Richard Schäfer

Director of Engineering at @MewsSystems

[Louie Bacaj @LBacaj]

"Look, I am going to be real with you; I promise neither of us will likely retire here."

Those are the words I used to close Sahil and hire him. I hired him into what was, at the time, a nascent and relatively early-stage startup that could've still failed by all objective measures. He had reservations, and he was on the fence.

But after that conversation, he immediately accepted.

In fact, those are the words I used to close numerous phenomenal engineering hires even after we stopped being a startup. I stole engineering hires from the likes of Google & many with offers to firms like FB & Apple, which wasn’t easy to do as a startup; I am proud of that.

But there is a lesson from that which applies to more than just hiring.

In short, I was real with all of them. I told them as long as their contribution to my team is big, everything will work out. They'll move up fast; they'll earn more. They'll likely be in demand.

I told Sahil, "If you do your part, it'll work out for me; it'll work out for you. It'll work out for our team. The skills you pick up here will be real, the titles will be real, and the money will be real. We'll all be earning more & neither one of us will retire here."

You might be asking yourself, how could that work?

It is the exact opposite of what most managers, leaders, and firms do today. Most leaders still play pretend.

Leaders still pretend employment is for life even though it doesn't work that way anymore.

Pretending leaders ooze a fakeness that few buy into. They say things like, “We want people to be missionaries.” They want people to be "on the mission until the end." Right up until things don't work out, then it's "Sorry, but this is just business; we have to downsize."

As we recently learned, firms always fire people when they have to—even hard-to-hire, highly skilled, highly educated people with credentials, tenure, and all sorts of accomplishments.

Downsizigin is understandable.

But what's not understandable is the play pretend.

Many leaders fooled themselves first because it benefited them and now attempt to fool everyone else too. They think it's the only way to get people to work hard. But people crave the truth.

Even when negotiating to hire Sahil, I knew I had bigger aspirations than to be a middle manager forever. So I told him that. And why would I even pretend I will be there until the end? I won't. And that's ok.

As Puff Daddy famously said in 1998:

"Even the sun don't shine forever
But as long as it's here, then we might as well shine together
Better now than never, business before pleasure."

Sahil signed the offer with me as a mid-level engineer and became a director of engineering in a few short years. Of course, his contributions were massive to my teams. He did his part; I did my part. He grew; he hired and built up multiple teams. But the important thing here is that our relationship was built on being real with each other from day one.

That's the relationship I had with all the people I hired. And that is the relationship I aim to have with all the people I deal with, even strangers on the internet. And I have been rewarded for that, and I believe you will be too.

Just keep it real; the right people can handle it. And the ones that can't, you probably don't want by your side anyway.

-- --
This was a small story from my newsletter that went out tonight. The link to subscribe is on my profile.

[Petr Pavel @prezidentpavel]

Zeman 2013: Lži o Sudetech.
Zeman 2018: Lži o migrantech.
Babiš 2023: Lži o zatahování do války.
Babiš se bojí, proto vás zneužívá a straší. Pojďme se lžemi proruského světa Babiše a Zemana bojovat šířením pravdy. Prosím, sdílejte toto sdělení.

[Will Larson @Lethain]

Some more writing on managing energy, in this case managing teams' energy, and how sometimes managing energy means moving faster by taking an indirect route.

https://t.co/m3h7KhLiXS

[Riley Goodside @goodside]

OpenAI's new ChatGPT explains the worst-case time complexity of the bubble sort algorithm, with Python code examples, in the style of a fast-talkin' wise guy from a 1940's gangster movie:

[Lyall Taylor @LT3000Lyall]

What happened at FTX is straight-forward. FTX lent US$10bn of client funds to their trading arm Alameda, which used it for leveraged crypto speculation. Alameda blew up in crypto meltdown & can't repay. Ppl got whiff of this & tried to pull US$5bn from FTX. FTX didn't have it.

[Tim Urban @waitbutwhy]

Twitter is an anti-compassion machine that stokes our tendency to dehumanize and even hate people we don't know personally.

Four little exercises I use to combat that and crank up the compassion in my mind:

[Gergely Orosz @GergelyOrosz]

“Make it so that as a manager, you pick up a shift every now and then.

Your team will respect you much more.”

Agree. Hard to build empathy for oncall lain if you don’t experience it every now and then.

- @mipsytipsy at LeadDev London

[Richard Schäfer @schafric]

@mipsytipsy Amazing talk about on-call at #LeadDevBerlin! Thanks!

[App Economy Insights @EconomyApp]

Choose your fighter
$AAPL $MSFT $GOOG $AMZN

[Anonymous @YourAnonNews]

Nuclear weapons are weapons of evil. When a leader of a country is promoting a nuclear response, it is up to the people of that country to remove that leader by any means necessary. When a leader holds life on earth hostage with nuclear threats, they forfeit their leadership.

[NB65 @xxNB65]

We won't stop until you stop.

[Naval @naval]

“The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”

https://t.co/VTdEkpQYZg

[Neil Hauer @NeilPHauer]

Russian friends sharing texts with me of their colleagues in Russia's public service resigning over this invasion. Widespread disgust among Russian government employees over Putin's decision.

[Anonymous TV 🇺🇦 @YourAnonTV]

JUST IN: #Russian state TV channels have been hacked by #Anonymous to broadcast the truth about what happens in #Ukraine.

#OpRussia #OpKremlin #FckPutin #StandWithUkriane

[Gergely Orosz @GergelyOrosz]

"The more senior you are, the less you speak, and the more you listen."

- former Amazon Principal Engineer Carlos Arguelles

[Lex Fridman @lexfridman]

I wish more young people dreamed about being inventors, engineers, scientists, and entrepreneurs than influencers.

[Gui Ferreira @gsferreira]

Are you a #dotnet dev? @nickchapsas YouTube channel should be on your subscription list! Trust me. Trust the 90k of us.

[Richard Schäfer @schafric]

What a year 👏🏻

[Honza Široký @sir_honza]

New features get all the accolades. However, there's a parallel track of technical work most people are not aware of. In the following article, I look under the hood of Mews tech and highlight some of the big technical enhancements we made in 2021. 🚀🧑‍💻https://t.co/QFae5NKH0u

[Honza Široký @sir_honza]

New features get all the accolades. However, there's a parallel track of technical work most people are not aware of. In the following article, I look under the hood of Mews tech and highlight some of the big technical enhancements we made in 2021. 🚀🧑‍💻https://t.co/QFae5NKH0u