It’s yet another long night. You’re crouching over your keyboard, and squinting your eyes at the maze of text in front of you. If you could only fix this one last bug you could finally go to bed.

As you’re re-launching the compiler you feel a soft hand on your shoulder. Thinking it’s your wife reminding you it’s late you softly say “just five more minutes, honey, I promise”.

The hand doesn’t go away and eerily enough, she doesn’t say a word this time.

You turn your head. Your mild irritation quickly turns into terror as you realize the person touching your shoulder is not your wife. It’s you.

“You’re wasting your time!” whispered the dark presence.

As you try to pull back and get up from your desk chair you suddenly wake up sweating. You fell asleep at your desk again.

We all have shortcomings and cognitive biases but this one is probably the most dangerous of all, because it’s so easy to defend.

I’m talking about Overworking and chances are you’re routinely sabotaging yourself with overwork.

Our society praises hard work to the point of neurosis.

We’re told that the early bird gets the worm and even that laziness is a deadly sin for which one must endure the torments of Hell.

But what if we’re enduring self-inflicted torment by overworking?

What if - and this one is really difficult to accept - but what if the most productive thing you can do is often to do nothing at all?

Here are just 3 things you need to do if you want to prevent overwork and have a healthier and truly more productive life:

1. Kill brain worms

Problem: You’re suffering from “shiny object syndrome”. You’ve convinced yourself that this new awesome feature will 10x your startup or your YouTube channel, or your side hustle. 

This idea didn’t bother you yesterday but now it’s all you can think about. You decide to drop everything and focus exclusively on implementing it. Nothing else matters.

Time passes, unnecessary sacrifices are made, the feature is implemented, you launch it and... crickets! Nobody cares. 

You have now convinced yourself that this idea was dumb to begin with and you can list 10 reasons why it would never work for anyone. Except one of your competitors launches the same thing years later and they’re wildly successful.

Solution: It’s really easy to check if you have been infested with a brain worm:

• You’re suddenly extremely enthusiastic about a new idea

• This new idea “changes everything”

• Your current work seems insignificant in comparison

Once you spot that brain worm, just squash it! I know it’s difficult, because it’s anti-hedonistic - you literally have to filter-out joyful ideas, and that sounds nuts.

But just put a pin in it. Create a document, use a post-it - whatever works for you. Jot the idea down and let it cool off. You are not allowed to touch the idea unless it doesn’t alter your state of mind.

Because we are often drunk on desperation disguised as hope it is best to “take a step back”.

2. Stop analysis paralysis

Problem: You’re incapable of making a decision and when you do, it’s usually a coin toss. You’re never satisfied with your own decisions and you’re somewhat convinced that nobody else, in your place, could have made a better call.

Since you’re juggling probabilities instead of facts, analysis paralysis often leads to really poor decisions, fatigue and burnout.

Solution: The first step is always to identify your problem.

If:

• You find yourself arguing that “it’s not that simple”

• You build brain maps that turn into brain mazes

• You feel like your mind is going 100 miles per minute

• You feel like an hour is not enough to explain your idea

The solution is simple: throw everything away and take a step back.

This is difficult because you’ve invested a lot of time and effort into those complicated mind maps - but acknowledge that this is just the Sunken Cost Fallacy.

The best thing to do is to either postpone or delegate this task to someone else - hire someone on Fiverr if you have to - but just move on.

When your mind is finally at peace you will see the answer clearly and effortlessly.

3. Stop feeling guilty you’re not working

Problem: you’re on vacation or you’ve decided to take a day off but your mind keeps going back to work because you feel guilty and you're not solving those “important” work problems.

Solution: Extend your vacation. Force yourself to step away from work for as long as it takes for your thoughts to cool down.

The best way to optimize your work is to force yourself to step back and do less.

It is best to just step away:

• From a heated discussion

• From an all-consuming project

• From a 10x idea

• From a monumental task

> You need total mental clarity to both uncover and embrace the truth. <

This is hard, you might say. Or “this is irresponsible! I can’t afford to step back for a month!”

If you can’t afford to step back for a month, then you can’t afford to continue working, which means it’s time to move on.

Close your laptop. Go to bed. 

And make it your priority to never put your wife in a situation where she needs to worry about your health and your sleeping habits.

It’s important to know what something is in order to deal with it correctly.

Have we mistakenly treated software development as a branch of Engineering for years?

Arguably hundreds of millions of dollars were lost chasing the wrong things.

Wrongfully treating software development as Engineering would explain the horrible failures of Six Sigma and other methodologies - including Scrum - in software development.

I’m going to structure this in two parts.

Dave Farley’s argument

Dave Farley's main argument for software development as a branch of Engineering - and please correct me if I'm wrong - is that we can measure software development, and measurement makes it Engineering.

To a certain extent, that is true - you can measure things at a team level or company level with DORA metrics and other similar QoS tools.

• Deployment frequency

• Lead time for changes

• Change failure rate

• Time to restore service

On an individual level attempting to measure anything is a fool's errand.

Every time we have tried to do so we have failed as metrics become goals.

Measure lines of code and you’re going to get code diarrhea, measure mouse movements and you’re going to get people using mouse jigglers etc.

Measurements are ubiquitous

Measurement, however, is not unique to Engineering.

Your tailor does measurements, your cook, your car repair shop and all branches of science: Physics, Chemistry etc. - and none of these are Engineering.

So, indeed, you can measure aspects of software development starting at team level, but measurement does not convert development to Engineering.

So what does? What makes Engineering Engineering?

The act of programming could be considered Engineering only if and when it deals exclusively with Knowns!

This is the light bulb moment - this is the one-liner to take from all of this.

When software development deals only with known variables it becomes Engineering.

Thus PaaS, software deployment, software distribution, networking - and everything else that "gets done 1000 times per day" - that is Engineering, and you’re welcome to borrow engineering best practices like Six Sigma and others.

• You can have a Network Engineer managing networking hardware and software. The TCP/IP protocol doesn’t change overnight.

• But the person writing a totally new transport layer over HTTP2, for example - that’s a software developer.

We're all, constantly and forever Researchers or Developers.

Scam or Ignorance?

Here's a scenario for you. Just take a few seconds, make yourself comfortable an picture this.

Imagine you're working a full-time job - that's 40 hours per week -, for free for an entire year and at the end of that year you might receive some Monopoly money.

And I do mean Monopoly money in the literal sense, this is not a metaphor. Yes, those tiny pieces of paper that you could get yourself from any toy store.

This is not a scenario for some Cannes Festival Indie movie or the beginning of a Socialist Manifesto, this is a real thing, a real scam happening today.

Welcome to the shady world of "equity-only" jobs.

Enthusiasm is key here

What's the difference between a scam and misplaced enthusiasm, really, if they both end up hurting people?

One might argue that those posting equity-only job adverts are simply victims of their own ignorant enthusiasm maybe born out of desperation, but maybe they are fully aware of what they're doing and they're just trying to take advantage of your fervor instead.

I have long held the belief that enthusiasm is everything. Odds are never in your favor so you need that blind force pushing you in the direction of your dreams, despite all obstacles and against all practicality.

Our society is built on enthusiasm, brick by brick. Humanity has risen above the absolute poverty of the stone ages and it persevered and even thrived through wars, famine and disease and I would attribute all of that to enthusiasm.

Hope is passive, hope is a drug numbing your mind to the pain of the present. Enthusiasm is active, it's a stimulant, it's the fire that actually makes tomorrow brighter.

I honestly believe enthusiasm is the only thing that kept our species from extinction during the darkest of times, but for all its merits, enthusiasm is not a source of truth.

Equity-only

There's a recent trend - and I wouldn't necessarily call it entirely a scam -, but a very shady trend of people posting job listings that are paid entirely in equity.

Since "equity" is such a "businessy" word, I'm guessing people just assume these job listings are legitimate, and the job titles are impressive to say the least (they're mostly C-level executive roles) - but in fact they are borderline illegal and absolutely immoral.

No respectable company on Earth would just give away equity for labor for the same reasons you wouldn't sell your house for backrubs.

And that's the first red flag - it seems to good to be true, right? That's because it is.

See, you're not getting "real" equity from an established, profitable company, you're getting the promise of equity in a pre-seed, pre-revenue private Company, with intentionally vague terms, a 1 year cliff and 4 years vesting period.

Confused yet?

Let me translate that to English: you're getting let's say 10% of the startup - which is zero dollars today because the company has no product, funding or revenue -, spread over 4 years starting 12 months from now (that's the vesting and cliff), and only if the board (which is usually one or two founders) decides you delivered some very vague results and - this is the funny bit - only if the company is not bankrupt by then.

I wouldn't call this an outright scam simply because I believe a portion of these job posters are blinded by enthusiasm - which is a very polite way of saying they have absolutely no clue what they're doing.

Maybe they mean well, and maybe they truly believe so much in their idea that they're willing to face the embarrassment of just screaming into the darkness - "can somebody help me make this real - please?"

But then again, maybe they know exactly what they're doing and they just want free labor.

Equity is (not yet) fiat

Equity is a form or capital. It's what the company is worth in the eyes of the public or the IRS divided amongst company shareholders. It is, in essence, a way to legally "print your own money" - but with many conditions including financial viability - i.e. your company actually bringing value to the marketplace.

If you've convinced the public your company is worth $10M dollars - and by "convinced" I don't mean conned -, and you own 10% of the shares, you get a tenth of that pie, which almost makes you a millionaire on paper - again conditional on someone buying those shares from you and don't forget about your capital gains taxes.

Don't be fooled by fancy terms and legal speak and business terminology, at the end of the day equity is just one possible measure of the financial success of a company. In startups, equity is generally a big fat zero.

Even if you get to a seed round, and a Series A round and the company has some money in the bank, and some traction, you are usually not allowed to sell any of your shares early and there's nothing you can do about this.

Usually you'll find yourself keeping a smaller and smaller slice of the pie in both relative and absolute terms with each new investment round, and that's if you're lucky to avoid bankruptcy in the first 4 years.

This is all to say that even in the highly improbable scenario of multiple successful VC rounds, and surviving the odds, your equity is mostly worthless until you get to that big exit event or an IPO, and the chances of that happening are extremely low.

But this is all a page from the script for Silicon Valley, you know, the sitcom with those nerdy billionaires.

In real life private companies start at zero, grind away for a couple of years, then crash back to zero not with a bang but with a whimper.

Free labor

Your labor, however, is always valuable - there are no probabilities attached to it -, and your time is both irreplaceable and the only non-renewable resource we all have, so exchanging that for shares in a newly incorporated entity is what Kevin O'Leary would call a "poo poo deal".

But there's a real legal issue here as well. With the exceptions of volunteer work and non-profits, it is illegal to work without compensation anywhere because that's slavery - even if you agree to it.

It is therefore at least morally wrong to suggest someone should exchange their time and expertise for shares in a company that is worth nothing today and has minimal chances of survival.

You only need to look-up the statistics for the survivability of startups. 99% of them die within the first 3 years - long before you had a chance to vest your shares, and even the few that survive never reach any liquidity event.

What makes this equity-only arrangement completely illegal in my opinion - and I'm not an attorney - is the unspoken assumption that equity has "eventual value" and that your labor will definitely be compensated in the future.

This is a promise, or a form of credit; however the expression is "buy now, pay later", not "buy now, maybe pay later, we'll see, but most likely not". That's such a stupid deal it should be illegal.

The probability of equity in a startup having a strictly positive value in the foreseeable future is so close to zero that you are, in fact, betting on becoming a slave if you exchange your time and expertise only for equity in a startup.

Always bet on yourself, be greedy with your time and never ever accept anything less than fair market value for your time, regardless of the equity offered!

Let's switch chairs

Let's play a very simple game called switching chairs.

This is a game for 2 players. One of the players is you, of course, and the other player is Bob - let's call them Bob - and they are the Founder of "Rug-pull, Inc."

Now Bob has this great idea for a startup but no product, no funding, no skills, nothing. They need your help to build the thing in exchange for equity.

You are a builder. Maybe it's design, maybe it's programming, maybe it's copyrighting, or something else entirely - but you have an actual skill and you have built a career around it. You're a domain expert.

The game ends quickly with a question: can you switch chairs? Well, can you?

Bob only has an idea and some C-Corp they incorporated yesterday on Stripe Atlas for a couple of bucks. You have years of experience.

You can absolutely take Bob's chair if you wanted to, incorporate a C-Corp yourself and keep 100% of the equity.

But can Bob magically take your chair and do what you do?

You might be tricked into believing that there's a disproportional exchange happening here, and that you have a small chance, but a real chance, of your equity becoming something very valuable soon.

Please understand that equity is something anyone can produce out of thin air and what makes any of it valuable is you.

Don't work with Bob.

Ideas are worthless

There's a common saying that ideas are worthless without execution but I would also add to all of this thousands of hours of work and a ton of luck.

Best ideas executed superbly at the wrong time are still failures.

In my opinion if all you have is an idea, you shouldn't be allowed to say you have nothing yet. You're so far away from nothing it's ridiculous.

Nothing is a company with 50 employees that needs to shut down because it couldn't achieve product-market fit and no VC want to touch them anymore.

Less than that is a 2-person startup with a great product but very little visibility and close to zero annual revenue.

Less then that is a great MVP built on the weekends with a lot of promise.

Less than that is a C-Corp you incorporated on a whim, and a domain you bought when you felt this urge to do something about your great idea, and you and your co-founder in a garage working tirelessly on an MVP

Less than that is you spectacular, flamboyant, out-of-this world, Earth-shattering idea.

An idea is 10.000 hours away from being worthy of being called "nothing".

Be nice

Enthusiasm is the driving force of our species, it's what makes humanity thrive, but for all its merits enthusiasm not a source of truth.

Enthusiasm lights a fire in your heart, but it doesn't help you see things clearer, and sometimes it is that same fire that completely blinds you and turns extasy into agony.

In the context of equity-only positions I still believe that innocent enthusiasm might play a role from time to time, but usually it's just ineptitude that brought someone to offer such an outlandishly unethical deal.

If you are looking for a co-founder and you have no funding and no skills, then you have nothing to offer. The second you understand that deeply, the second you can begin working on yourself.

If you have skills, then I'm sure you'll make it work on your own. You don't need a C-level in a startup, you don't need VPs of anything, you don't need a Financial Officer or GDPR compliance from day one. You just need to start working.

If you truly get stuck, then maybe look for a partner, but don't disguise it as a fake job, just offer 50% of the whole company and call it what it is - volunteer work to turn an idea into maybe a little bit more than nothing.

If you ever get contacted by someone to work for equity only - remember to refuse gracefully.

We're all humans and there's truly a real possibility that on the other end of the line there's someone who doesn't yet fully understand how crazy they are - and that might be a great thing for our species overall.

After 10 years as CTO, the most common problems I encountered with Agile development are that it’s great at delivering the wrong things faster and it’s really awesome at making people miserable.

The solution to this is anti-Agile by definition - you need to slow down, you need to give yourself and your team space to breathe and you need to shift your focus on the right things.

In essence, building software is a very simple 2-variables equation: customer value and team morale. That’s really it. Maximize for both and you’re golden.

What to do:
- maintain real-time feedback with your customers (variable #1)
- read everything you can about Yerkes–Dodson’s law and maximize your team’s happiness (variable #2)

What not to do:
- employee tracking
- dumb estimates
- meetings & more meetings
- e-mails & more e-mails
- standups
- backlogs
- TDD when you don’t need it

At kronup we prioritize deep work over deadlines, experimentation over execution, choice over delegation and flow over ritual.

Experimentation over Execution

As outlined in its 2001 Manifesto, a core Agile value is “responding to change over following a plan”. This obviously has its merits, especially in a context when Waterfall was “the only way to do things”, but current Agile methodologies (not going to name them here) have sadly taken this principle to the extreme, prioritizing speed and “iteration in production” over common sense.

At kronup we believe in applying the Scientific Method, and going back to first-principles reasoning, and that this approach is much faster than “brute-forcing it” long-term, so our workflow looks something like this:

1. Define the customer value item

2. Attempt to list assumptions

3. Attempt to invalidate assumptions with small experiments

4. Document findings clearly in very short sentences

5. Go to step 2 for as long as it takes

The end result here is that, before writing a single line of code in production, your entire team deeply understands the context of the issue at hand and the reasons behind it.

Plus at this stage you can afford to move as fast as you like: experiments are always small, never unit-tested, never integrated into a larger system, and never exposed publicly so you have total freedom to break anything in search for your answers.

When the value item is clear and all assumptions are validated, we can begin to break it down into tasks and allow team members to choose the work they do based on Yerkes–Dodson’s law.

This was kronup’s first principle, “experimentation over execution”.

Choice over Delegation

I have always encouraged my leaders - from PMs to VPs - to “learn to step aside”.

It often feels like you should intervene to fix an issue or that you should lead by example but this often turns into either micromanagement or setting the tone for a toxic hustle culture. Best case scenario, you have just robbed your team of valuable opportunities to make their own mistakes and learn and grow.

I have also struggled with this impulse to “fix it myself” but I have learned over the years that if I feel like the most competent person in the room, I am likely at fault for that.

You have to let your team fail from time to time - especially when you see it coming from a mile away and you know exactly how ugly it’s going to get. After the shit hits the fan, don’t say “I told you so” - be stoic, be kind, guide but not push your team to get themselves out of the mess.

You don’t teach your kid how to ride a bike by showing them your sick tricks, you let them fall so that they learn they can get up again.

In the words of The Mandalorian - “This is the way”. It truly is.

We don’t delegate tasks. Team members choose what they want to attack next from a list of tasks.

These tasks are graded by our system for each team member individually by something we call “the happiness factor”. This is just Yerkes–Dodson’s law in action, nothing fancy.

Deep Work over Deadlines

Estimates are drugs - they give you a high then slowly kill you.

No engineer ever claimed in their CV they are “good at estimates”, yet somehow project managers keep insisting that developers do have this skill and they stubbornly refuse to use it, as if out of spite.

Building any piece of software is not a recipe - you do not know the ingredients (yet), you do not know the steps (and they will change constantly), and you have no idea what you’re cooking. Exploratory work presents the worst type of variables: unknown unknowns - the things you don’t even know you don't know yet.

Asking a software engineering team to give any sort of estimates on a completely new feature is like Divination (from Harry Potter). You’ll get the answers you want to hear, but those have nothing to do with reality.

When estimates become commitments because of incompetent management, you’ve got yourself the perfect set-up for silent quitting.

As a manager, if you truly need that estimate for whatever reason and you cannot fight back, what you should do is let your team work, jot down their current “speed”, use the rule of three, then triple the result. Keep that result to yourself or whomever asked for it and move on.

Our team at kronup believes in deep work over deadlines as a catalyst for productivity. Sure, as Elon said, having an insanely tight deadline might yield some temporary increases in output - but it will also lead to burnout.

As the Romans used to say, “festina lente” - make haste slowly.

Following Cal Newport’s rules for Deep Work - book here: Deep Work on Amazon - we strive to keep distractions to a minimum, and estimates are considered one of the most toxic types of distractions.

Flow over Ritual

The main reason “Agile frameworks” fail is ritual.

Why do rituals exist and why are there (rigid) frameworks for (fluid) Agile development? The “Agile framework” oxymoron should be a red flag in itself, yet it is ignored.

For one, following a blueprint feels safer. This is a combination of two or more cognitive biases, including “Authority bias” and the “Bandwagon effect”. We are inclined to follow the advice of authority figures and ideas that have mass adoption even though those notions do not apply to our unique circumstances.

It’s also much less mentally demanding to follow the guidelines than formulate unique solutions to our unique set of problems.

Last but not least, when you’re following a well-known recipe you can blame the ingredients, right? “It’s the team’s fault, they didn’t do Scrum correctly”.

When rituals are seen as disconnected from progress they begin to feel like barriers.

Team members will say “this is stupid!” - and their frustration is justified. Meetings for the sake of meetings, standups that interrupt deep work “just because”, backlogs that become synonymous with landfills, retrospective this, adaptation that - it is all ritualistic nonsense.

At kronup we believe in flow over ritual. Flow is not some fancy term we made up, it is just the mental state in which a person performing an activity is fully immersed. That’s it.

We have minimized distractions so that each team member can reach a state of flow and perform deep work.

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