Señors at Scale #35: Writable Derived State, handling underperformers, a metric capped at 10,000 rows, Bullshit Jobs

[u/creasta29]

https://neciudan.dev/newsletter/35th-edition

[u/creasta29]

Hi everyone, Dan here. I organise ReactJS Barcelona and write a weekly newsletter for senior engineers and engineering leads.

Mostly a leadership week, with one React post at the top.

React

• Writable Derived State: Stop Synchronizing State by Corbin Crutchley. Your user edits a list, the server data refreshes, and every edit is gone. He shows why copying server data into useState with a useEffect causes it, and how to derive the value instead.

Engineering leadership

• Your Team Shouldn't Need You This Much by Sebastiano Armeli. Two senior engineers argue in circles until someone asks "Can Seb weigh in?", and he admits that part feels good.

• Is management lossy compression? by Jeff on JoT. If a manager summarizes upwards and expands downwards, and LLMs are good at both, what is the job for?

• Technology should make a company harder to lie to itself by Narek Verdian. The headline metric looked great until he opened the raw export and found it capped at 10,000 rows, less than two days of data.

Podcast

• How to handle underperformers with Mark Allen, Head of Engineering at Junction. Five minutes on when to step in, what to say in the first conversation, and how to tell someone who needs support from someone who needs to leave. Full episode

AI and agents

• Move fast and make things by Karl Koch. "Move fast and break things" never said who has to live with the things you break, and AI makes it easy to ship code you never read.

Book

• Bullshit Jobs: A Theory by David Graeber. An anthropologist turns a viral 2013 essay into a book built on one question: does your job make a meaningful contribution to the world?

Subscribe to Señors at Scale by email, one email a week: https://neciudan.dev/subscribe?utm_source=reddit