The Important Thing

In our 101st episode, we kick off a new era of episode titles as your best engineer becomes the interim manager of their own team — delegation, one-on-ones, the three-year rule, a visit from Chili Palmer, the Cadillac of minivans salesman himself, and the only question that matters: do you actually want this job?

Down the rabbit hole:

• Sometimes Your Job is to Stay the Hell Out of the Way, the wolves post Rands published the day this was recorded
• Sometimes Your Job is to Get in the Way, the direct response
• Get Shorty, home of Chili Palmer and the Cadillac of minivans

Related Important Things episodes:

• EP 32: The One About 1:1s — the investment, not the cost
• EP 76: The One About Seven Managers
• EP 9: The One About Manager READMEs
• EP 20: The One About Management (Pt. 1) — plus Pt. 2 and Pt. 3

One hundred episodes. For this occasion, years in the coming, Lyle and Rands talk about the thing itself — the nuts and bolts of the podcast, including how the robots now do an alarming amount of the work, what a hundred episodes taught us, and why we use the "The One About…" naming convention.

🎁: the show has a home at importantthing.show. Deep-link a favorite or just scroll through a hundred episodes of history.

Stuff that came up:

• Riverside, where this show has been recorded since the We Are Netflix days
• Rands Leadership Slack, now staffed by a helpful jobs robot named Floyd
• Planetfall, the Infocom classic Floyd is named after
• Friends, the homage hiding in plain sight in every episode title
• Marco Arment, listening since at least Rands' fiftieth birthday

Related Important Things episodes:

• EP 56: The One About the Month of Podcasting
• EP 51: The One About Names... Again
• EP 98: The One About The Joy of Bots
• EP 18: The One About Sugar — Lyle's favorite, as heard on-air
• EP 78: The One About Sandwiches — the other favorite
• EP 96: The One About ARC Raiders — the first episode the robots dressed up

In our 99th episode, Rands is back on the Pro Leisure Circuit — infinite time, a suspicious amount of Arc Raiders, and no wind in the sails — and we wrestle with what actually motivates a person when the engine of work goes quiet.

The usual suspects:

• Arc Raiders, absorbing ten-hour days like it's a job
• Rands Leadership Slack — 35,000 leaders, 7,000 a week
• Daring Fireball, John Gruber's one-person media entity
• Ray Kroc, who started McDonald's in his fifties
• CalArts, where Lyle's daughter learned she didn't want to animate for a living
• UC Santa Cruz, Lyle's decade in the state of California

Related Important Things episodes:

• EP 25: The One About the Pro Leisure Circuit
• EP 96: The One About ARC Raiders

In our 98th episode, we list the things we've been building with our robots and figure out who we're really yelling at when it all goes wrong.

Mentioned, referenced, or obsessed over:

• Planetfall, the Infocom game that gave Floyd his name
• Rands Leadership Slack
• Managing Humans
• Railway
• Supabase
• Bear
• Ghostty
• Cory Doctorow on centaurs and reverse-centaurs

Related Important Things episodes:

• EP 73: The One About Robots
• EP 83: The One About Your AI Tools

In our 97th episode, we talk about how much more we learn in person and why the last 10% of anything is the most important part.

Things we mentioned:

• Rands Leadership Slack
• South by Southwest
• Jony Ive & Patrick Collison at Stripe Sessions

Related Important Things episodes:

• EP 73: The One About Robots

In our 96th episode, Rands goes deep (perhaps too deep) on ARC Raiders, an extraction shooter where trust is the real currency.

Mentioned, referenced, or obsessed over:

• ARC Raiders
• The Last of Us (HBO)
• Pokemon Go
• Sea of Thieves
• World of Warcraft
• Acquired Podcast

Related Important Things episodes:

• EP 25: The One About the Pro Leisure Circuit
• EP 2: The One About Destiny
• EP 55: The One About Destiny 2

In our 94th episode, we talk about when Rands goes unhinged and why that is cathartic. Then, we talk about the plight of enterprise software users and why they are so unfortunate.

In our 93rd episode, we wonder aloud about free will, children, and what makes a good ice hockey team.

In our 92nd episode, we talk about the ongoing battle with productivity tool swirl. Again.