Get It Done

Too often people do the best they can

Author

Jakub Chodounsky
June 19, 2023

Too often people do the best they can with what they have when they should instead get it done.

Ensuring that Intercom has great uptime requires a rapid response when things go wrong. This is how we developed an effective, sustainable on-call engineering process.

A deep dive on why projects always overrun and a framework to improve future estimation

An outdated way of thinking about peak performance is: “maximum effort = maximum results.” But research shows that it doesn’t actually work that way in reality. Here’s what actually works: The 85% rule, which counterintuitively suggests that to reach maximum output, you need to refrain from giving maximum effort.

Observations collected over 20 years in the tech industry.

Learnings from “An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management” by Will Larson.

I really like the "tech debt" metaphor. A lot of people don't, but I think that's because they either don't extend the metaphor far enough, or because they don't properly understand financial debt.

Lots of mistakes, some uptime too.

And we'll wrap up with some interesting news from big tech: