Christof Damian: Friday Links 22-29

Two week of links again. Will's post about hiring quality was fascinating.

And I learned about Sturgeon's Bias, which I have to remember for the future.

Leadership

One-on-ones with executives. - cool advice from Will Larson about ad-hoc 1:1s with executives

Is Engineering Management Bullshit? - no

Sturgeon's Biases - TIL: "Ninety percent of everything is crud."

Eight Traps to Avoid When You Take Over a Team - a bit late, but thanks

The Scoop: Netflix’s historic introduction of levels for software engineers - it is so wild that Netflix didn't have levels

Onboarding Practices: The First Month - Angela about her personal onboarding plan

Dear Ex-Bigco New to Smallco - I think this can be general advice when changing companies

OPP (Other People’s Problems) - how to pick your battles

The fallacy of “thriving in ambiguity” - "Ambiguity is bad. You should thrive in it, sure, but you should also strive to eliminate it whenever possible."

Why are you so busy? - being busy shouldn't be the goal for you or your team

Bar raisers, hiring committees, and other complex ways to improve hiring quality. - I liked the idea of Amazon's bar raisers for a while, but Will makes a good point that you probably don't need them

Engineering

Facebook Has No Idea What Data It Has - if you ever felt bad about how much of a mess your data is: you are not alone

JIT Compilers for Ruby and Rails: An Overview - more speed and more choice for Ruby

After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have thrown in the towel. The oligopoly has won. - I gave up too. I pay someone to do it now.

How to Sign Commits For GitHub With SSH - this is nice, but seems a bit of a hassle for most cases

Work

Telegraph miscalculates the cost of working from home - yes, but there is still a cost

California Passes Law Requiring Companies to Post Salary Ranges on Job Listings - one more state, we are getting there

How to create the perfect home office setup for remote working - good summary of best practices

Environment

Australian parliament passes first climate change legislation in a decade - they have some catching up to do.

World on brink of five ‘disastrous’ climate tipping points, study finds - we all have some catching up to do.

Clearing the Air [Podcast] - the case of Ella Kiss-Debrah, her death was the first ruled as partly caused by air pollution

More ways to drive sustainably and save money with Google Maps - finally also in Europe

The truth about hydrogen [YouTube] - it is very inefficient and probably dirty

Germany’s €9 train tickets scheme ‘saved 1.8m tons of CO2 emissions’ - sounds like a success to me!

Urbanism

How might (should) cities regulate Bicibus? - ideally, the Bicibus should be the norm and not need protection. Until then, the protection is a good thing.

513. Should Public Transit Be Free? [Podcast] - I don't think so, but I think the best way is a very cheap yearly subscription. I think it will lead to higher usage.

‘I will never ride a bike again’: why people are giving up on cycling - :-(

How car culture colonised our thinking – and our language - our life is framed by car, we have to rewire our brains

Freie Fahrt für freie Fussgänger:innen [German] - how to rethink cities and traffic in Switzerland

Spat at, abused and run off the road: why do some people hate cyclists so much? - the UK sounds like a nice place ... not!

Would you believe me if I told you the true cost of owning a car is over $11 million? How can that be? Come join me for a thread. 🧵👇 [Tweet] - for the US, but owning a car is expensive