Thanh Pham

“For example, if overwork is due to (in)stability of the production systems, it’s your job as the manager to slow down the product roadmap in order to focus on stability for a while. Make clear measures of alerts, downtime, and incidents, and strive to reduce them. My advice is to dedicate 20% of your time in every planning session to system sustainability work (“sustainability” instead of the more common “technical debt”).”
― Camille Fournier, The Manager's Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change

“Boats that stay in the harbor are safe, sweetheart, but that's not what boats were built for.”
― Fredrik Backman, Anxious People

“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.”
― Kim Malone Scott, Radical Candor: Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity

“A sociopath is often described as someone with little or no conscience. I’ll leave it to the psychologists to decide whether Holmes fits the clinical profile, but there’s no question that her moral compass was badly askew. I’m fairly certain she didn’t initially set out to defraud investors and put patients in harm’s way when she dropped out of Stanford fifteen years ago. By all accounts, she had a vision that she genuinely believed in and threw herself into realizing. But in her all-consuming quest to be the second coming of Steve Jobs amid the gold rush of the “unicorn” boom, there came a point when she stopped listening to sound advice and began to cut corners. Her ambition was voracious and it brooked no interference. If there was collateral damage on her way to riches and fame, so be it.”
― John Carreyrou, Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup