Erik Bernhardsson

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What's Erik up to?

2021-04-01 I joined Better in early 2015 because I thought the team was crazy enough to actually change one of the largest industries in the US. For six years, I ran the tech team, hiring 300+ people, probably doing 2,000+ interviews, and according to GitHub I added 646,941 lines of code and removed 339,164. Read more…

Giving more tools to software engineers: the reorganization of the factory

2020-12-16 It's a popular attitude among developers to rant about our tools and how broken things are. Maybe I'm an optimistic person, because my viewpoint is the complete opposite! I had my first job as a software engineer in 1999, and in the last two decades I've seen software engineering changing in ways that have made us orders of magnitude more productive. Read more…

Developer experience as a competitive advantage

2020-10-06 I spent a ton of time looking at different software providers, both as a CTO, and as a nerd “advanced” consumer who builds stuff in my spare time. In the last 10 years, there has been an order of magnitude more products that cater directly to developers, through APIs, SDKs, and tooling. Read more…

Mortality statistics and Sweden's "dry tinder" effect

2020-09-23 We live in a year of about 350,000 amateur epidemiologists and I have no desire to join that “club”. But I read something about COVID-19 deaths that I thought was interesting and wanted to see if I could replicated it through data. Read more…

How to set compensation using commonsense principles

2020-06-08 Compensation has always been one of the most confusing parts of management to me. Getting it right is obviously extremely important. Compensation is what drives our entire economy, and you could look at the market for labor as one gigantic resource-allocating machine in the same way as people look at the stock market as a gigantic resource-allocating machine for investments. Read more…

Never attribute to stupidity that which is adequately explained by opportunity cost

2020-03-10 Hanlon's razor is a classic aphorism I'm sure you have heard before: Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity. I've found that neither malice nor stupidity is the most common reason when you don't understand why something is in a certain way. Read more…

How to hire smarter than the market: a toy model

2020-01-13 Let's consider a toy model where you're hiring for two things and that those are equally valuable. It's not very important what those are, so let's just call them “thing A” and “thing B” for now. Read more…
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Erik Bernhardsson

... is the founder of Modal Labs which is working on some ideas in the data/infrastructure space. I used to be the CTO at Better. A long time ago, I built the music recommendation system at Spotify. You can follow me on Twitter or see some more facts about me.