziness in life and work did not allow for the amount of sleep and recovery I needed to finish it out. I did manage a 20x Bodyweight Squat during this period and set a new Bench Press PR without any pain.

To end the year I started running a version of Deadlifts & Kettlebells with my life while also putting a heavy focus on the KB press, and am running that program into the new years. I didn’t do a ton of deadlifting the second half of this year and had lost some strength, and saw it quickly start coming back with more focus.

What I learned

In general 5/3/1, Easy Strength and DL&KB were run as “park bench”¹ programs where I made some steady progress (especially on fat loss) and General Gainz and Mass Made Simple were run more short term as muscle building “sprints” for 4-6 weeks.

I found this breakdown (around 42 weeks of the year going at an “easy” pace and 10 weeks going more intensely on a specific objective) worked well for me and I will be copying that again this year. Consistency works, and doing things in a way that I can maintain allows for greater progress and fun over time.

I also saw that my shoulder pain issues seemed to be helped a lot by focusing on doing more pulling than pressing. The focus on pullups throughout the year seemed to make a major difference here once some direct PT exercises got me to a more stable foundation.

Progress Made

	Start of the year numbers	2024 Progress
Weight	255 Jan 1	233 in November, 238 Dec 31
Bench Press	250 1RM	260 1RM
Squat (high bar)	355 1RM	375 1RM
Overhead Press	155 1RM	165 1RM
Deadlift	405 1RM	435 2RM
Chinup	BW 2RM	BW 10RM
Pullup	N/A	BW 8RM
KB Press	N/A	32KG 3RM

I made moderate overall progress on the powerlift numbers this year, but my new maxes were mostly set at 10-15 pounds lighter body weight than the original numbers. Those are also all numbers I hit in training, as I did not do any serious 1RM testing this year. At the same time I put more focus on pulling exercises and kettlebells, and am happy with my progress there.

The two biggest wins though are getting down to a weight where I feel much more energetic, and getting my shoulders healthy to the point where I can do bench, pushup and overhead press exercises without pain or limitations.

Looking Ahead to 2025

For 2025 I want to continue “reasonable” training, and put most of my focus on the Deadlift, KB Press and pullups. I’m hoping to achieve a 2x bodyweight DL this year and would like to be able to do 10 strict pullups with a 25lb weight and be able to press the beast (48kg KB) for 1 rep by the end of the year.

I’m starting off the year by continuing the DL & KB program I began at the end of last year.

Park Bench vs Bus Bench are Dan John terms for workouts that you can do consistently over time vs more short term programs run for a specific purpose ↩︎

Sun, 09 Feb 2025 15:50:09 -0400

The first great fact which emerges from our civilization is that today everything has become “means.” There is no longer an “end”; we do not know whither we are going. We have forgotten our collective ends, and we possess great means: we set huge machines in motion in order to arrive nowhere.

Jacque Sellul

This quote has been haunting me all weekend. It describes and explains so much of the tension in modern life.

Lifting Program Review: Easy Strength

Sun, 25 Aug 2024 20:23:54 -0400

I spent the last 2 months running Dan Jon and Pavel Tsatsouline’s Easy Strength Program. It’s a fundamentally very simple program that Dan still managed to write a huge ~200 page book about. The high level goal is to pick 5 exercises and to run them every workout for 40 workouts without doing more than 10 reps on any of the individual exercises. The idea is that it is a minimalist program thats run before your “other activity”, a sport or walking for fat loss.

Dan recommends running it 5x a week so that it takes 2 months total, and allows for some variation in exercise throughout the month. I ran it that way, while focusing on walking 8500 - 12000 steps a day (sometimes but not always doing a long walk immediately after the workout). My goals were fat loss, improving pullups, and improving my pressing.

I switched my exercises at the halfway point. For the first half I ran:

Push Press (Inexperienced, goal was to help my press where I was having lockout trouble)
Pullups / Chinups (Lots of variations, didn’t always stick to the 10 rep limit)
High Bar Squat
Ab Wheel
Curls (Probably not a great rep scheme but I’ve neglected curls and wanted to support the chins/pullups)

Halfway through I returned to a normal work schedule after being on delayed parental leave the first month and made 2 switches

Push Press -> Bench Press
Squat -> Hang Cleans

Squats 5x a week proved to be too tiring while I was working, even at “easy” weights, so I switched to hang cleans (a “learning” movement for me that wasn’t overly challenging)

I’ve avoided heavy bench pressing for almost a year due to shoulder troubles that I had mostly overcome in the spring but still felt on pushups and bench. So I started very light here and worked my way up.

Results

P and DL numbers are from testing the last week.

Measure	Progress	Notes
Body Weight:	248 -> 237lb
Squat	355 1RM -> 375 1RM	early in cycle – saw some strength loss after not squatting the last 2 weeks
BP	250 1RM -> 255 1RM	more importantly, I hadn’t benched over 200 without pain in > a year, but benched 2x5@230 without pain this week
P	155 4RM -> 155 3RM	Small loss here but I think pretty good given weight loss and lack of practice
DL	435 1RM -> 395 1RM	Not overly concerned about this, I think this is mostly lack of practice this year, but probably some real strength loss from neglecting lower body the last month
Chinup	6RM -> 10RM	10 chins was one of my goals for this year, very happy with that one

Overall I was very pleased with this. I think I likely did lose some real lower body strength the last month from neglecting those lifts, but my upper body pressing strength seems to be somewhere between gain and maintenance despite losing 11 pounds, and I hit two of my big goals for the year (10 chins and benching heavy without pain). Even better I felt great throughout the program, other than when I tried to push the squatting a bit at the end of the first month.

I definitely will run easy strength again next time I want to lean out a bit and focus on 1 or 2 specific lifts. I will likely program a bit differently though. At least at my current place in life, I seem to have capacity to give my best to at most 2 lifts, and then can fill in solid work with 3 more. I probably don’t want to completely neglect lower body for 2 months, so in the future I’d probably go with a more “classic” split where I incorporate deadlifts along with a pressing movement and put them first, and then do 3 “easy/fun” filler exercises along them.

Lifting in the first half of 2024

Wed, 10 Jul 2024 15:08:13 -0400

I ran a mix of 5/3/1 and Easy Strength from January to June and while I continued to work through a shoulder injury in Q1 I did set some new PRs:

Squat: 350 -> 375 1RM DL: 400 -> 435 1(and 2)RM Chins: Max of 3 with poor ROM -> 8 clean

Shoulder health is significantly improved but still bothering me on bench press and pushups. Overall made minimal pressing progress so far this year even though improving my press was a primary goal.

I also focused more on “easy conditioning” with a decent amount of walking and easy runs, and that’s been a positive change. I’m down 12lbs from the beginning of the year.

Overall I’m happy with the progress even if the pressing is frustrating. If I make similar progress in shoulder health / conditioning and the lower body lifts the back half of the year I will be very pleased.

A Simple Path To Building Trust

Tue, 25 Jun 2024 14:22:10 -0400

Being trusted is a superpower at work and in life. When we’re trusted things move faster. Communication is more open, people become more cooperative, and work becomes more enjoyable as relationships can grow deeper.

I’ve found that there’s a very simple¹ formula to building people’s trust.

Here’s the formula:

Identify a need
Say you will meet the need. Say when you’ll do it by and with what quality.
Go and do it the way you said you would
Tell people you did it
Repeat

That’s the whole process. Do that enough as an individual and you will develop a reputation for reliability and trust. You’ll find that people tell you things and give you more opportunities. If your team does that you’ll find that other teams become easier to work with.

A few notes:

Misses count more than makes

Fairly or unfairly, one missed commitment is more memorable than 4 that were completed on time. If you’re operating at a trust deficit it will take time to rebuild trust, but the process is the same.

When you do miss, always try to miss early and clearly. Nothing erodes trust like discovering that somebody has been hiding failure.

Sometimes you’ll discover that while you don’t have to miss, your commitment no longer makes sense after making it: priorities have changed, new information has emerged, or another opportunity has presented itself. You can choose to make changes in this situation. If you communicate the change and your reasoning early to the people you’ve committed to², this probably won’t be counted as a true miss. However it probably won’t build trust either, and if you’re regularly doing this you may create the impression that no plans can be relied upon if you’re involved. The tradeoffs here will vary based on context.

People can hold you to implicit expectations

You can lose trust if you share a secret, even if you never explicitly promised not to tell anybody the secret. You may lose trust at work if you don’t meet some standard of quality that other team members are hitting, even if the expectation wasn’t explicitly stated. This is also why it’s useful to say when and at level of quality you’re committing to something - if you think you’re committing to a rough draft of a tech doc by next week but your manager is expecting a polished doc to be done by Friday, you’ll lose trust even if you hit what you think you’re committing to. Since misses count more than make its important to understand and clarify any implicit expectations you might be held to

People trust kindness

When you’re kind to others they want to trust you and are more likely to overlook or forgive misses. Jerks fight an uphill battle to earning others' trust.

As always, simple does not mean easy. ↩︎
For work tasks it may not always be clear who is counting on your commitments: other departments might have been promised this work by somebody else, or be relying on another project that is dependent on your work. Be careful here. ↩︎

Mon, 17 Jun 2024 13:26:31 -0400

The intended takeaway from all this is exactly where we started in the introduction: creating quality is context specific. Be wary of following the playbook you’ve seen before, even if those playbook were tremendously successful. They might work extremely well, but they often don’t unless you have a useful model for reasoning about why they worked in the former environment.

Loved the thoughts on quality here from Will Larson: lethain.com/quality/

Sun, 09 Jun 2024 19:54:25 -0400

Over a year old, but new to me – I thought this series of posts was a great roundup of some of the issues that make tech a less happy place to work than in the previous decade: Software and its Discontents

Sun, 09 Jun 2024 19:52:08 -0400

Very helpful writeup on LLMs in production: What We’ve Learned From A Year of Building with LLMs

Thu, 09 May 2024 15:00:05 -0400

Reality Has A Surprising Amount Of Detail

This is an old piece, but new to me. What a great turn of phrase, and accurate insight about doing hard things.

2023 Lifting Recap: Frustration & Learning

Sat, 27 Jan 2024 22:15:00 -0400

2022 was the year I began lifting at home, and it was a year of consistent progress and wins. 2023 was… different. I switched from a Starting Strength based Linear Progression to a 5/3/1 based program , and was also fully self-programming with no coach, and it was a year of ups and downs. In the end I learned that I had a lot to learn, and feel ready to get better in 2024. My quantifiable lifting improvements for the year are minimal compared to 2023 though.

What I did

At a high level I used 4 5/3/1 templates throughout the year.

Jan-April: “Classic 5/3/1 Boring But Big”

This was the first thing I saw with 5/3/1 and what most people seemed to do so I tried it. This is a lot of sets of 1-5 reps and even more with 10 reps with lower weights than I got used to from starting strength.

April-Early June: “Krypteia (aborted early)"

Krypteia is a heavily super-set focus variant of 5/3/1. It’s intended to be a conditioning focused program without sacrificing strength and size (too good to be true?). I quickly got injured doing this, though it was related to longer term problems not just Krypteia. I switched to Morning Star at that point

June - September: “Morning Star”

After I picked up a shoulder injury that was making benching dicey, I decided I wanted to shift to focus on strength and specifically Squat and Press. Morning Star was a way to do that which felt a bit more familiar to me. Overall these were the cycles I made the most progress in terms of strength numbers, and felt the healthiest.

September-December: Squat/Push/Pull Full Body / 1000% Awesome

I’d liked the full body feel from the summer with Morning Star, so I decided to move back to that, continuing to keep emphasis on the Press and Squat but reincorporate Bench Press and Deadlift.

What I learned

5/3/1 and Starting Strength have very different philosophies:

Starting Strength: Focus ~exclusively on 5 big compound lifts (Bench Press, Deadlift, Press, Squat, Power Clean)¹ and try to make progress as quickly as possible on a 5 rep max

5/3/1: Focus on overall strength and conditioning with a goal of slower maintainable progress across a wider range of fitness indicators (multiple RM targets and general preparedness / conditioning)

I started 5/3/1 programs like they were Starting Strength (started with weights that were in retrospect too aggressive, didn’t do the accessory work, and ignored conditioning recommendations) and ultimately it led to a path of feeling like I’d stopped making progress and then getting injured.

The lessons for me:

Understand your program’s philosophy if you’re coaching yourself

5/3/1 was initially not effective for me because I wasn’t really doing the full program, I wasn’t really thinking of progress in the way the program encourages, and I wasn’t disciplined in how I progressed.

Slow progress without injuries > fast progress followed by injuries

That’s obvious in retrospect but I set up myself for injury specifically by pushing for heavier weights without focusing on discipline of having good quality reps, and by over focusing on push-style exercises (Press + Bench Press) without corresponding pull / shoulder health exercises to provide balance. The net result was I tore up both shoulders at points in the year, and have had to spend a few months on PT/rehab to get them back to feeling ~normal.

Progress Made

My 5RM numbers made embarrassingly little progress in 2023 relative to where I was in January.

Bench: 240 -> 240 Press: 145 -> 150 DL: 385 -> 400 Squat: 320 (low bar) -> 335 (high bar)

That said, I did hit PRs at a number of other rep ranges, I can do a lot more reps at high intensity during a workout without feeling aches and pains the next day and the quality of my reps is much higher both in high intensity low rep ranges like the above and at moderately lower weights with more reps. And while I only really started taking the conditioning portion seriously in December, I’m seeing some progress there as well as I’ve started running again.

Looking Ahead to 2024

I’m starting off 2024 with a major focus on conditioning, and also on keeping my workouts efficient as I’m going back to work after parental leave and continuing to spend time on PT recovering from my shoulder injury. In that vein, I’m mixing 3x a week of Krypteia Redux with 2 running days a week from now till the end of April. Still deciding what I want to do after that, but currently thinking that I’m going to return to “Boring But Big” and do it right this time.

The program does include chinups in its 3rd phase as well, which I never worked in to my detriment ↩︎

Sun, 20 Aug 2023 15:24:53 -0400

Last year when I started powerlifting as my main form of exercise I set goals of being able to do

5x325 High bar squat 5x400 Deadlift 5x150 Overhead Press 5x250 Bench Press 10x body weight pull-ups (I’d never been able to do more than 2)

BP and Pull-ups are still struggling, but I’ve now managed 3/5

Sat, 12 Aug 2023 14:44:45 -0400

Diving back into (Neo)Vim this week for the first time in a few years (have done my core work with VS Code for a while).

Telescope Plugin + Language Server Providers are nice additions to the landscape, and it all feels so powerful, but everything is still so fiddly to setup :/

Wed, 22 Feb 2023 22:36:41 -0400

Really enjoyed these reflections on LLMs: medium.learningbyshipping.com

AI, ChatGPT, and Bing…Oh My

Setting Expectations: 4 key areas for performance management

Sun, 12 Feb 2023 17:00:00 -0400

Performance management processes have been different at every company I’ve worked in, ranging from “basically non-existent” at a 15 person startup to “months of work for managers each review period followed by clear expectations that growth feedback will be given throughout the year” in big tech world. Some of these differences are good and bad, most are more about the context of the company. I’ve found that regardless of process there are 4 things that it’s important for a team member to align with their manager on throughout the year. Hopefully there’s process supporting this, but if not both the team member or the manager can take the initiative to make it happen.

Focus - Where should the teammate be putting their energy? Depending on seniority and the level of change within the organization, this might be something to resync on every 6 months, monthly, weekly or even daily[^1].

Baseline Expectations - It’s important to agree not just what you’re trying to do but what results are expected. This means being clear on what a team member is and isn’t responsible for, what success looks like, and giving feedback when the manager believes things are off track or a miss has occurred.

Opportunities - This is about above and beyond. What things aren’t expected but could be an opportunity for growth (to help the team/business, show that the teammate is ready for a promotion, or ideally both)? It’s useful to clearly delineate these from expectations, so that you don’t risk a lack of clarity on what is “good enough”, which can cause unnecessary stress/burnout or poor prioritization.

Risks - I find that this part is usually left implicit, but its helpful to align up front on what likely areas of failure might be, where the teammate and manager see the most risk of missing expectations (or finding out that the expectations weren’t correct!). This could be due to ambiguity, a known skill gap from the team member or those they’re collaborating with, a new type of challenge, or business level needs/expectations that aren’t realistic.

[^1] Long term syncing daily on priorities/focus areas might be micro-managing or a sign that the team member is struggling to manage their own work, but it can be useful in a rapidly changing environment or during onboarding for a time

Sat, 11 Feb 2023 14:33:54 -0400

“I am human; and nothing human is alien to me” - Terence

Tue, 24 Jan 2023 20:58:12 -0400

Really enjoyed The Narnian by @ayjay — left contemplating what I find delight in. 📚

3 Pillars For Effective Work

Fri, 13 Jan 2023 07:33:53 -0400

There are 3 primary reasons why one human may be more effective than another in a given work situation.

Caring - All things being equal, somebody who cares more about a problem / product will generally be more effective¹. Caring can range from “startup founder” level obsession to being completely checked out, and effectiveness will vary on that spectrum.

Capacity - The amount of time and mental resources a team member can bring to a problem matters and will vary over time. Illness, stress, a busy personal season or competing work priorities can reduce this temporarily for anyone. Some people will have longer term lower capacity than others due to factors like life circumstances, health, and outside of work commitments.

Leverage - People’s skills, experiences, tendencies, relationships and abilities can allow them to be disproportionately effective or ineffective in different situations. Some of this is situational: “he wrote that library and knows all the details”, “she is an expert on this technology”, “he has admin privileges on this system”, “she knows the tech lead on that team”. Other factors like communication ability, broad technical experience, or credibility within an org tend to persist across problems.

When trying to understand why somebody is more or less effective than [their peers | what you expected | your own performance], it is useful to pull out this model². Trying to help somebody who is capacity constrained level up their skills likely won’t move the needle. On the other hand, if you have team members who have the skills but lack capacity or don’t care about their work, there may be an opportunity to help address those underlying challenges and get a better outcome. Similarly if you’re trying to “outwork” your way to a promotion while you see peers who seem to be doing less than you getting better outcomes, its worth looking into what leverage they might have (skills, access, relationships) that are helping them be more efficient.

A caveat: be careful not to prejudge caring vs capacity issues in others. It can be difficult to tell whether somebody seems disengaged because they don’t care, or because they don’t have capacity to care. Best to work through that with them before solutioning.

Caveat – if the level of care for a sub-section of a product/problem/org is disproportionate to the business value, this can become a negative. Think of an employee who spends their time improving line-level code quality of a feature that the team intends to deprecate. ↩︎
I don’t recommend it for hiring however – trying to judge “caring” can tend toward unconscious biases, and most long term capacity issues fall under protected categories / more explicit biases. Better to focus on proven previous effectiveness and testable “leverages” (tech/people skills / knowledge) ↩︎

Wed, 11 Jan 2023 10:53:51 -0400

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.

Wed, 11 Jan 2023 10:50:17 -0400

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:

It’s fine to be asked for a date or a scope (not both)
Never ship something likely to cause an incident

Tue, 03 Jan 2023 23:02:23 -0400

Reread The Hobbit for the first time in a few years. It’s a charming tale – and a good reminder that the movies were a complete misinterpretation of the tale – this is a much more innocent story than LOTR.

Tue, 03 Jan 2023 11:41:27 -0400

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: www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/viralit…

Or at least the large audiences “seed” the viral behavior