Ben Kuhn
Software engineer and writer; former CTO of Wave, now at Anthropic. Blogs at benkuhn.net on attention, engineering management and doing hard things well.
Ben Kuhn did not write this page.
We collected these quotes from things they published elsewhere, and every quote links to where it was said. They have no account here and have not endorsed this site. Quotes are word for word; the short line under each one is our own restatement, not their wording. Their own site. Is this you? Claim it or ask us to remove it. Or tell us what is wrong here.
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Our reading
Most forms of dance require weeks of lessons before newcomers are welcomed to dance socially.
Their wordsMany other forms of dance require weeks of lessons before you're even encouraged to do it socially at all.
↗You should try contra dancingbenkuhn.net 1st of 3 in this piece
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Their wordsIt's pretty common for people to use contra as a gateway into more difficult forms of dance.
↗You should try contra dancingbenkuhn.net 2nd of 3 in this piece
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Their wordsThe default mood of a lot of spaces is a sort of ironic detachment.
↗You should try contra dancingbenkuhn.net 3rd of 3 in this piece
- 12 months earlier
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Their wordsmost rewrites fail and most people are over-optimistic about how long they will take
↗Impact, agency, and tastebenkuhn.net 1st of 3 in this piece
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ambitionmanagementideas vs execution
Their wordsPeople who can be trusted to make something inevitable are really rare, and are typically the bottleneck for how many different things a team or company can do at once.
↗Impact, agency, and tastebenkuhn.net 2nd of 3 in this piece
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Our reading
Different people's areas of strongest judgment or taste rarely overlap much with each other.
Their wordsit's quite rare for different people's "zone of best taste" to overlap very much.
↗Impact, agency, and tastebenkuhn.net 3rd of 3 in this piece
- 3 weeks earlier
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Our reading
A manager's own individual technical output drops by roughly 10-20% per engineer they manage.
Their wordsyou should expect to have something like 10-20% less individual output per engineer you manage, depending on how experienced you are, they are, etc., and with substantial week-to-week variance.
↗Advice for time management as a managerbenkuhn.net 1st of 2 in this piece
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Their wordsThe stereotype is that new managers often micromanage, but at Wave, I've noticed that new managers often err on the side of undermanaging, or being too hands-off, perhaps out of a desire to signal that they trust their reports.
↗Advice for time management as a managerbenkuhn.net 2nd of 2 in this piece
- 2 weeks earlier
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Their wordsOne of the most common megaproject failure modes is to not freak out soon enough, and having a concrete plan is the best antidote.
↗How I've run major projectsbenkuhn.net 1st of 3 in this piece
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Our reading
The best project managers are usually not the strongest technical individual contributors.
Their wordsThe best project-managers are often not the strongest technical ICs.
↗How I've run major projectsbenkuhn.net 2nd of 3 in this piece
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Their words"Direction is more important than magnitude"-it's usually better to have a lower-velocity project that works on the right things, than a higher-velocity one that's pointed at the wrong goal.
↗How I've run major projectsbenkuhn.net 3rd of 3 in this piece
- 8 months earlier
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Their wordsTeam leadership covers a huge array of things-as you can see from how long this post is-and trying to find someone who can be great at all of them is often a unicorn hunt.
↗Categories of leadership on technical teamsbenkuhn.net 1st of 3 in this piece
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Their wordsThe bar I typically suggest is that the people manager doesn't need to have the most technical depth on the team, but they need enough depth that they can follow most discussions without slowing them down, understand who's correct in most debates without needing to rely on trust, and generally stay oriented easily.
↗Categories of leadership on technical teamsbenkuhn.net 2nd of 3 in this piece
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Their wordsGood project management is barely visible-it just feels like "things humming along."
↗Categories of leadership on technical teamsbenkuhn.net 3rd of 3 in this piece
- 8 days earlier
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Our reading
Trust between colleagues comes from shared mental models built through mutual investment.
mental modelsmanagementbehavioural science
Their wordsTrust comes from common knowledge of shared mental models, and that takes investment from both sides to build.
↗Trust as a bottleneck to growing teams quicklybenkuhn.net 1st of 2 in this piece
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Their wordsIn a large, fast-growing company you'll probably never get to the utopian ideal of full pairwise trust between everyone-it takes too long to build.
↗Trust as a bottleneck to growing teams quicklybenkuhn.net 2nd of 2 in this piece
- 5 months earlier
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Our reading
Repeated vague platitudes without follow-up specifics signal weak first-principles thinking.
Their wordsIf they don't follow this up with a more specific, precise or nuanced claim, they may not be a strong first-principles thinker.
↗How I build and run behavioral interviewsbenkuhn.net 1st of 3 in this piece
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Our reading
Someone who can't name what they'd do differently is unlikely to be good at improving over time.
Their wordsif the person responds to "what would you do differently" with "nothing," or with non-actionable vague platitudes, it's a sign they may not be great at figuring out how to get better at things over time.
↗How I build and run behavioral interviewsbenkuhn.net 2nd of 3 in this piece
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Our reading
Most workplace problems have more than one person contributing to them, not a single culprit.
Their wordsSometimes this is true, but usually problems aren't a single person's fault!
↗How I build and run behavioral interviewsbenkuhn.net 3rd of 3 in this piece
- 10 months earlier
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Their wordsManage projects according to the owner's level of task-relevant maturity.
↗Some mistakes I made as a new managerbenkuhn.net 1st of 3 in this piece
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Their wordsPeople with low task-relevant maturity appreciate some amount of micromanagement (if they're self-aware and you're nice about it).
↗Some mistakes I made as a new managerbenkuhn.net 2nd of 3 in this piece
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Their wordsunmaintained infrastructure degrades more quickly, and is more expensive to fix in the long run.
↗Some mistakes I made as a new managerbenkuhn.net 3rd of 3 in this piece
- 3 years earlier
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Their wordsBeing impatient is the best way to get faster at things. And across a surprising number of domains, being really fast correlates strongly with being effective.