In my time observing managers, one observation seems to repeat again and again: good managers write well, and bad managers write poorly. In fact, the best managers I’ve ever had were not just good writers, they were terrific. And the worst managers I’ve ever had were not just bad writers, they were uncommonly shoddy.
Today I will share some of the software engineering soft skills I have learned from my first 10 years on Google Chrome, where I am a Senior Staff Engineering...
When I came out as trans and started seeking medical care, I worked at a large employer that directly paid for the medical costs of its employees and dictated how their insurance networks process claims. I had the benefits I needed because other trans people fought for them and the company could unilaterally choose to provide them. Startups don’t have this luxury and are at the whims of insurance companies to keep the cost of hiring and retaining employees manageable. Meanwhile, insu...
Managing teams has taught me a lot about my own behaviors and motivations. For example, I overworked for a long time. This left me continually teetering on the brink of burnout, and I had no energy left to absorb the typical sorts of organizational changes that happen at any company. Despite doing good work, I handled change poorly, and I picked up the reputation for being difficult to manage.
I’d like to say that I learned from my mistakes directly, but the honest version is that I ...
What does it mean when we say that developers spend most of their time figuring the system out?
Why is it important?
And how else could we look at this problem?
You probably need to do fewer things right now. Prioritization, the other definition There’s two loose definitions of prioritization. Prioritization(1): Ordering a todo list. You make a giant list of things you could do, things you should do, things you’d like to do… and then you put a unique number...
As a Director of Engineering, I have monthly 1:1s with all of my direct reports. A 1:1 (one-on-one) is a recurring meeting with no set agenda between a manager and one of their reports. The internet is full of valuable insight into how to run them from my perspective, (ex. The Update, The Vent, and The Disaster) but somewhat more limited in advice on how to make the most of them if you’re on the other side of the table.
In another case of military metrics gone wrong, the US military reported success in undermining Taliban financing after it paid Afghan farmers to destroy their crops of opium poppies. What went unreported, however, was that the farmers planted larger fields of opium poppies in response, in the hopes that they might be paid by the US military to destroy the crops again. When US payments didn’t come through, the opium was harvested and entered the international drug trade. Much of the ...
At large company B (LCB), ICs agreed that it's problematic to reward creating new features more richly than doing critical grunt work. When I talked to managers, they often agreed, too. But nevertheless, the people who get promoted are disproportionately those who ship shiny new things. I saw management attempt a number of cultural and process changes at LCB. Mostly, those took the form of pronouncements from people with fancy titles. For really important things, they might produce a...
Co-authored with Dr Paidi O'Raghallaigh and Dr Stephen McCarthy at Cork University Business School as part of my PhD studies, and originally published by Cutter Consortium’s Business Agility & Software Engineering Excellence practice on 22nd of July 2021 Take a minute and write an answer to the question, “What is technical debt?” Then read this…
Standardizing on a given platform or technology is one of the most powerful ways to create leverage within a company: improve the tooling a bit and every engineer will get more productive. Exploration is, in the long run, an even more powerful force, with successes compounding over time. Developing an investment thesis to balance the ratios and timing of standardization and exploration is a core challenge of engineering strategy.