Edition 35: Mark Allen on handling underperformers, Your team shouldn't need you this much, Is management lossy compression? | Writable derived state, Move fast and make things

How to handle underperformers

Here is a five-minute clip out of last edition's episode with Mark Allen, Head of Engineering at Junction, on what to do when someone on your team isn't performing.

When do you step in, and what do you say in that first conversation? How do you tell a person who needs support from one who needs to leave?

Watch the five-minute clip

If you missed the episode, the full conversation covers why you never stop being an IC, the mistakes he made as a new manager, why he banned stand-ups at his startup and then brought them back, and management in the new AI world.

Watch the full episode on YouTube

Listen on Spotify

Community reads

Engineering leadership

Your Team Shouldn't Need You This Much by Sebastiano Armeli — two senior engineers argue in circles until someone asks "Can Seb weigh in?", and he admits that part feels good.

Is management lossy compression? by Jeff on JoT — if a manager summarizes upwards and expands downwards, and LLMs are good at both, what is the job for?

Technology should make a company harder to lie to itself by Narek Verdian — the headline metric looked great until he opened the raw export and found it capped at 10,000 rows, less than two days of data.

React

Writable Derived State: Stop Synchronizing State by Corbin Crutchley — the user edits a list, the server data refreshes, and every edit is gone, so is that useEffect the bug?

AI and agents

Move fast and make things by Karl Koch — "move fast and break things" never said who has to live with the things you break, and AI makes it easy to ship code you never read.

Book recommendation

This week's management reads got me thinking about the work that never needed doing in the first place.

Bullshit Jobs: A Theory by David Graeber

Graeber was an anthropologist who turned a viral 2013 essay into a book built on one question you can answer in your head: does your job make a meaningful contribution to the world? It gives you a way to look at which of your own work would never be missed.

Find it on Goodreads

Meme of the week

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