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Hello, I wrote a new talk that is ultimately about how misery is a dumb strategy egoless.engineering

I'm curious about the idea of slack in the system. Can you quantify or add more detail about how hard people are pushing in high performance scenarios?

I think you want specific programs: bootcamps and hack weeks like I mentioned, 20% time is another one

You also want to make an intentional choice about what percentage of the whole team is devoted to tool sharpening, paying down debts, etc. In the really hellish rebuilding years I alluded to in the talk we were doing 60% progress on product work, 40% trying to get ahead of the scaling curve.

None of this works if you aren't measuring how often people do their bootcamps, take slack time, and treating slippage there as a bug to remediate. It's a goal like anything else.

We have moved to a 6/2 week cadence for product work vrs maintenance. Sort of ShapeUp. But not. Having one person at a time do maintenance as they had time resulted in nothing happening and 4 years of debt. This is all 6 Eng doing N things as a team Working well so far after 6 months