Right before the long weekend began, I had a chance to chat with a colleague who has been at Netflix for more than seven years. I have been struggling with giving some feedback to my manager and thought she would understand my predicament. So we chatted about my foster cats for a couple of minutes, and I straight-up asked her, “how do you give feedback to the manager new to Netflix?”

Then we discussed the power imbalance and how it makes reports feel awkward about giving feedback to their managers. She also suggested that our HRBP can be an excellent person to talk through my feedback. But the most memorable advice was when she pointed out that my manager is likely going through an imposter syndrome phase, and that he’d appreciate any signal about his contribution so far. So if I can give feedback with positive intent to support him, the conversation will go well.

This chat was such a stunning colleague moment. It was a neat coincidence later that day when our CEO at an all-hands emphasized the importance of positive intent.

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

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Software Engineering ⚙️

A year with Spectre: a V8 perspective – V8

I read an old article on Spectre I collected a year ago. Then I found out that we still don’t have a proper hardware-based fix for Spectre since the fix will negatively impact the performance too much.

Chrome Content Optimization Service Runs on Go – Go Dev

I didn’t know that Chrome also had a server component for performance optimization. Today I learned.

People ❤️

If Management Isn’t A Promotion, Then Engineering Isn’t A Demotion – Charity Majors

I am 100% behind this article that engineers become managers because they need the powers to fix the problem and that engineers should have information and opportunities necessary to tackle big problems.

One additional note, I have an allergic reaction when managers refer to themselves as “leaders,” since that implies that the others (usually the reporting engineers) aren’t expected to lead.

Business 💸

Facebook complains, Apple responds: iOS 14’s big privacy change gets postponed – Ars Technica

Apple pulled back from deprecating IDFA (identifier for advertisers) in September. But the deprecation will come next year. It’s not clear to me how hard Facebook will be hit; it still got its logins. But I am sure other lesser networks will be decimated.

Also, here is an article on how precisely we are tracked, down to our names, addresses, and daily movements.

Epic, Apple and the Platform Wars – Paradox Podcast

I stumbled upon a podcast from a Swedish mid-size game publisher on Epic lawsuits. The gist was that the publisher sees the lawsuit as the battle between two closed ecosystems and that they prefer the future where there are multiple competing ecosystems. It was the first take I heard from the industry insiders.

Tailwind CSS: From Side-Project Byproduct to Multi-Million Dollar Business – Adam Wathan

I rarely hear opensource success stories but here is one, hitting $2 million revenue.