iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Allen Holub @allenholub.bsky.social · 12/10/2026

If you're forced to work 8 hours, you'll spend 4-6 productive hours and fill the rest with mindless busywork. That busywork benefits nobody. It's theft. 5/5

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Allen Holub @allenholub.bsky.social · 12/10/2026

There is absolutely no reason to be sticking to that schedule in the 21st century, at least not for knowlege work. In fact, it's counterproductive to overwork people. The result is lower quality, more bugs, and much of the work will have to be redone. 4/5

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Allen Holub @allenholub.bsky.social · 12/10/2026

The eight-hour day dates back to 19th-century sweat-shop factory work. The crack-the-whip bosses wanted the line running 24 hours a day, but 12-hour days led to too many deaths and mistakes (not to mention worker anger), so they split the day into three equal parts. Eight hours. 3/5

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Allen Holub @allenholub.bsky.social · 12/10/2026

conditions no longer hold. Couple that thinking with the well-documented fact that nobody can work more than about six hours a day and be effective. If you're doing intensively intellectual or creative work, that number is closer to four. 2/5

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Allen Holub @allenholub.bsky.social · 12/10/2026

One of the key practices of a highly effective organization is that everybody works at a "sustainable pace." That term has been twisted around, but what it really means is that everybody comes into work every day rested, relaxed, and able to do their best work, and they stop when those 1/5

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Allen Holub @allenholub.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

There's a new remake of Stephen King's Carrie on Amazon, and the blurb calls it a "classic coming-of-age story." That's exactly like calling what most companies do "Agile." Both of them are centered on bullying and end with rivers of blood, hundreds of deaths, and the whole town on fire. 😉

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Allen Holub @allenholub.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

(P.S. Let me add that a few good organizations have coaches who touch base with the team when asked, and provide help and support. Same job title, but different role altogether. Those are not the coaches I'm talking about.) 7/7

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Allen Holub @allenholub.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

Coaching won't fix the rot. 6/7

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Allen Holub @allenholub.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

Teams of smart people are perfectly capable of coaching themselves, given real support and a culture of improvement and learning. I don't see that often. Instead, management has instituted some magic process or framework that it thinks will compensate for the underlying rot. It won't. 5/7

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Allen Holub @allenholub.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

Bad culture, bad process, bad management, bad incentives, a culture of violence: none of that is the team's doing, and no amount of team "coaching" will help improve the situation. 4/7

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Allen Holub @allenholub.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

No amount of stand-ups or story pointing will fix that, and no number of retros will make an iota of difference. It's all out of the team's control. 3/7

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Allen Holub @allenholub.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

That's usually not the case. If your backlog, for example, is a putrid pile of out-of-date, made-up requirements that management has forced down the team's throat without team involvement, coaching the team on "backlog management" is a travesty, no matter how good the individual coach is. 2/7

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Allen Holub @allenholub.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

More and more, I think the *role* of a team-level "Agile coach" or equivalent is patronizing at best, scapegoating at worst. My problem is that the "coach" role is all about blaming the team. The assumption is that the overall organization is just fine, but the team needs some work. 1/7

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Allen Holub @allenholub.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

You don't do it because you observe that something's wrong, you do it because you know that you can't even see the problems you're having. It's a proactive, not a reactive, process. Ignore it at your peril. 5/5

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Allen Holub @allenholub.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

Frogs and pots and all that. So, the best orgs are constantly tuning themselves, even if (especially if) they don't think there are any problems. Continuous improvement is a way of life, though—a culture. 4/5

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Allen Holub @allenholub.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

Once we tune what we're doing, however, suddenly the system is appreciably better. The Catch-22 is that it takes experiencing the fixed system to know that there was a problem that needed fixing. Most orgs put up with out of tune instruments simply because they don't notice the dullness. 3/5

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Allen Holub @allenholub.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

I didn't even hear the problems (other than a single unison that's been driving me nuts for months). The difference between yesterday and today is night and day. Software development is similar. We think that what we're doing "works." We don't even notice the problems. 2/5

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Allen Holub @allenholub.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

I just had my piano tuned today, and suddenly, there's a sparkle to the sound that wasn't there before. The interesting thing is that yesterday, I was wondering if it needed tuning at all. Everything sounded okay, there were no obvious off notes. 1/5

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Allen Holub @allenholub.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Wrong on both counts. It's not about the coding. We, of course, make matters worse by not going out of our way to be more visible and accessible. 2/2

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Allen Holub @allenholub.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Software developers make easy scapegoats because people don't know or understand what we do. The move, in some circles, to eliminate developers entirely stems directly from that ignorance. They don't understand what we do, so they imagine it's easy (and easily replaced by AI). 1/2

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Allen Holub @allenholub.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Developers make easy scapegoats because people don't know or understand what we do. The move, in some circles, to eliminate developers entirely stems directly from that ignorance. They don't understand what we do, so they imagine that it's easy (and easily replaced with an AI). Wrong on both counts.

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Allen Holub @allenholub.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

That's why you need product management. Mindlessly doing "what they want" will kill the company.

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Allen Holub @allenholub.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Asking customers to do our work for us (i.e., design the software) or slavishly doing whatever they tell us is just laziness. 2/2

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Allen Holub @allenholub.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

There's a huge difference between customer needs driving the development process and customers driving the process. Customers know their work, and they know what they need to accomplish. It's _our_ job to collaborate with them and figure out the best way to accomplish that. 1/2

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Allen Holub @allenholub.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

That's not quite my point. When the pace of change is too steep, you lose customers. I can vote with my feet when the pace is too fast. Customers don't have to passively accept having things shoved down their collective throats.

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Allen Holub @allenholub.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Of course they can. Most companies I come in contact with have no interest in doing so.

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Allen Holub @allenholub.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Work that builds up behind a bottleneck (which in this case is the rate at which the customer feels comfortable pulling a change) is called "inventory." Money spent (creating the inventory) without a return being realized is, by definition, a liability. It's a loss on the balance sheet.

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Allen Holub @allenholub.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Absolutely, but the point is that you have a smooth product development flow. The rate at which the customer can handle changes is your limiting factor. Everything upstream from that should be metered so that work flows smoothly through the system. "10x" AI code gen is a liability in that case.

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Allen Holub @allenholub.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

A firehose of AI output is simply impossible to deal with. 5/5

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Allen Holub @allenholub.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

A program like that is literally unusable. You spend 100% of your time dealing with the changes and 0% getting work done. The fact that software is released gradually over time makes changes palatable. The speed of change has to be within our capacity to deal with the change. 4/5

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Allen Holub @allenholub.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Let's say that 10% of the program changes during those eight months. As a user, do you really want to sit down every day, only to discover that 10% of the things that worked yesterday don't work anymore, that you'll need to learn 10% of the program all over again from scratch? 3/5

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Allen Holub @allenholub.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

So, as a thought experiment, imagine that all those bottlenecks go away. The process is now frictionless, and you can spit out eight months' work every eight hours, all day, every day. Eight months' work involves many UI changes, feature modifications and additions, etc. 2/5

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Allen Holub @allenholub.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

There's this notion surrounding AI-assisted coding that the entire process should be infinitely fast. People gnash their teeth and wring their hands because review takes longer than the generation, and testing even more so. 1/5

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Allen Holub @allenholub.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Too true. Parkinson's Law (work expands to fill all available time) is at work, here.

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Allen Holub @allenholub.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Solution hoarding? Please explain. Excess features are solution hiding, not hoarding.

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Allen Holub @allenholub.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Of course, the phone companies that survived didn't actually solve the problem; they changed the nature of their core business by becoming internet and text-message providers. LinkedIn shows no such ability to adapt, however. An entire industry was effectively destroyed by greed. 9/9

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Allen Holub @allenholub.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Instead of protecting legit users from slop, their eyes light up with dollar signs as they count all those expensive accounts the fake recruiters need to spread their slime. 8/9

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Allen Holub @allenholub.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

LinkedIn, like the phone companies before it, is rushing towards its own demise by treating spam as income. The biggest opponents of do-not-call lists were the phone companies themselves. 7/9

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Allen Holub @allenholub.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

If there are legitimate recruiters in the mix, they're lost in the noise. By refusing to filter out fake AI-generated inmail, LinkedIn is making itself useless to its primary revenue source—legit recruiters. 6/9

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Allen Holub @allenholub.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

They'll use a company email address that you (and their own HR department) can track. Treat that WhatsApp demand as a sign to flee. Anyway, the above describes pretty much all of the "recruiter" contact I've had on LinkedIn in the last year. 5/9

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Allen Holub @allenholub.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Then these "recruiters" say that the company they represent will talk to me only via WhatsApp or Signal. No legit company or recruiter will hide behind a WhatsApp handle or make legitimate communication untraceable. 4/9

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Allen Holub @allenholub.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

The "recruiters" in question often seem to be hijacked profiles—people from far-away places with little job experience who, according to their own profiles, have never worked as recruiters. 3/9

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Allen Holub @allenholub.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Lately, my inbox has been flooded with AI-generated recruiter emails with the alleged jobs tailored precisely to my skill set. The job descriptions are _very_ appealing. 2/9

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Allen Holub @allenholub.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

LinkedIn is about to go the way of the telephone, which was destroyed by phone spam. Who answers their phone anymore? LinkedIn makes its money from recruiters. It is, first and foremost, a recruitment site. 1/9

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Allen Holub @allenholub.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Doesn't "adding things to the surface" impact the UI?

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Allen Holub @allenholub.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

"Why shouldn't we?" Because unnecessary complexity makes your system less usable, harder to maintain, and more buggy. Back when I was making my living as an artist, I learned that when the piece is done, it's done. All changes made after that point just do damage.

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Allen Holub @allenholub.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

AI, when used in the six-month's-work-in-a-week feature-factory mode, adds nothing but undesirable features and complexity. Just sayin'. 2/2

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Allen Holub @allenholub.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Adding features (and complexity) makes your program less appealing, not more. Software systems exist to solve a problem. Anything that's not laser-focused on the solution is an annoyance, and building that cruft is worse than money down a hole. It can lose us customers. 1/2

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