When I started dating my partner, I quickly noticed that grad school was making her very sad. This was shortly after I’d started leading an engineering team at Wave, and so the “obvious” hypothesis to me was that the management (okay, “management”) one gets in graduate school is totally ineffective. Most graduate students, including Eve, start school right after college, i.e., without much clue about how to effectively do self-directed work.| benkuhn.net
Wave is a $1.7B company with 70 engineers1 whose product is a CRUD app that adds and subtracts numbers. In keeping with this, our architecture is a standard CRUD app architecture, a Python monolith on top of Postgres. Starting with a simple architecture and solving problems in simple ways where possible has allowed us to scale to this size while engineers mostly focus on work that delivers value to users.| www.wave.com
I can't think of a single large software company that doesn't regularly draw internet comments of the form “What do all the employees do? I could build their product myself.” Benjamin Pollack and Jeff Atwood called out people who do that with Stack Overflow. But Stack Overflow is relatively obviously lean, so the general response is something like “oh, sure maybe Stack Overflow is lean, but FooCorp must really be bloated”. And since most people have relatively little visibility into F...| danluu.com
My favorite thing about working at Wave is knowing that what we’re building makes a massive, tangible improvement to the lives of millions of people. This matters to me for a few reasons: It pushes me to do my best work. When I know that what I’m working on is going to be useful to lots of people, it makes it easy to focus on what’s important, and to stay determined when things aren’t going well.| www.wave.com