Michael Lopp
Senior Director of Engineering, Apple · 1 appearance on the record.
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Michael Lopp is a veteran engineering leader who has built software products and led teams at Apple, Netscape, Palantir, Pinterest, and Slack. Writing under the pen name "Rands," he authors the blog Rands in Repose and has published books including Managing Humans, Being Geek, and The Art of Leadership.
26statements → 1claims → 0claims resolved → 3.88/5average certainty → 2.62/5average debate potential → ≈4.5/5argument clarity, estimated →
1 not checkable as stated how the 1 claim stands · each chip opens the sources
1 assertion · 2 opinions · 22 insights · 1 disclosure · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertion are the 1 claim: statements the public record can support or contradict. 0 are resolved, and 1 names no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.
The record, in short
What the tape says about how Michael argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.
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Everything Michael Lopp said on In Depth that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →
Building successful software is getting harder despite AI and modern tools
“No, I think it's getting harder, actually. Well, number one is because there's so many, when, back in the Barlow days, this is pre-web, this is software that you print on a disk and ship to humans, so you've got, you know, you're shipping it once a year, so th…”
Managers should encourage employees to leave Slack once they outgrow it
“And here's a controversial one. There's times we spent a year. I'm like, you don't need to be here anymore. You have learned everything that you're going to learn here at Slack. It's time to go somewhere else. And I wouldn't say it like that, but there's truly…”
Lopp: Borland vastly influenced Microsoft's programming language strategy
“It was all of the languages led the charge on the languages. I would argue vastly influenced Microsoft programming language strategy.”
Contracting out engineering or design for a startup is a disaster
“I think there's literally founders who think cool, but it's going to kind of Contract out the engineering or kind of bring in some con, you know, an upside firm to do this. This is a hugely horrible, bad idea. If you're trying to build software as to not, and …”
Lopp: Building software without product managers is a disaster
“I got an engineer. He's amazing. And I got a designer and he's amazing. We don't really need product people. Like who are these folks? We know what we should do here. That's also a disaster. So like, I'm just picking one of the many sort of. Initial conditions…”
Scaling requires unglamorous process operators alongside visionaries like Stewart Butterfield
“You need those Stuart Butterfields. You need those Dr. Carps and those sorts of folks, but you also need like that set of folks that are just like turning the crank, building the crank and turning the crank. These are incredibly important. By the way, not sexy…”
Measuring unstructured engineering time destroys the conditions for creative invention
“There is no accounting. Because it's, the moment we do that, then the project managers show up and they say, cool, have you done your wolf time? Great. Check. Let's do that. Thanks so much. Great. Good job, everyone. Now we're operationally sound. It's the sho…”
Google's famous 20% time policy was gamed and is no longer used
“I think even the Google thing got gamed. No one uses it now.”
Lopp: Bad Product Managers Strip Engineers of Creative Agency and Invention
“The bad ones create a scenario where engineering doesn't feel like they have a vote in what gets built. And the, this 29% time that we're talking about here is one of my countermeasures to that, in that an engineering culture where they don't feel they can inv…”
Lopp: Consumer software development requires an equal triad of product, design, and engineering
“Consumery software, which means you're building a software for regular humans. I would argue you have equal parts engineering, design, and product. Products there to tell the story of the customer and to influence, like, to think like the customer, to think si…”
Notorious visionary tech leaders will quickly concede when proven wrong
“Every leader that you just referred to, every single one, when I'm right, and they're wrong, and I can convince them of that in whatever scenario, they understand that. They go, yeah, well, yeah, shut up. You're right. Stop. I got it. I got it.”
Lopp: Directive leadership helps people by giving them the initial momentum to start
“I think a lot of people want to be told what to do. Oh, I just threw up in my mouth. And I don't, I bet these people don't even think that, but I think it gets you started. Right? It's not, you're actually not going to do it. I'm gonna say, hey, go do this thi…”
Unsolicited back-channel references are far more insightful than candidate-provided ones
“I think you can learn from background. Checks, but there are people that are, they're picking the people that they're telling to you. You gotta do like unsolicited ones are actually the ones that are actually interesting because someone who hates them tells yo…”
Accountability means explaining your rationale, not being punished for mistakes
“Accountability, if you ask most people what accountability means, they say, well, it means if I don't do what I said I was going to do, I'm going to be in trouble. It's not what accountability means at all. Accountability means to give account, to give the sto…”
It takes three full years to become effective in a leadership role
“You're not, you get a new role. You're not good at it for three years.”
Executives will inevitably anger at least 30% of their organization
“30% of the people always going to hate you. It doesn't matter what you say. You're always going to be pissing off like minimum of 30%, like all the time.”
Engineering leaders must stay technical and code to maintain credibility
“You must stay technical as an engineer. They can tell. They know when you're no longer doing that, and your credibility, it's not gone, it's just different.”
Startups cannot excuse chaotic operations by claiming early-stage product focus
“You don't get to say that you're building a product, but actually what you're building is a company and that's an operation, whether that's the recruiting or the sales or the product process or the quality process or whatever it is. And you're building it to s…”
Lopp: Autonomous engineer exploration should be continuous, not limited to hackathons
“My utopia is that engineers have a good chunk of time To do what everyone promises us during week of code or these other like one week of things. Hey, I want to build something and demo the CEO. These are great things, but that's an always thing. That's all a …”
Engineering teams should spend 71% on structured work and 29% exploring
“That's my utopia, is that there is that thing that's 71%, that's a real business and real stuff that's really clear, and we're debating it, and we're making it better, but there's also this free time to be kind of a free electron or a wolf or something like th…”
Operationalizing unstructured engineering innovation time at Palantir was a huge disaster
“I tried to operationalize this at Palantir and it was a huge disaster for most of the reason I kind of disimplied. I gave it a title. I said, this is how you achieve this and this is how we will measure this. And it suddenly became this gameable thing where ev…”
Lopp: Visionary CEOs foster debate cultures to challenge their ideas
“That is part of the culture of these companies that you're talking about is that there is that, that debate culture that the CEO, she or he has created because they have a vision. They want to do the thing, but they also want their brightest and their talented…”
Company culture is defined by early founding behavior, not written values
“People try to write it down and they say, Hey, here are values and sort of thing, but that's not what it is. It's like, it's the early ways that their founders and the company treated each other.”
Job interviews only reveal a facade compared to real work pressure
“It's not enough time and you don't, you got to see someone with bullets shooting over their heads to see who they truly are. It's fine. Interviews are great. You learn quite a bit, but like I've been trying for this forever. It's kind of like root out and I'm …”
Appearances (1)
| Episode | Date | Speaking time |
|---|---|---|
| The human side of world-class engineering leadership | Michael Lopp (Apple, Palantir, Slac | Jan 25, 2024 | 51m |