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The Multi-Billion Dollar Memo
The billionaire CEO, Jeff Bezos, sent a memo in 2002 to all of Amazon telling them how they were going to architect AWS. His vision was Application Programming Interfaces - or APIs as engineers call them. Anybody who did not obey would be cheerfully fired. This brilliant idea would lead Amazon to dominate the cloud space. As the joke goes, the CEO should spend 80% of time pleasing shareholders and the other 30% checking the numbers are correct.
Read more…Mind the (Communication) Gap
It’s a story as old as software itself. Managers think: “why don’t these engineers understand we have deadlines in the real world?” The engineers likewise wonder: “we’ve explained the problem so many times, is this guy just stupid?” Now here’s the kicker: nobody has the monopoly on common sense. Rather, it’s just another example of the double empathy problem. The idea behind it is simple. If people don’t generally understand neurodivergent individuals then other neurodivergents shouldn’t either.
Read more…Tickets, please
Change is part of life whether we like it or not. Everybody reacts to it differently. There are some who resist it and some who embrace it. It’s the same in the world of development. Some want everything in its right place before work begins. Others accept flexibility. For most software projects, change comes with the territory. Often, what may appear to be a straightforward piece of work actually turns out to be quite tricky and goalposts subtly shift during development.
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