Notes from 26/10–3/11
Career
My Advice After Interviewing 100+ Software Engineers
- Prepare
- Be critical
- Must know technicals
- Keep trying, don’t get demotivated
- Be passionate
Belief in the unstructured interview: The persistence of an illusion
Thus, while interviews do not help predict one’s GPA, and may be harmful, our participants believe that any interview is better than no interview, even in the presence of excellent biographical information like prior GPA.
Our findings suggest a rethinking of the meaning of interview validity. The validity of predictions made by interviewers or by numerically incorporating interviews into a model is uninformative unless it can be directly compared to predictions made by the same methods without an interview
In addition to the vast evidence suggesting that unstructured interviews do not provide incremental validity, we provide direct evidence that they can harm accuracy. Because of dilution, this finding should be especially applicable when interviewers already have valid biographical information at their disposal and try to use the unstructured interview to augment it
Apple’s Functional Organization
Deep expertise.
Apple is not a company where general managers oversee managers; rather, it is a company where experts lead experts. The assumption is that it’s easier to train an expert to manage well than to train a manager to be an expert.
In a functional organization, experts leading experts means that specialists create a deep bench in a given area, where they can learn from one another. For example, Apple’s more than 600 experts on camera hardware technology work in a group led by Graham Townsend, a camera expert. Because iPhones, iPads, laptops, and desktop computers all include cameras, these experts would be scattered across product lines if Apple were organized in business units. That would dilute their collective expertise, reducing their power to solve problems and generate and refine innovations.
Immersion in the details.
One principle that permeates Apple is “Leaders should know the details of their organization three levels down,” because that is essential for speedy and effective cross-functional decision-making at the highest levels. If managers attend a decision-making meeting without the details at their disposal, the decision must either be made without the details or postponed. Managers tell war stories about making presentations to senior leaders who drill down into cells on a spreadsheet, lines of code, or a test result on a product.
Willingness to collaboratively debate.
Apple has hundreds of specialist teams across the company, dozens of which may be needed for even one key component of a new product offering. For example, the dual-lens camera with portrait mode required the collaboration of no fewer than 40 specialist teams: silicon design, camera software, reliability engineering, motion sensor hardware, video engineering, core motion, and camera sensor design, to name just a few.
While Townsend is accountable for how great the camera is, he needed dozens of other teams — each of which had a long list of its own commitments — to contribute their time and effort to the portrait mode project. At Apple that’s known as accountability without control: You’re accountable for making the project succeed even though you don’t control all the other teams. This process can be messy yet produce great results. “Good mess” happens when various teams work with a shared purpose, as in the case of the portrait mode project. “Bad mess” occurs when teams push their own agendas ahead of common goals.
Leadership at Scale
Apple’s way of organizing has led to tremendous innovation and success over the past two decades. Yet it has not been without challenges, especially with revenues and head count having exploded since 2008.
As the company has grown, entering new markets and moving into new technologies, its functional structure and leadership model have had to evolve. Deciding how to organize areas of expertise to best enable collaboration and rapid decision-making has been an important responsibility of the CEO. The adjustments Tim Cook has implemented in recent years include dividing the hardware function into hardware engineering and hardware technologies; adding artificial intelligence and machine learning as a functional area; and moving human interface out of software to merge it with industrial design, creating an integrated design function.
In 2006, the year before the iPhone’s launch, the company had some 17,000 employees; by 2019 that number had grown more than eightfold, to 137,000. Meanwhile, the number of VPs approximately doubled, from 50 to 96. The inevitable result is that senior leaders head larger and more diverse teams of experts, meaning more details to oversee and new areas of responsibility that fall outside their core expertise.
But with the expansion of his responsibilities, he has moved some things from his owning box — including traditional productivity apps such as Keynote and Pages — into his teaching box. Now he guides and gives feedback to other team members so that they can develop software applications according to Apple’s norms. Being a teacher doesn’t mean that Rosner gives instruction at a whiteboard; rather, he offers strong, often passionate critiques of his team’s work. (Clearly, general managers without his core expertise would find it difficult to teach what they don’t know.)
The discretionary leadership model preserves the fundamental principle of an effective functional organization at scale — aligning expertise and decision rights. Apple can effectively move into new areas when leaders like Rosner take on new responsibilities outside their original expertise, and teams can grow in size when leaders teach others their craft and delegate work. We believe that Apple will continue to innovate and prosper by being organized this way.
Data
Meet whale! 🐳 The stupidly simple data discovery tool.
Repo.itjust does exactly what it does, but it’s more for your own local DB
Product
Nile Frater: Reimagining Work with No-Code Tools
Where I think no-code is really, really interesting is given the name, you know, no-code, people use that to refer to building an app or a website. But really, what no-code is doing for me, it’s taking something that used to be done by professionals, software engineers in this case, and it’s making it easy and accessible.
There is literally no-code companies launching every single day with new capabilities and new integrations with tools and new use cases you couldn’t use before.
I mean, so many things have come out, you know, in the last year, like Andola or Parabola. And for people who don’t know, Andola makes mobile apps, Parabola, essentially can let you drag and drop data signs or otherwise do things you would usually do in Excel. So that’s probably a bit unfair but we’ll stick with that. You know, these kind of tools are just coming out, people are just starting discussions on what’s actually possible with them. And I think importantly kind of where the space is starting to go is as more and more of these tools come out, they’re starting to integrate with each other, you know, Bubble, for example, which is probably the best known app builder out there. They just integrated with Airtable, which is kind of the best known sort of database, a spreadsheet, that kind of thing. But as more and more of these integrations come out, the things that you’re able to do, the functionally to create, the services you’re able to connect, every single time one of those connections becomes possible.
And where we’re really seeing the benefit is not trying to come in and say, okay, how can we replace this big system with no-code or how can we deliver something to a customer with no-code, but actually just first of all, looking at the individual person on the ground and saying, let’s just give this person the skills that they need. Let’s make it really easy for them to build something. Let’s make sure we’ve got some guardrails in place that mean that people are not going to build some software that’s got some bug in that a coder would have spotted instantly.
For instance,a marketplace for cars where you’re going to have to, you know, look up license plates or check for car makes and models or this kind of thing, you know, keep it simple. What’s a simple thing you can start with? Why don’t you build the website for your idea or, you know, once you’ve built a website for your idea, why don’t you try connecting that to your service? Let’s say you’ve got your website for your car marketplace. You’ve got to sign up button that connects you to a newsletter and you can email people.
For me, it’s really about doing it step by step. And one of the stacks, a stack is essentially a collection of different tools you might use to achieve a kind of a no-code project about something. But one of the most popular ones out there is called the WAMZ stack. That’s actually what it’s called. It stands for Webflow, Airtable, Memberstack, and Zapier. And Webflow lets you build website. Airtable kind of acts as a database with a kind of Excel like interface. Memberstack allows you to have login and log out features, you know, users essentially on any website. And Zapier lets you connect to tons of different services, and I believe Formstack may well be one of them.
Tools
Stripe Climate
the future of charity
Dendron note-taking tool
Need to adapt this
No Code learning platforms
tutorials and pathways
wunderpresentation — transform md to slides
It’s simply a linter
