Nine Lies about Work

This is a pretty interesting book. I really love this kind of book where the author challenges the common sense and traditionally established truths that are not so true actually. Work is something we all do and I often think differently about it. Nine Lies about work sound arrogant but actually is not. The book is full of examples and scientific studies and argues very well on the spot. We are living a global pandemic(COVI-19) and that changed all our lives, that shows how fragile we can be. I personally was always into Lean/Agile and never was a fan of traditional management culture. So buckle up this book might shake up you a lot since will challenge traditional things like People to need Feedback. I often like feedback and worked a long time(~11 years) living strong and daily feedback however even that being a strong truth for me, the author managed to show me a different point of view(wit studies of course) and I still like feedback and strong feedback cultures but I see there are better and different ways today. So yeah buckle up. Let's get started. 
The 9 Lies

Lie #1 People care about the company they work for. 
Lie #2 Best Plan wins 
Lie #3 The Best Companies Cascade Goals
Lie #4 The Best People Are Well-Rounded
Lie #5 People Need Feedback
Lie #6 People Can Reliably Rate Other People
Lie #7 People Have Potential
Lie #8 Work-Life Balance Matters Most
Lie #9 Leadership Is a Thing

The 9 Truths

1. People care about what teams they are on - because thats where real work happens. 
2. The Best intelligence wins because the world moves too fast for plans. 
3. The best companies cascade meaning - because people want to know what they all share. 
4. The best people are spike  because uniqueness is a feature, not a bug
5. People need attention - because we all want to see what we are best 
6. People can reliably rate their own experience because thats all we have
7. People have momentum because we all move to the world differently 
8. Love in work matters most because thats what work is really for
9. We follow spikes because spikes bring us certainty

The Video


The Slides 


Cheers,
Diego Pacheco

Popular posts from this blog

C Unit Testing with Check

Image
When I start on IT, several years ago(+15), C was the first language that I learned. But was not the first language I mastered and deployed in production which was...surprisingly Visual Basic 6.0. However, when I learned C or any language back on that old and arcane time noddy was into testing. However now is impossible to work professionally in any language without tests. C is a low-level language but still kicks ass and has several interesting libs/frameworks. People use to fear C a lot because of lack of syntactical sugar but once you get used to it is not that hard at all. Today I want to show how you can do Unit Testing with C. I will not show how to do Unit Testing with C++ but with C ANSI actually. We will be using Check a unit test lib for C ANSI.
read more »

Having fun with Zig Language

Image
Zig is a general-purpose language created in 2016 by Andrew Kelly .  Zig aims to fix the issues C language has while being pragmatic and simple at the same time. Zig really shines as being simple by not having any hidden control flows, not having hidden memory allocations, no pre-processors, and no macros. Basically, it's one language and one language only. Since pre-processors and macros can get really complex and become their own universe. Sure it's not the Zig Philosophy.  Zig Compiler(Zig cc) also is a C compiler, and the interoperability from C to Zig is very good. Clearly, we can see influence from other languages like Go and Rust; however, Zig is pretty unique and different from Go and Rust.  Zig is fast. Zig is perfect for system programming. I bet we will see a lot of solutions being built in Zig. As a languages aficionado, I like to learn at least one language per year and sometimes more; Zig was my 2021 pick, did not regret it. Even if you dont use all language...
Keep reading

HMAC in Java

Image
In 2018 AWS CTO(Vogels) said : "Security is everyone's job". For the last 2 years, there was so many famous and big data leaks and breaks that made that statement be very true more than ever. Security often could mean worst performance and worst user experience so in order to get it right you really need to think about the designs before jumping into to code and consider performance and user experience has main requirements.  I was thinking about writing about how to do HMAC in Java for a while and recently Redis 6.0.0 come out and to my surprise, there was a refactoring on the password part in order to use HMAC.  Security easily could scare engineers often because it is not something well spread yet but I believe this will change soon. It does not matter if you have to deal with PII Data or not, security is super relevant because everybody is running their workloads at the cloud or with IoT and Edge devices which means more distribution, more code, more points of fail...
read more »