“Always design a thing by considering it in its next larger context — a chair in a room, a room in a house, a house in an environment, an environment in a city plan” — Eliel SaarinenFrequently we will be given problems to solve by other people. Early in our career, these problems will usually be well-scoped and specific, eg:Add this new data to...
Adding product management to more traditional software infrastructure organizations, sometimes with a shift towards platform engineering, is all the rage today. As someone who has done both these things, it doesn’t surprise me to see so many people struggling to make it work. Both of these shifts require going from a siloed, process, tech-focused...
Software engineers are attracted to formulas, algorithms, and structures. As people whose job it is to take ideas and turn them into predictable executable code, it is unsurprising that we’re drawn to ways of thinking that categorize and systematize things. This attraction continues as engineers become engineering managers and leaders. I should...
Most companies have carefully created separate senior career tracks that provide details of the differences between being a manager and being an individual contributor (IC). And yet, many people still believe that you can’t get ahead without becoming a manager, and many companies who want more senior individual contributors struggle to promote...
For varying levels of seniority, from senior, to staff, and beyond.How to run a meeting, and no, being the person who talks the most in the meeting is not the same thing as running itHow to write a design doc, take feedback, and drive it to resolution, in a reasonable period of timeHow to mentor an early-career teammate, a mid-career engineer, a...
originally posted on LeadDev.comOne of the most stressful parts of the end-of-year process for managers is the dreaded performance rating. This process forces you to boil down all of the work that a person did over the year, all of their accomplishments and misses, into a numeric score (often from 1–5) that may also come with words like ‘meets...
You’re probably familiar with the concept of Choose Boring Technology. If you’re not, I’ll wait for you to read the excellent blog post by Dan McKinley that inspired a much-needed correction in tech to balance “innovation” with stability. I’m here to take this to the next level, and talk about how “boring” should apply not just to your technology...
This tweet got me thinking about change, and how software engineers (and especially, Platform teams) can drive cultural change throughout companies.First, let’s take the question. You want to change the engineering values that your company is expressing. You don’t just want to create a heavyweight process (your checkin fails if you don’t reach X...
Have you ever worked on a team that felt like it was just stuck in a rut? Somehow things were always just one fix away from improving: the next project, the next quarter, the next hire, this would turn the situation around. And yet these projects came, the quarters went by, new people were hired and joined and left and nothing ever really...
For the past 3 years, I have been running a platform engineering organization. Since that term is vague, where I work it means the software side of infrastructure. Compute platforms like kubernetes, storage systems, software development tools, and frameworks for services are part of the mandate. Our customers are other engineers at the company. I...
A hard lesson for me over the past several years of my career has been figuring out how to pick my battles. I’ve seen many friends and colleagues struggle with this as well: how do you know when to involve yourself in something, and how do you know when to stay out of it? How do you figure out where the line is? The setup If you’re reading this...
I got feisty on twitter this week and wrote up some tweets on manager READMEs, a recent hot trend in management. Let’s break them down: Dropping f-bombs is one of my "quirks" Well, what can I say, I’m sick of this trend. I’ve been a skeptic from day one, but what pushed me over the edge was watching one of my senior engineer friends react to this...
When I wrote “The Manager’s Path” I talked about what it means to work at the various levels of leadership, but I didn’t really talk as much about how you actually climb to those levels. For some people, it just happens as a consequence of being in a growing organization, and succeeding at growing with that organization. But how does that work,...
I’m often asked about the characteristics of great engineering managers. This is a question that almost always has a long answer that involves “well, she’s good at X, and he’s good at Y, and then there’s Z…” Every management role is slightly different, and a great engineering team will have managers who reflect a set of complimentary skill sets...
Effective delegation is one of the most critical skills a manager can learn. Without effective delegation, you fall victim to micromanaging your team, losing control of your time, and eventually failing to put yourself in a position where you can take on more and lead bigger things. There are many facets of effective delegation, and in this post...
Alignment, in the teamwork sense, means “a position of agreement or alliance.” It is one of the critical qualities that determines success in an organization, particularly at higher levels. Many individual contributors (ICs) get stuck at a certain point in their career because they can’t see that they are out of alignment with their company, and...
I have a bad habit. I noticed it today as I was leaving a comment in a strategy document. I’d highlighted some text that I found unclear and commented: “Do you mean X or Y? Because I don’t think it is reasonable for us to do Y” This is one of my bad management habits. I jump to conclusions. I pretend to ask a question but then make it clear that...
*May also apply to senior ICs Earlier this year, I wrote a piece called “How do Individual Contributors Get Stuck?” This was an attempt to help ICs provide constructive feedback to their peers, by identifying common challenges that I have seen developers struggle to overcome. This piece is a little bit different. I want to answer the question...
Occasionally, you may be asked to give constructive feedback on your peers, perhaps as part of review season. If you aren’t a naturally critical person but you want to give someone a valuable insight, you may find this task daunting. To that end, I suggest the following: Pay attention to how they get stuck. Everyone has at least one area that...
When I worked in finance ages ago, there was a system used by many (but not me!) that was basically a combination of a gigantic distributed database plus a scripting language that allowed you to run calculations over information in that database. One of the things that you could easily do, as far as I understand, was "diddle" a piece of...
I have agreed to give a guest lecture for a class at Yale, and they’ve asked me to speak about “building and motivating engineering teams” from the perspective of a smaller startup. The readings for my section include A Field Guide to Software Developers by Joel Spolsky. I remember reading it when it was first written. I admire Joel’s work, and...
A dissection of our favorite folk architecture Introduction I’m fascinated by the lore and mystery behind microservices. As a concept, microservices feels like one of the most interesting folk architectures of the modern era. It’s useful enough to be applied widely across different usage patterns and also vague enough to mean many different...
In my previous post, I discussed the leadership virtues of Laziness and Impatience. But as you may know, I neglected one of the core virtues in my list, namely, that of hubris. Hubris. Pride. As Larry Wall says, Excessive pride, the sort of thing Zeus zaps you for. Also the quality that makes you write (and maintain) programs that other people...
This is an excerpt from my work in progress, a book on engineering management. If you're interested in getting occasional updates you can subscribe to my newsletter! I love the idea of Laziness, Impatience, and Hubris as virtues of engineers, articulated in “Programming Perl” by Larry Wall. I believe these virtues sustain into leadership, and...
There is a movement now in tech to really think about what it would take to improve our interview process. This is a movement a long time coming. White board coding interviews are clearly a strange way to measure a person's ability to actually do the day to day work of a modern software engineer. And we know that we tend to have a lot of bias in...