The 3 Layers to Unlocking Team Trust: A Leader’s Guide – Leadership Garden

Table of Contents

Trust is the glue that holds teams together. It’s like the secret ingredient that makes a group of individuals work like a well-oiled machine. When there’s trust, people feel safe to share their ideas, take risks, and openly express their opinions without fear of being judged or ignored. This creates an environment where everyone can contribute their best, leading to more creativity, better problem-solving, and higher productivity. In teams where trust is strong, members support each other, communicate better, and are more committed to their goals. It’s no wonder that building trust is considered a top priority in successful teams. So, how do we build this trust?

Engineering Leadership Tactics: Building Alignment

How to find buy-in as an Engineering Manager?

6 min read ·

Dec 14, 2022

—

Change is part of the day-to-day work of an Engineering Manager (EM). It could be because an EM is trying to improve their team’s delivery results or quality. Or they could be trying to make improvements that affect the broader organization.

I have previously discussed implementing change at a high level previously. I would like to go more in-depth into some tactics that I have used in the past. How to get alignment at different levels?

“Good Things Come to Those Who Wait.”

Articles

Series

ColorsNew

Mixtapes

Signup

Reading ClubNew

• Articles
• Series
• 
• ColorsNew
• Mixtapes
• Signup
• Reading ClubNew

“Good things come to those who wait.”

by Tobias van Schneider

Published Oct 25, 2023

As a designer, one of the most useful skills you can have is patience. Even if you’re not a designer, patience is one of the best yet hardest skills to learn.

Patience helps you trust the process as a designer. It guides you when you’re annoyed of yourself not finding a solution to your problem today, right now. It reminds you that efforts build and compound.

Writing an engineering strategy.

Once you become an engineering executive, an invisible timer starts ticking in the background.

Tick tick tick. At some point that timer will go off,

at which point someone will rush up to you demanding an engineering strategy.

It won’t be clear what they mean, but they will want it, really, really badly.

If we just had an engineering strategy, their eyes will implore you, things would be okay.

Own It Mentality

At times, I’ve taken on too many responsibilities, only to pay the price later with poor follow-through — which is ultimately more painful than saying “no” at the outset.

My poor follow-through is downstream of my ambition and my desire to people-please, both of which seem noble but can lead to consequences. When it comes to ambition, I’m like a starving guy at a buffet. Not only am I unable to eat everything on my plate, but I get sick from trying. My desire to people-please is why I say “yes” to opportunities as they arise, but I disappoint people later when I’m late on a project or have to cancel at the last minute.

Don’t Fix Things. Write a New Story

Some thoughts on why the push to “align on the problem” is often counterproductive, and why a better approach is to focus on breaking the narrative stalemate with a better story.

Companies are filled with (often competing) narratives about what is broken, why, and what to do about it.

These narratives vary and are heavily influenced by people’s worldview, perspective, tenure at the company, personal experiences, and skills and knowledge (among other factors). For example, some people are biased toward individual performance or specific team dynamics explanations. Others tend to gravitate to narratives that involve systemic organizational issues, cultural dynamics, strategy (or lack thereof), and incentives.

Things I Learned the Hard Way

1. Things I Learned the
   Hard Way
   Bryan Cantrill
   Oxide Computer Company

   View Slide

2. OXIDE
   The imperative to learn
   • The thrill of being a software engineer is that we are always learning
   • Learning is clearest with respect to our craft: learning new languages,
   new technologies – or new aspects of developing or deploying them
   • Learning extends beyond craft: software creation sits at the confluence
   of the technical and the creative, at once solitary and collaborative
   • The way we organize is not formulaic; we are always learning new ways
   of organizing ourselves and working with one another

   (more…)

Writing engineering strategy | StaffEng

I kind of think writing about engineering strategy is hard because good strategy is pretty boring, and it’s kind of boring to write about. Also I think when people hear “strategy” they think “innovation” – Camille Fournier

Few companies understand their engineering strategy and vision. One consequence of this uncertainty is the industry belief that these documents are difficult to write. In some conversations, it can feel like you’re talking about something mystical, but these are just mundane documents. The reality is that good engineering strategy is boring and that it’s easier to write an effective strategy than a bad one.

Superlinear Returns

October 2023

One of the most important things I didn’t understand about the world

when I was a child is the degree to which the returns for performance

are superlinear.

Teachers and coaches implicitly told us the returns were linear.

“You get out,” I heard a thousand times, “what you put in.” They

meant well, but this is rarely true. If your product is only half

as good as your competitor’s, you don’t get half as many customers.

How to Tell Great Stories

Is it possible to turn anyone into a storyteller as good as Neil deGrasse Tyson?

Imagine anyone—even your bitter, old uncle—being able to command a stadium’s worth of people hanging onto their every word.

I recently got to the bottom of it.

My motivation: I had been trying to start a podcast to exchange stories with great storytellers, but I sounded awful in comparison to them. I was ruining first impressions with people I’ve always wanted to meet, and that sucked.

Productivity

I think I am

at least somewhat more productive than average, and people sometimes ask me for

productivity tips. So I decided to just write them all down in one place.

Compound

growth gets discussed as a financial concept, but it works in careers as well,

and it is magic. A small productivity

gain, compounded over 50 years, is worth a lot.

So it’s worth figuring out how to optimize productivity. If you get 10%

This Is the Most Powerful Word in the World

The Hyperfocused Entrepreneur

February 18, 2023

Read time: 5 minutes

I spent the past week in Antarctica playing patty-cake with penguins and watching whales like a peeping-Tom.

We landed a few hours ago and I’m currently writing this from the basement of a Chilean hotel mere hours before it’s scheduled to go out to ya’ll.

As a result, this week’s letter will be shorter than usual…

Are You Ready to Be a Public Company?

Going public is not the same as being a public company*.*** When you go public, your company’s performance suddenly has a real-time scoreboard: your stock price. It’s easy to think that high growth can make up for a low stock price, especially for founders at fast-growing late-stage startups that are still burning cash. But as a public company, the reality is that a low or volatile stock price sucks and can hurt your business. It’s bad for employee morale and retention, it’s bad for recruiting and hiring new executives, it’s bad for using your stock for M&A, and it often gives competitors the opening to point at your stock price and say, “the market’s figured it out. They’re a disaster.”

The Techno-Optimist Manifesto

“Our species is 300,000 years old. For the first 290,000 years, we were foragers, subsisting in a way that’s still observable among the Bushmen of the Kalahari and the Sentinelese of the Andaman Islands. Even after Homo Sapiens embraced agriculture, progress was painfully slow. A person born in Sumer in 4,000BC would find the resources, work, and technology available in England at the time of the Norman Conquest or in the Aztec Empire at the time of Columbus quite familiar. Then, beginning in the 18th Century, many people’s standard of living skyrocketed. What brought about this dramatic improvement, and why?”

How to Stop Taking Work So Personally

Thomas Barwick/Getty Images

Our jobs often provide more than a paycheck: They often offer a sense of purpose, growth, and community. But over time, our professional roles can become too intertwined with our sense of self. This is especially true for When you’re driven to perform and also think and feel everything more deeply, it’s easy for interactions, decisions, or feedback to have a direct — and often disproportionate — impact on your emotions, self-worth, and identity.

Listening Tours: Not Just for New Leaders

Does this sound familiar? You’re in a new leadership role. During your initial weeks, you embark on a listening tour, meeting with various team members and stakeholders to understand their perspectives, challenges, and aspirations. The tour proves insightful, enabling you to make informed decisions quickly and build trust with your teams early.

Listening tours during onboarding are a proven, well-known practice in leadership circles (tips, keys to success). However, many of us put this valuable tool away after we feel onboarded. In this post, I’ll explore the benefits of conducting listening tours beyond the onboarding phase and share some real world examples of how they’ve positively impacted leadership here at Flatiron.

Capital (In)Efficiency

In this post, we will explore capital (in)efficiency and why the current preoccupation with developer productivity (and efficiency overall) is a symptom of something else. We will discuss layoffs, trust, personal identity, and interest rates. It’s going to get heavy.

Quick Definitions

Capital:

Skills, knowledge, experience, machinery, patents, copyrights, working capital, debt and equity, partner relationships, brand, etc.

Capital Efficiency:

A measure of how effectively a company uses its sources of capital to achieve its objectives, which may include growth, profitability, market share, and other strategic goals.

Information Diet: High Agency vs Low Agency

Information Diet: High Agency vs Low Agency

Every minute, 500 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube.

Every day, 500 million tweets are uploaded to Twitter.

Every year, 67 million people die.

Despite this, if you don’t have an up-to-date opinion on trending events – you are… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

If you want to improve your information diet, I’ve put together the best ideas and articles I’ve found for free here:

Solving the Engineering Strategy crisis.

These are speaking notes for my October 4th, QCon talk in San Francisco.
Slides for this talk.

Over the course of my career, I’ve frequently heard from colleagues, team members

and random internet strangers with the same frustration: the company doesn’t have

an Engineering strategy.

I don’t think this problem is unique to Engineering: it’s also common to hear

folks complain that they’re missing a strategy for Product, Design or Business.

Are You Serious?

Justo Gallego Martínez (1925-2021), working on the cathedral that he spent 60 years building. (Photograph by Susana Giron)

It’s frustrating to not be taken seriously.

When I was a kid, one of my most agonizing frustrations was about how rare it was that anybody would take me seriously. It doesn’t bother me as much anymore, largely because I’ve since achieved some level of success at the things I care about. I now have some people who have my back – people who see me for who I am and what I’m doing – and I’ve also learned to be more patient with other people’s misunderstandings, misinterpretations, and so on. I’m writing this to share some of my thoughts about that.

Diving Into Engineering Metrics

In today’s engineering world, you often hear about something called “Engineering Metrics.” Whether you’re a new engineering manager or have been in the field for a long time, you’ve probably come across this term.

But what exactly are engineering metrics, and how can they help you and your team?

In this essay, we’ll dive into the world of engineering metrics and specifically:

• 🔍 What Engineering Metrics are and what’s their purpose
• 🏭 See how they relate to Productivity
• 🚀 How to make the most from them

Before we begin, let me introduce our first sponsor. Since this is the first time I’ve included a sponsor here, please let me know if this bothers you in any way!

Notes on “Taste”

Gertrude Stein’s home. [A black and white photograph of a room with walls covered in framed paintings, and ornate dining table, and a wood burning furnace.]

Taste is a word I’ve been hearing a lot more lately, and I think it’s because we’ve broadened its application from the world of the aesthetic to the world of the practical. Taste has historically been reserved for conversation about things like fashion and art. Now, we look for it in our social media feeds, the technology we use, the company we keep, and the people we hire. When I ask people what they mean by “taste,” they’ll stumble around for a bit and eventually land on something like “you know it when you see it,” or “it’s in the eye of the beholder.” I understand. Words like taste are hard to pin down, perhaps because they describe a sensibility more than any particular quality, a particular thing. We’re inclined to leave them unencumbered by a definition, to preserve their ability to shift shapes. But I don’t think we have to. And for the past several months, I haven’t been able to resist the urge to try to articulate taste. This comes, in part, from a place of wanting to be precise — now that the term is such a frequent and varied part of our lexicon, it runs the risk of losing its meaning. But I also believe taste is something we can and should try to cultivate. Not because taste itself is a virtue, per se, but because I’ve found a taste-filled life to be a richer one. To pursue it is to appreciate ourselves, each other, and the stuff we’re surrounded by a whole lot more. So, how to wrap my arms around this term in a way that captures its spirit without flattening it? I can’t think of a piece of writing that does this more effectively than Susan Sontag’s “Notes on ‘Camp.’” In her words, “a sensibility is one of the hardest things to talk about… To snare a sensibility in words, especially one that is alive and powerful, one must be tentative and nimble. The form of jottings, rather than an essay (with its claim to a linear, consecutive argument), seemed more appropriate for getting down something of this particular fugitive sensibility.” So, in shameless imitation of a master and tastemaker, here are my notes on “taste.”

Strategy Basics: Why Strategy Is Important and What Does It Mean?

Strategy is one of the most powerful tools for change-leadership. Yet it is heavily misunderstood, underutilized, and abused. How can a tool be used properly if it’s not well-understood?

If there was a survey of abused professional words, “strategy” would be right at the top along with “agile”, “AI” and “platform”. It is broadly used as a fancy substitute for goals, visions, decisions, tactics, policies, or even fluffy dreams. In the absence of a formal definition, anything can pass as strategy.

Micromanagement: The Unpopular Truth You Need to Hear

Micromanagement – a term that often sends shivers down the spines of engineers. It’s a topic that’s been debated extensively, and opinions vary. Nat Friedman, the former CEO of GitHub, said: “The cultural prohibition on micromanagement is harmful.” This got me thinking about our collective aversion to micromanagement and how it might sometimes prevent us from effective management.

In my experience, when interviewing or onboarding new team members, one common question I ask is about their least favorite management behavior. It’s no surprise that the majority respond with “micromanagement.” It’s almost a buzzword for managerial overreach. However, it’s essential to recognize that micromanagement is a spectrum. What one engineer considers micromanagement, another might perceive as necessary guidance.

Creativity Faucet: Increase Your Creativity

One of the most valuable writing skills is the ability to generate novel ideas.

Last year, I stumbled into a technique to achieve this at will.

I was watching a documentary on songwriter Ed Sheeran. In it, he described his songwriting process. It struck me as identical to the process that author Neil Gaiman detailed in his Masterclass.

Here’s the thing.

Ed Sheeran and Neil Gaiman are in the top 0.000001% of their fields. They’re among, say, 25 people in the world who repeatedly generate blockbusters.

A Discussion on Communication With Executives, Using the Lens of This Common Management Line

“Don’t bring me problems, bring me solutions” is a common message that one imagines a stereotypical CEO saying to their teams. While this literal phrase isn’t particularly common in the wild, it’s rooted in some deep underlying truths about communication with executives. In this post, we’ll dissect this catchphrase as a means of analyzing how to effectively communicate upwards, whether to a senior manager, head of function, or CEO.

Stop Letting OKRs Masquerade as Strategy | by Roger Martin | Medium

Playing To Win

Desire is not a Strategy

7 min read ·

Nov 15, 2021

—

Source: Roger L. Martin

I am getting weary of the Objective & Key Results (OKRs) hype-train. As a result, I am compelled to dedicate my third Year II Playing to Win/Practitioner Insights (PTW/PI) piece to Stop Letting OKRs Masquerade as Strategy. Given the widespread enthusiasm for OKRs, I predict it will be a worthy successor to It’s Time to Toss SWOT Analysis into the Ashbin of Strategy History, which is, simultaneously, my most read AND most objected to PTW/PI! You can find all previous PTW/PI here.

Unbundling AI — Benedict Evans

ChatGPT 3.5 launched a year ago, and I think we’re all still working out what the questions are. The AGI argument happens in one corner (now mostly ignored by everyone else) and the semiconductor, model size and running cost conversations in others, but I’m most interested in product. How is this useful? What do you do with a technology that promises it can do anything?

The Written Word

A few thoughts I have about writing:

Writing is an art, and art is subjective. Novelist William Maughan said there are three rules to good writing. “Unfortunately no one knows what they are.” I actually think there’s one: write the kind of stuff you like to read. Writing for yourself is fun, and it shows. Writing for others is work, and it shows.

Good writing is a performance. Mark Twain used to read aloud his family and watch their reactions. If he saw them getting bored, he’d cut that part out. If he saw them getting excited, he’d double down on that section. People don’t remember what you wrote as much as they remember how they felt when they read it.

Exponential Value at Linear Cost

Exponential Value at Linear Cost

What a deal!

Binary search is kind a of a magical thing. With each additional search step, the size of the haystack we can search doubles. In other words, the value of a search is exponential in the amount of effort. That’s a great deal. There are a few similar deals like that in computing, but not many. How often, in life, do you get exponential value at linear cost?

Nobody Cares

Posted October 8, 2011

“Just win baby.”

—Al Davis

This post is dedicated to the late Al Davis. Rest in peace.

Back in the bad old days when I was running Loudcloud, I thought to myself: how could I have possibly prepared for this? How could I know that half our customers would go out of business? How could I know that it would become impossible to raise money in the private markets? How could I have figured out that there would be 221 IPOs in 2000 and 19 in 2001? Could anybody expect me to achieve a reasonable outcome given those circumstances?

Fire Every Bullet

In crisis situations, a new style or management and prioritization has to occur. Andy Grove famously called this “wartime”, and he and others like Ben Horowitz have described what it’s like to be a “wartime” CEO. I haven’t ever seen anything written about being a wartime CPO though. Being a wartime CPO means a lot has to change in how you approach building product. Most product leaders think about their team as the product, and they continue to iterate on their team through hiring, training, coaching, delegation, etc. In wartime, you’re not hiring, you don’t have time to train or coach, and you make more top down decisions. But there’s one big thing that needs to change for wartime CPOs I want to cover today, and that is prioritization and evaluation.

10,000 Hours With Reid Hoffman: What I Learned

(Credit: Wired magazine. )

Time to read: 50 minutes

We touched down in Las Vegas only three hours before, but we were already back in the plane and flying home to San Jose on a brisk winter day in December, 2012. Not having to go through security at an airport saves a lot of time.

Other than the two pilots in the front, Reid and I were alone, debriefing what worked and what didn’t at the tech event where he had just spoken. I gave some quick feedback on the answer he offered to a question about LinkedIn’s vision. He re-played his answer on how Greylock differed from other venture capital firms. I took notes.

How to Hire

After startups raise money, their next biggest problem becomes

hiring. It turns out it’s both really

hard and really important to hire good people; in fact, it’s probably the most

important thing a founder does.

If you don’t hire very well, you will not be successful—companies are

a product of the team the founders build.

There is no way you can build an important company by yourself. It’s easy to delude yourself into thinking

What Does a CTO Actually Do?

21 July 2023 · 25,673 views

· Updated 12 September 2023 career

development

management

newsletter

Table of Contents

In 2017, I found myself stepping into the shoes of a CTO for the first time. I joined a small startup as a senior developer, and before I knew it, I was handed the reins of the tech team. Having the CTO title sounded cool, but in reality, it was more of a tech lead role — we were small, just about ten people, and I was deeply involved in building the product. My days were filled with coding, debugging, and playing whack-a-mole with new bugs and customer issues. I was also responsible for ensuring our team delivered on our commitments to investors and clients. It was a challenging time, but it was also a time of immense learning and growth.

Memorized Rules: How to Give Your Life Direction

A funny lie of adulthood is pretending we’ll act on the life advice we save.

We don’t revisit bookmarks. We don’t re-read Kindle highlights. We rarely re-open Google docs.

I recently overcame this self-sabotage. If I have a superpower, it’s that I now turn advice into action. This post breaks down how, and it shares the best advice I’ve been given.

Why we don’t act on advice

The first cause of advice laziness is misclassifying what life advice is. We treat life advice the same way we learn someone’s name: briefly acknowledge it then assume we’ll remember it.

What Is the Right Level of Specialization? For Data Teams and Anyone Else

2021-07-23

This isn’t as much of a blog post as an elaboration of a tweet I posted the other day:

I think this specialization of data teams into 99 different roles (data scientist, data engineer, analytics engineer, ML engineer etc) is generally a bad thing driven by the fact that tools are bad and too hard to use

(more…)

‘A race it might be impossible to stop’: how worried should we be about AI?

Last Monday an eminent, elderly British scientist lobbed a grenade into the febrile anthill of researchers and corporations currently obsessed with artificial intelligence or AI (aka, for the most part, a technology called machine learning). The scientist was Geoffrey Hinton, and the bombshell was the news that he was leaving Google, where he had been doing great work on machine learning for the last 10 years, because he wanted to be free to express his fears about where the technology he had played a seminal role in founding was heading.

5 Crucial Things to Know About GPT-4

ChatGPT is about to get way more powerful

Screenshots via the author

After a long wait, OpenAI finally released the new GPT-4 model, a major update to the basic framework underlying their wildly popular ChatGPT system, as well as their GPT-3.5 API.

Jade Rubick – Increase your impact with upstream thinking

I was listening to a podcast where the host was interviewing Dan Heath, the author of Upstream: the Quest to Solve Problems Before They Happen.

The author tells a story about Jeff and Marta, who are standing by the river. They see a child drowning, so they rescue him. As they’re drying off, they see another child drowning, so they jump in and rescue her. As they get her to shore, they notice two more kids in the water, flailing around. After getting the two of them out of the water, Marta starts walking upstream. Jeff says, “where are you going, we’ve got to rescue these kids!” And Marta says, “I’m going to go find who’s throwing them in the water.”

Donella Meadows recommendations for how to dance with and intervene in systems | by Daniel Christian Wahl | HackerNoon.com | Medium

Donella H.Meadows was one of the co-authors of the 1972 Club of Rome Report on Limits to Growth which contributed to putting the issue of sustainability on the agenda of business and governments. She was a cofounder of the Balaton Group, an international network of systems-oriented analysts and activists from over 50 nations.

How Leaders Can Get the Feedback They Need to Grow

Westend61/Getty Images

When uncertainty is high, knowing where you stand — and learning about your mistakes while there’s still time to fix them — is more important than ever. To be able to adapt to changing conditions and ensure that your team continues to feel supported and motivated, you need to understand what you’re doing well — and where you’re falling short. Soliciting clear, actionable feedback allows you to make better, more informed decisions and pivot when necessary.

Using Metrics to Measure Individual Developer Performance — Laura Tacho

“What metrics should leaders use to measure the individual performance of developers on their teams?”

I get asked this question a lot. I’ve asked myself this question before, too – both as a developer and then later as a leader.

A lot of research and “best practice” will tell us that metrics like lines of code, story points completed, or deployment frequency are not appropriate to measure individual performance. This is true. These metrics came out of research and studies to measure different things, like devops maturity, software delivery capability, and overall delivery performance. Applying them to individuals is unfair at best.

Why Many Tech Companies Suck at Planning and Don’t Hit Their Targets

I receive many messages from Product Managers and Product Owners who are close to going crazy because they constantly loop through the Planning Cycle of Madness with the accompanying Roadmap Circus that drains their energy.

Thanks for reading Maarten’s Newsletter! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Here’s what I see happening in many tech companies all over the world:

TWH#49: The Metrics of Fear

Engineering leadership coach Laura Tacho recently published an article that starts with a question she often gets:

“What metrics should leaders use to measure the individual performance of developers on their teams?”

As far as I’m concerned, Laura does a masterful job of answering this question. But as she points out towards the end:

“If you’ve read this far, hoping for a list of metrics that you can grab and start using on your teams, you won’t find one. There’s no shortcut here.”

(more…)

Your View of Management Is Upside Down

The common view of managerial roles and compensation as a reward for good performance is a disastrous misunderstanding for managers and subordinates alike.

Thanks for reading figure-grounds, a newsletter about products, organizations, and psychology. Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

To understand management, we must ask an obvious question: in the absence of coercion, why would a person choose to be managed? Despite the prevalence of complaints about bosses and jobs, very few people decide to do away with them. Even fewer force themselves to explicitly acknowledge why that’s the case.

Underpants Gnomes, Outcomes, and Intermittent Reinforcement

tl;dr:

Organizations and the people in them irrationally and addictively build and release products that often have no real value. This article gives my best explanation why. If you want to skip it, you can jump strait to the .

It’s a puzzle

A couple things have puzzled me for the close to 30 years I’ve been in product development.” Puzzled” is an understatement. They’ve actually driven me nuts.

Things You Should Never Do, Part I – Joel on Software

Netscape 6.0 is finally going into its first public beta. There never was a version 5.0. The last major release, version 4.0, was released almost three years ago. Three years is an awfully long time in the Internet world. During this time, Netscape sat by, helplessly, as their market share plummeted.

It’s a bit smarmy of me to criticize them for waiting so long between releases. They didn’t do it on purpose, now, did they?

A Year of Scaling to a Multi-Hundred Person Engineering Organization at Pleo

My father once explained how organizations scale with the analogy of fabric. If you take a piece and stretch it, holes start to appear everywhere. In order to keep that fabric stable, you need to weave new thread into it.

It’s a beautiful analogy. And I hated it. All I could think about was how those new threads were frustrating middle management layers that created bloated bureaucratic organizations. And let’s not kid ourselves, that can happen.

Org development through experimentation

How to use simple experiments to improve how you organise and work

The three-step change process to loop your way steadily to massive improvements.

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

This article is an adapted excerpt from my book Work with Source.

Both startups and established initiatives need an approach to bring about change and development. The standard model of change taught at most business schools is to design a future state up-front and then roll out a top-down org change process that attempts to drag people along kicking and screaming until, hopefully, the destination is reached. If you’ve ever been through such a change initiative you will know how painful and ineffective they can be. Even if you finally get there, the carefully thought-out new design may not be so great in practice.

Tomorrow’s technology, yesterday’s insights

Picture by wackystuff/Flickr under cc-license by-sa

Sometimes what the tech world comes up with has already been tried and rejected and really doesn’t need to be resurrected — like the Taylorist view of the workplace. Sometimes the solutions have already been there for a long time.
You just need to take a look around. At your fellow humans.

In his recent book “The Formula”, Luke Dormehl describes how

Why You Should Do One Impossibly Hard Physical Task Every Year | Huckberry

Why You Should Do One Impossibly Hard Physical Task Every Year | Huckberry

A Thorough Team Guide to RFCs

Maximum Sensation by mounir fatmi, on display at the Brooklyn Museum

Early in my management days, I found myself in an unforeseen situation. A new and unexpected frontend framework was added to our early-stage startup stack from one week to another. We were not in production yet, so the thought of maintaining two utterly different parallel client-side stacks this early wasn’t a problem I was anticipating. Opinions about technical decisions replicate almost as fast as frontend frameworks, so as the news spread, so did the backchannel feelings.

The Difference Between Good and Great Engineers

You don’t design your engineering culture by writing blog posts or printing posters. It’s shaped by the people you hire, the things they do, and the traits you reward and celebrate.

Choose wisely, and deliberately. Know what you value, and why. It’s easy to form this list in hindsight, but for anyone growing an engineering team, I urge you to think upfront, spelling out what you value most, then fight to hire for, encourage, support and celebrate those traits.

The Alternative to Performance Reviews for Software Engineers

Learning and development reviews

Photo by Glenn Carstens-Peters on Unsplash

Table of Contents  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  

Introduction

With the increasing reliance on software in every aspect of our lives, using management techniques from traditional industries in software engineering teams has gained momentum.

One practice that has recently seen widespread adoption is using performance measurements. Despite the promises made by such methodologies, many leaders are still struggling in their quest to measure the performance of their engineering teams: at the beginning, the adoption of such systems seems to bring a performance improvement, but shortly after, it becomes clear these improvements don’t translate into increased customer value.

Getting a Job as an Engineering Executive

I started my first executive job search when I was 25.

Eventually, I got an offer to lead engineering at a startup with four engineers,

which I turned down to join Uber.

It wasn’t until a decade later that I joined Calm and started my first executive role.

If you start researching executive career paths, you’ll find

folks who nominally become engineering executives at 21 when they found a company,

If You Want to Get Better at Something, Ask Yourself These Two Questions

Mike Hewitt /Getty Images

It was the last race of the ski season. My son Daniel, 10 years old, was at the starting gate in his speed suit, helmet and goggles, waiting for the signal.

What Workaholism Might Be Hiding – The Atlantic

” is a column by Arthur Brooks, tackling questions of meaning and happiness. Click here to listen to his podcast series on all things happiness, How to Build a Happy Life*.*

Winston Churchill was many things: statesman, soldier, writer. He was one of the first world leaders to sound the alarm about the Nazi menace in the 1930s, and then captivated the global imagination as a leader against the Axis powers in World War II. While prime minister of the United Kingdom during the war, he kept a crushing schedule, often spending 18 hours a day at work. On top of this, he wrote book after book in office. By the end of his life, he had finished 43, filling 72 volumes.

The Only 3 Ways to be More Productive

Whenever you feel like you’re not getting enough done, you probably always turn to the same solution: working harder. Yet, you’ve probably heard the saying that you should “work smarter, not harder” which sounds great, but how do you actually work smarter?

Why Working Harder isn’t the Answer

The reason most people work harder is that it’s the most visible form of productivity.

The Truth About Git Metrics Tools

The Truth About Git Metrics Tools January 24, 2023

There’ve recently been a couple of interesting Twitter discussions about engineering metrics tools, namely whether people actually use them and the questionable metrics that they expose.

There are at least a couple dozen different vendors out there that currently provide this type of a solution. These products primarily provide analytics on top of tools like GitHub and Jira, and some support additional data sources.

Stop Obsessing Over Development Velocity, Focus on This Instead

An awful lot of effort is going these days into boosting product teams’ productivity: getting them to burn those story points faster, deliver the planned scope in every sprint and cycle, and generally ship more stuff, faster. The term “development velocity” is often thrown around by executives, but what they’re actually aiming for is upping launch throughput—apparently a matter of vital importance for the success of the company.

Organizational Boundary Problems: Too Many Cooks or Not Enough Kitchens?

Inside Noma, an open kitchen which supports exceptional teamwork. Image credit: City Foodsters, CC BY 2.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

If you’re lucky, you’ve worked in a job with respectful people who share information openly and habitually bring different perspectives together for big decisions (if you haven’t, yes these do exist!). I’ve been a part of several open work cultures, and it’s been good for me. Working where people are actively pulling towards transparency, inclusivity, and empowerment, on problems that matter, is hugely satisfying.

Do Users Write More Insecure Code with AI Assistants?

We gratefully acknowledge support from
the Simons Foundation and member institutions.

> cs > arXiv:2211.03622v2

quick links

• Login
• Help Pages
• About

Computer Science > Cryptography and Security

arXiv:2211.03622v2 (cs)

[Submitted on 7 Nov 2022 (v1), last revised 16 Dec 2022 (this version, v2)]

Authors:, Megha Srivastava, Deepak Kumar, Dan Boneh

Download PDF

Abstract: We conduct the first large-scale user study examining how users interact with

(more…)

The maze is in the mouse. What ails Google. And how it can turn… | by Praveen Seshadri | Feb, 2023 | Medium

I joined Google just before the pandemic when the company I had co-founded, AppSheet, was acquired by Google Cloud. The acquiring team and executives welcomed us and treated us well. We joined with great enthusiasm and commitment to integrate AppSheet into Google and make it a success. Yet, now at the expiry of my three year mandatory retention period, I have left Google understanding how a once-great company has slowly ceased to function.

Fixing “Too Much WIP”

“too much WIP” means too many things being worked on at the same time

WIP refers to “work-in-process”, that is how many things are being processed or worked on at the same time.

“Too much WIP” refers to having too many tasks / Stories / Initiatives / Bets being worked on at the same time. This applies at the individual, team, department, and company-level.

“too much WIP” is a problem because it makes things take longer

Calendar Triage for Startup Leaders

Many engineering leaders share a common problem: too many things to do, and not enough time to do them all. In my coaching practice I often work with my clients to optimize their calendars, and one of my primary tools for this process is a modified Eisenhower Matrix.

Photo by Claudio Schwarz on Unsplash

The Eisenhower Matrix

At some point in their career, most of my clients have encountered a 2 by 2 matrix, divided into Important / Not Important on one Axis, and Urgent / Not Urgent on the other. However, most of them haven’t heard its name: An Eisenhower Matrix. The name originates from a quote attributed to the former US President:

Jade Rubick – Uplevel your managers with Mini-M support groups

Today, I would like to share a management practice we developed at New Relic. It was one of the best things we did as an engineering organization. The practice is called “Mini-Ms”. I believe it’s as important a practice for managers as code reviews are for engineers.

This post is first of a series:

1. In this post, we look at how Mini-Ms work and what they are.
2. Next, we learn how to implement Mini-Ms.
3. Finally, we share a history of Mini-Ms, including where the name came from.

What is a Mini-M?

A Mini-M is a group of managers that meet weekly or biweekly. The meeting is a combination support group and working session. In each session, managers share challenges they face. The other participants offer support and help problem-solve.

DevEx Principles: Minimize Switching Contexts

Recently someone asked me what my principles are for DevEx. Over the past 15 years shipping products for Heroku, GitHub, and now Vercel, I’ve learned a lot about what developers need to succeed. Still, I’ve never documented the principles I use daily to build developer tools, so I’ve decided to write it all down.

1. Interruptions matter even when it’s your tools that are doing it.
2. Respect the craft. The bar is higher because you’re building products for people who build products.
3. Automate anything that can be automated: Automation is king. Any task that can be run in the background should.
4. Optimize for TTC (time to code): Just as artists need to see paint on canvas in order to keep creating, developers need to see code running in order to test, get feedback, and ship.
5. Be dependable: Be mindful of breaking changes. People’s services depend on your services.
6. Don’t bury the lede: Show me what is possible and why it matters. Don’t hide pricing, don’t use convoluted marketing language, and don’t hide the documentation.

I’ll talk about each principle in detail over the next five posts. Minimizing switching contexts is the first and perhaps the most important, and I consider all of them when designing and building any new developer-focused product.

My Role as a Founder CTO: Year Five

It’s hard to believe that five years have already gone by since RevenueCat’s inception. In a matter of weeks, RevenueCat will become the company where I have worked the longest in my career. As Jason Lemkin says, it’s important to continuously reinvent the company and oneself every five years. It’s required to carry on and stay relevant the following five.

I had no doubts my role was going to evolve again. It has every single year, leading me to start this series of posts. But the remarkable part this year has been the internal transformation of RevenueCat. As we enter 2023, the company is more mature than ever before, with well-established processes, cross-functional teams, and leaders in key areas. The company has become a well-oiled machine, allowing us to deliver quality software at a faster pace. However, reaching this point was not without its challenges and it took a lot of hard work to get here.

A Framework for Prioritizing Tech Debt

The Importance of Leverage

Having spent over a decade building tech startups, I’ve come across my fair share of tech debt: The gnarly Ember.js code no one wants to touch, the bespoke cloud infrastructure maintained entirely by hand, or the solitary Elixir service left behind by a long-gone former teammate.

While these may be painful today, at one point in the past they were likely important accelerants that pushed the product forward in a meaningful way. In fact, tech debt is arguably a necessary evil–if a growing company isn’t taking on some measure of leverage, then it’s likely not shipping as fast as it should be. However as a company begins to see traction, there will come an inflection point where it becomes important to start prioritizing tech debt.1