Even Xero isn’t immune to layoffs
Breccan McLeod Lundy on the pressure to come up with a snappy mission statement or purpose for his company:
You have the choice between saying something that sounds great but isn’t quite true or saying too much and being asked why you didn’t just stick with “Our purpose is to make the world a better place”.
Companies, like people, have a hierarchy of needs - they need to make a certain amount of money to even be able to think about broader social purpose. I think for us we’d have to do a prioritized list of purposes which doesn’t sound as cool as “purpose” but is necessary to be functional in the long run.
What happens when the US Army needs 36,000 kettlebells, fast
LeadDev: Riding the ever-changing waves of front-end development
Will Larson: Writing an engineering strategy
Once you become an engineering executive, an invisible timer starts ticking in the background. Tick tick tick. At some point that timer will go off, at which point someone will rush up to you demanding an engineering strategy. It won’t be clear what they mean, but they will want it, really, really badly. If we just had an engineering strategy, their eyes will implore you, things would be okay. For a long time, those imploring eyes haunted me, because I simply didn’t know what to give them: what is an engineering strategy?