book-highlights

Organizational health lies in being able to work together. As a manager, our job is to try as much as we can to drive balance and clarity. A happy, driven team sees the wider purpose of their work and also feels empowered to execute tasks individually. “You can’t call yourself a leader by coming into a situation that is by nature uncertain, ambiguous—and create confusion. You have to create clarity where none exists....

Opportunity cost Staff engineers’ skills are usually in high demand. If you’re assigned to a single team, you may not be top of mind for solving a problem elsewhere in the org, or your manager may be unwilling to let you go. Losing empathy It’s easy to overfocus and forget that the rest of the world exists, or start thinking of other technology areas as trivial compared to your rich, nuanced domain....