You’re reading The Steady Beat, a weekly-ish round-up of hand-picked articles and resources for people who make software products: designers, engineers, product managers, and organizational leaders.
By the Numbers - Chill
- 270 million — As of early 2024, Netflix boasts a global subscriber count of 270 million accounts, solidifying its position as a video streaming giant.
- 125 million — Netflix Open Connect delivers over 125 million hours of viewing daily, underscoring its massive global impact and distributed CDN capacity.
- 1,000+ — Netflix’s Open Connect Appliances are deployed in over 1,000 locations worldwide, from bustling cities to remote areas, ensuring seamless streaming.
- 6 months — It took six months for Netflix to fully migrate mobile traffic on its homepage to GraphQL, following rigorous testing and optimization phases.
— Vishal Lokam, 7m
The Coordination Tax
Too many meetings, fragmented tools, and unclear roles are the silent productivity killers lurking in every software team. Enter the “coordination tax”—not a government fee, but a symbolic price paid in wasted time, missed innovation, and skyrocketing costs. The solution? Streamlined communication, clearer roles, and smaller, cross-functional teams can help slash this tax, freeing up mental bandwidth for actual work. With inefficient collaboration costing companies billions annually, it’s clear: reducing the coordination tax is more than a nice-to-have—it’s a survival strategy.
— Deskbird, 5m #productivity #leadership #management
“Sneaking” Your Way to Distrust
Deceptive design patterns like “sneaking” might get short-term sales but at a serious cost: customer trust. Sneaking comes in three flavors—forced continuity, hidden costs, and sneak-into-basket tactics. Think of Spotify’s silent auto-renewals, Ticketmaster’s surprise fees, or GoDaddy’s stealthy add-ons. While these tactics might pad the bottom line, they erode long-term loyalty and breed user frustration. The lesson? Ethical design that prioritizes transparency wins in the long run, creating lasting trust and stronger customer relationships.
_— NN/g, 5m, #design, #productmanagement
Breaking Team Knowledge Silos
In engineering teams, siloed knowledge is a productivity killer, with nearly half of developers feeling blocked multiple times a week due to limited access to information or feedback loops. Anton Zaides outlines four core reasons for this issue—poor horizontal information flow, weak documentation, subpar onboarding, and “us vs. them” mentalities. Solutions include establishing engineering guilds, implementing “Minimum Viable Documentation,” and creating collaborative onboarding practices. The key? Make sharing knowledge not just possible, but an embedded part of company culture—rewarding transparency and collaboration, not hoarding information.
— Leading Developers, 10m #productivity #leadership #management
AI’s Real Job: Making Horrible Jobs Disappear
Llama 3.2 isn’t just another AI model; it’s tackling a truly terrible job: moderating the worst of the worst on social media—content so brutal it leaves human reviewers with lasting trauma. Meta’s open-source LLM aims to ease human suffering by handling the gut-wrenching task of reviewing flagged content, offering a rare win in AI’s quest to replace human labor. With multimodal “Guard” models that can evaluate both text and images, Meta’s AI ambitions look less like profit-chasing and more like a genuine attempt at harm reduction. Here’s a tech pivot everyone can cheer for.
— Michael Johnson, 6m, #ai, #engineering
Less Meetings, More Context
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