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I started Developer Tea in 2015 to help engineers find clarity, perspective, and purpose in regular short bursts of high-value content.

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Von Restorff Isolation Effect and a Backfiring of Process

The Von Restorff effect says we remember things that stand out. This is probably mostly intuitive - "that stood out to me" is a common colloquialism. But what isn't intuitive is the implied downside of uniformity, which is often the product of process. In other words, if your process creates perfect uniformity, elevating any one thing, say, in priority, is going to be exceedingly difficult. Additionally, if your "escalation" process is overused, it will once again violate the point of the escalation in the first place. "If everything is urgent, nothing is urgent."

Published: 2/25/2024
Length: ~13m
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Perform a Career Premortem

In today's episode, we do a journaling exercise to provide a new lens on developing your own career roadmap. We're going to practice the power of hindsight, finding our wiser selves, and ultimately looking forward and backward...at the same time. It sounds a little odd, but it's all based in solid cognitive science. If you have a notoriously hard time figuring out your career path, I'd invite you to participate!

Published: 2/22/2024
Length: ~15m
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Delegation, Ownership, Responsibility, and Agency

As you grow your career, you will continuously lean on delegation to scale your efforts and focus on the most important things. True delegation requires ownership, and ownership can be thought of in two critical parts: agency and responsibility. In today's episode, we discuss the fool's errand of delegating only one or the other of these parts.

Published: 2/16/2024
Length: ~16m
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Apply Little's Law To What You Can Control

Little's Law explains, in a given queuing system, what the relationships of throughput within that system are. We can garner insights both for our work, and for our own lives, by recognizing how these relationships work and what we can do to utilize them. In this episode, we talk about when it is useful to use Little's law to your advantage.

Published: 2/3/2024
Length: ~13m
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Finding Leverage by Escaping Functional Fixedness

Finding leverage is difficult to do, but a lot of the reason for this is that we allow ourselves to fall into well-traveled cognitive pathways. If we reject the solution domain-set that comes to mind immediately, we may be able to consider options for solutions we had never considered. This larger solution set may also include a high-leverage option we had previously ignored.

Published: 1/26/2024
Length: ~12m
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Is it Actually Important to Question Assumptions?

In today's episode, we discuss turtles, resolutions, and why your beliefs and what you see as fact is probably worth questioning anyway.

Published: 1/16/2024
Length: ~10m
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9 Years - Persistence by Reducing Expectation

Today Marks 9 Years of Developer Tea. Thank you all for your support, and your friendship. I wish you all well on your journey, and may you find clarity, perspective, and purpose. (Don't worry, we aren't going anywhere!)

Published: 1/5/2024
Length: ~18m
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Good Plans, Bad Plans, and Road Trips

What characterizes good plans from bad ones? And how can you make your plans better on average? In this episode we discuss how to better organize your intentions and processes to yield better plans.

Published: 12/15/2023
Length: ~19m
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Negative and Positive Lollapalooza Effects

The "lollapalooza" effect (coined by Charlie Munger) occurs when multiple other effects have a compounded outcome that tends to create an extreme situation. In this episode, we discuss lollapalooza effects and how you might fall victim to them, and more importantly, how you can use them to your advantage.

Published: 12/9/2023
Length: ~22m
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Fresh Eyes - How Anchoring Bias, Bandwagon Effect, Status Quo Bias, and Uniqueness Bias Interact When Joining New Groups

When you are newly joining a team, you have a huge opportunity to do something that no one on the team has: to find your "weathervane." The pressure pushing against you to adopt the beliefs of the team you are joining. What you do with it is one huge way a team can improve, or otherwise, stay the same.

Published: 12/1/2023
Length: ~17m
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The Dark Side of Optimism Bias

Most people believe good things will happen by default. Not to be the bearer of bad news, but there's a downside to this endless optimism. You cannot will good things to happen, and when you don't prepare for adverse events, you won't be ready when they inevitably occur.

Published: 11/27/2023
Length: ~15m
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Backlog Psychology - Breaking Out of the Habit Trap

Your team's process for managing a backlog is probably growing stale because you are running on habit rather than procedure. Break out of procedure and remind yourself why you have a process to begin with: orient yourself to the outcomes!

Published: 11/9/2023
Length: ~12m
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Availability Heuristic and Substituting Hard Questions

What is it about our present situation that changes our perspective? In today's episode we talk about the availability bias and why our present reality looms so large in our decisionmaking.

Published: 11/3/2023
Length: ~17m
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Spend Your Time Intentionally Through Expectation Mapping

What do you expect of yourself? Are you spending your time in ways that align with those expectations? In this episode, I provide you a simple framework as a starting lens for getting a better idea of how you are spending your time in relation to who cares the most about those investments. You'll walk away with a new lens on how to evaluate your most precious resource: time.

Published: 10/26/2023
Length: ~15m
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What is the Real Question? How To Be An Exceptional Listener

Almost every conversation you have will start with a question. Have you stopped to listen closely? Questions are extremely meaningful and deeply human. Paying close attention to questions is a skill that will put you head and shoulders above the average engineer or manager.

Published: 10/21/2023
Length: ~9m
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Backlog Psychology - Fix Your Broken Expectations

How often does reality match your expectations exactly? Sure, you may guess in the ball park, but usually there are errors in our expectations. In today's episode, I talk about a simple shift in thinking that will help improve your expectations for your work.

Published: 10/12/2023
Length: ~8m
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Backlog Psychology - Practice Requires Rhythmic Predictability

In this episode we continue a little mini-series called "Backlog psychology." How do you get better at anything? (Hopefully you said "practice" almost instinctively.) What does good practice look like? Your team has an opportunity to practice every meeting and every day. But if your days look different from one to the next, how will you ever have the opportunity to actually do that practice?

Published: 10/3/2023
Length: ~8m
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Backlog Psychology - Hyperbolic Discounting, Tech Debt, and Hacking Your Habits

In this episode we continue the mini-series "Backlog psychology." Would you rather have $5 now or $50 next week? The answer to this question, though it seems logically obvious which is better, does not always produce the same response. The required incentive to convince someone to wait tends to follow an exponential curve upward. This is not just true with money, but for any benefit and incentive: monetary, social, emotional, physical, etc. What does this mean for our backlogs? What about our daily habits?

Published: 9/21/2023
Length: ~16m
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Backlog Psychology - The Ziegarnik Effect - Why Limiting Work In Progress Protects Your Cognitive Load

In this episode we kick off a little mini-series called "Backlog psychology." You've heard you should "limit your work in progress" - why? What makes more work in progress more difficult to handle? Cognitive load isn't just about multi-tasking in the moment - it's also about limiting your open tasks.

Published: 9/17/2023
Length: ~5m
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Two Tips for Better Retros - Add Specificity, Respect Uncertainty

Your retros may feel like deadends where complaints go to die. If you're running retros and treating it only as an avenue for emotional support rather than continuous improvement, today's episode is for you. Retros are for improving iteratively over time. That can only happen if your outcomes are aligned to that iterative mindset. Two simple adjustments can help drive that improvement.

Published: 9/5/2023
Length: ~9m
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Developer Tea was a part of Spec and is hosted by Jonathan Cutrell, engineering manager at Guild Education.