Your Two Jobs as a Manager. Set clear expectations and reduce uncertainty for your team.
Links
How to Collect Customer Feedback That’s Actually Valuable. A look inside how the team at Intercom collects and synthesizes customer feedback.
The Technium. A fascinating interview with Kevin Kelly from last February. It’s a long read, or an hour-long video, but so worth the time. One of my favorite nuggets was, “Machines are for answers; humans are for questions.”
2014 was a good year for Basecamp support. Noah Lorang recaps what last year looked like for the Basecamp support time. Their median response time astounds me. Pretty impressive work from a relatively small team.
Documentation, Support, and Customer Success. Simon writes about how documentation is a psychological band-aid in how it calcifies habits and shifts responsibility.
Adjunct professors get poverty-level wages. Should their pay quintuple? The SEIU is organizing adjunct professors together around the future goal of $15,000 per course. Improving adjunct working conditions is long overdue. A side note worth noting is that part of the reason I went to Whitman was their expectation that tenured faculty actually teach.
The Windows of Siracusa County. Episode 96 of Accidental Tech Podcast is worth listening to if for nothing else than the post-show chatter. John Siracusa describes what his computer monitor looks like; it involves 31 different browser windows alone. Crazy.
Larry Lessig’s Long Walk. A long feature on Larry Lessig and his walk through New Hampshire that kicked off the MayDay PAC project.
The Nomadic Life of an Assistant College Basketball Coach. Long feature on Gus Hauser, an assistant coach at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Sounds like an absolutely brutal profession.