April 2025

Author

Cody Hiar
April 06, 2025

It's April and the Easter bunny has come early with a basket full of links. The bunny has also brought warm weather which means I can start going for bike rides again. Let's check out some fun links.

Have you ever wondered what the downside to having a flat organization is? Well, wonder no more! I've read this one a couple of times but it never fails to hold my interest. The article is even cited under "Criticisms" on the Wikipedia page for Flat Organization. I see some overlap with one of last month's links, Embrace Complexity, talking about nominal vs emergent structures. Some interesting quotes:

This hegemony can be so easily established because the idea of "structurelessness" does not prevent the formation of informal structures, only formal ones.

As long as the structure of the group is informal, the rules of how decisions are made are known only to a few and awareness of power is limited to those who know the rules.

The article also has some great insights into informal communication networks and power dynamics. All important things to understand in the world of Staff Engineering. I also enjoyed the set of principles for democratic structuring at the end.

I'm a sucker for these kinds of articles. The overall message advocates for a balanced approach that values relationships, personal well-being, and meaningful contributions over mere accolades. A message I wholeheartedly agree with. There's a quick tldr with the lessons at the top too if you're pressed for time.

Getting good feedback is a challenging process. Too often we ask shallow questions that yield results that are either not useful or hard to action. I also agree that organizations should integrate constructive feedback into their routines, but I also think it's easier said than done. Adam Grant's technique of asking "give a rating out of 10" and then following it up with "what would have made it a 10?" is genius. I'll have to remember that for my next round of feedback.

This one has made the rounds on so many sites, but it's invaluable so I'm including it. Gergely Orosz writes about the "trimodal" distribution model to explain significant compensation disparities within the same market for software engineers. It's #3 of a 3 part series he's written on the subject, this time backed by data from levels.fyi. If you are in the software industry, this is a must-read. My only wish is that he would have included a breakdown for Canadian engineers.

The git core developers ran an experiment to better understand their product by removing their custom config options and aliases. Next, they used stock git to figure out which options might be better served with different defaults. What they ended up with was a list of 9 config settings and 3 aliases. The punch line is none of these have become the new defaults since the experiment happened. You can check out each of the recommendations along with explanations. I still need to update my config.

An article was shared recently on hackernews about Using uv as your shebang line. I'm a fan of uv, but what if you need dependencies outside python? That's where nix has you covered. With nix, you can specify any package within Nixpkgs as part of the script's dependencies. This lets you turn your scripts into a binary of sorts, which is handy for portability.

thelinklist.dev is a project by Cody Hiar.