Here are the top 10 articles that I read, liked, and shared in 2019.
Feedback Fallacy (HBR): An insightful article explaining why conventional feedback rarely does what it is designed to.
How to demonstrate strategic thinking skills (HBR): I believe that the best way to demonstrate "strategic thinking" is by doing; this article gives some advice on how to make others believe that one has the ability.
The care and feeding of software engineers: or, why software engineers are grumpy. It reads like a "user manual for managing engineers", but it goes beyond that and I found it funny too.
CNET's Echo Flex review: "This might be Amazon's smartest device in years". It isn't often do you find the tech press highlighting the small but important things that were thought through during product definition and development.
Long hours are a sign of a bad leader, and other leadership insights, from Microsoft's research. This is a summary of a longer New York Times article explaining how Microsoft is using data to get insights on leadership and employee satisfaction.
Why people really quit their jobs: Facebook's version of employee satisfaction data crunching. Interesting (and some already known) findings.
The catch-22 that broke the internet (Wired): an analysis of Google Cloud Platform's outage and the perils on depending on tools that need to connect to the network when the network is down. Google's analysis is at: https://status.cloud.google.com/incident/cloud-networking/19009
Notes on AI Bias: Ben Evans.“There’s a joke in Molière's Bourgeois Gentilhomme about a man who is taught that literature is divided into ‘poetry’ and ‘prose’, and is delighted to discover that he’s been speaking prose his whole life without realising. Statisticians might feel the same way today - they’ve been working on ‘artificial intelligence’ and ‘sample bias’ for their whole careers without realising.”
Is Alexa working? Ben Evans: It is a good analysis, with the main point at the very end.
CES show report: Steve Sinovsky.
Feedback Fallacy (HBR): An insightful article explaining why conventional feedback rarely does what it is designed to.
How to demonstrate strategic thinking skills (HBR): I believe that the best way to demonstrate "strategic thinking" is by doing; this article gives some advice on how to make others believe that one has the ability.
The care and feeding of software engineers: or, why software engineers are grumpy. It reads like a "user manual for managing engineers", but it goes beyond that and I found it funny too.
CNET's Echo Flex review: "This might be Amazon's smartest device in years". It isn't often do you find the tech press highlighting the small but important things that were thought through during product definition and development.
Long hours are a sign of a bad leader, and other leadership insights, from Microsoft's research. This is a summary of a longer New York Times article explaining how Microsoft is using data to get insights on leadership and employee satisfaction.
Why people really quit their jobs: Facebook's version of employee satisfaction data crunching. Interesting (and some already known) findings.
The catch-22 that broke the internet (Wired): an analysis of Google Cloud Platform's outage and the perils on depending on tools that need to connect to the network when the network is down. Google's analysis is at: https://status.cloud.google.com/incident/cloud-networking/19009
Notes on AI Bias: Ben Evans.“There’s a joke in Molière's Bourgeois Gentilhomme about a man who is taught that literature is divided into ‘poetry’ and ‘prose’, and is delighted to discover that he’s been speaking prose his whole life without realising. Statisticians might feel the same way today - they’ve been working on ‘artificial intelligence’ and ‘sample bias’ for their whole careers without realising.”
Is Alexa working? Ben Evans: It is a good analysis, with the main point at the very end.
CES show report: Steve Sinovsky.
