Five for Friday – November 22, 2024
First things first, I’m going to take the rest of the year off after today. Next week is a holiday, and then December is madness. I’ll do a few more posts in my other blog, and then hit the ground running in 2025.
- First thing worth reading is a short and pragmatic plea that on-call shifts last from Tuesday to Tuesday. On my last team at Microsoft, our on-call shifts were Wednesday to Wednesday (which I sort of like even better), but the author makes some good points.
- Just about every leader I know could be a better at delegation (and yes, I’m looking in the mirror as well). This article on Common obstacles to effective delegation has a lot of great points and advice.
- I also enjoyed the opinions in this article on job promotions. A lot of people get obsessed with promotions rather than the growth opportunities job changes can offer. Great advice in this article as well.
- I’m infatuated with design, but know almost nothing about it. In fact, I was surprised that I’ve read two of the books in this list of Top ten design books. Honestly, I’m not going to read all of them, but I’m definitely going to read some of them.
- And finally – for the few people out there who understand how AI can help them, and also understand the challenges in building effective solutions using AI, I discovered super duper. It looks simple, effective, and I expect it to be massively underused by a lot of orgs who could benefit. Time will tell.
And that’s all for this week, and that’s all for 2025 while I take a FfF break. As always, thanks for reading.
Thank you for keeping up writing entries every week. I am always looking forward to getting the new post on Fridays.
I like reading about design, too, but I really missed one book from the list: The Design of Everyday Things. I realized that I liked this book a lot as it is easy to draw parallels in the case studies shared in the book and the software world.