“This is because we do not make objects to entice responses of strong affinity, like, “This is what I really want” or, “I must have this.” MUJI’s goal is to give customers a rational satisfaction, expressed not with, “This is what I really want” but with “This will do.” “This is what I really want” […]
If you’ve noticed something interesting, do it justice. Point it out, and give it a name. You can call it whatever you like. The fewer people who have figured out how to put it into words, the better. For example, someone decided to take the idea of naming, apply it to business branding, and name […]
Blogs are still an incredible source of joy for me. That’s why I do this everyday! I recently rediscovered The Brilliance, which I first came across in 2009 during a visual computer science lecture, run by Benjamin Edgar, Chuck Anderson, and the late Virgil Abloh. I’ve been diving into its archives from the late 2000s. […]
Companies that open a window into the process and culture are able to draw in much more marketing and recruiting than they should be able to. If you want to bolster your recruiting efforts, corporate handbooks are a simple way to start doing this: see Posthog’s, Airbyte’s, Basecamp’s, Valve’s, and GitLab’s. Less clicking send, more […]
The majority of experienced developers who responded to this thread applied for a job or joined a company after learning more about it at a corporate engineering blog. u/improbablywronghere wrote, “Finding a blog post from a company is like you an interviewer at some company finding a public GitHub repo from a candidate.” Writing a […]
Remote companies are going to draw in the most talented people. As teams grow, they also need to spend more time maintaining communication. A team of 3 people needs just 3 lines of communication; a team of 11 people will need a whopping 55 lines of communication, and a team of 14 people will need […]
“On a very long timescale, the entire future of every business is determined one warm intro, cold LinkedIn-outreach, or engineering blog puzzle solution at a time,” Byrne Hobart closes a recent post, The Counterintuitive Economics of Hiring. Anything you, your company, or your team puts out there can lead to an unexpected butterfly effect and […]
People don’t have time to write (Exhibit 1, 2). The difference between, “We should really write a blog post about that,” and a blog post actually going live on the internet is, mostly, time. (Consider, how many drafts do you have sitting in your files vs. live on the internet?) One solution is to shorten […]
You’ll know it when you feel it; too many meetings, too much management overhead, and hiring more people isn’t really producing as much output as it should be. This is caused by a debt of documentation; when the people on the team have spent too much time working in the business, and not enough time […]
A few weeks ago, I started a discussion at r/experienceddevs with the question, “Has a corporate engineering blog made you want to join the company?” I wanted to share some key findings: The majority of experienced developers who responded to the thread applied for a job or joined a company after learning more about it […]