Zain Rizvi

Interested in software engineering, business, or psychology? You're in the right place

Newsletter

All newsletter issues

Newsletter #15 - The Psychological Safety Paradox

Psychological safety at the workplace comes with tradeoffs. Where should you draw the line between making it safe about their performance, while still requiring people to meet expectations? Slava and...

Posted on Thursday, October 22, 2020

Newsletter #14 - Timezone madness

My aunt has a problem: she wants to join Zoom meetings, but they’re all hosted in different time zones. And she can’t convert them to her local time. She has to ask for help every time....

Posted on Saturday, October 17, 2020

Newsletter #13 - Develop insights by noticing connections

In school, did you hesitate to ask questions? I certainly did. It was peer pressure, raising my hand was a big no-no. I didn’t want to be that kid. So I suppressed the instinct to ask. And those...

Posted on Thursday, October 8, 2020

Newsletter #12 - My sister got scammed. The bank helped her scammers

Hi friends, My sister just wanted to earn some money before returning to college. She found a job posting on craigslist, which she learned too late had been carefully written by scammers. Those people...

Posted on Friday, October 2, 2020

Newsletter #11 - Send a Bat Signal

At work, cutting scope is a way to potentially save weeks of effort. But where does cutting scope cross the line into cutting corners? Slava and I try to find that line in: The Nonintuitive Bits...

Posted on Wednesday, September 23, 2020

Newsletter #10 - Why I stopped focusing on the user

Today I’m sharing a hard truth about our industry. I wanted to reject this for the longest time. But I finally had to change my mind. Companies don’t actually focus on their users. They...

Posted on Wednesday, September 16, 2020

Newsletter #9 - How my coworker got senior leaders to consider his proposals

A couple weeks ago I suggested repeating your message twenty one times for it to sink in. That might seem excessive, but my old manager Viacheslav Kovalevskyi has used this tactic to get senior...

Posted on Wednesday, September 9, 2020

Newsletter #8 - When someone said I was wrong 😬

Do you have people who disagree with you? My old coworkers from Google are happy to do it. They’re great to bounce ideas off of, and last October we started a podcast where we’d discuss...

Posted on Wednesday, September 2, 2020

Newsletter #7 - Everything is an opportunity to learn

In the past few days, some of my articles have really hit a chord on reddit and hacker news. I’m stoked to see them helping people. And they’ve led to a lot of new faces on the newsletter...

Posted on Thursday, August 27, 2020

Newsletter #6 - Struggling with Impostor Syndrome

Two years into my first job at Microsoft, I was expecting to be fired. I felt like I wasn’t good enough, like I was only pretending to be smart. I spent years desperately trying to hide my...

Posted on Thursday, August 20, 2020