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 …

6 min read ·

Articles

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

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.

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.

Things I Learned the Hard Way Bryan Cantrill Oxide Computer Company

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

October 2023

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

I think I am

The Hyperfocused Entrepreneur

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, …

“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 …

Thomas Barwick/Getty Images

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 …

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 …

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

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

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

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.

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.]

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?

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 …

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

“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 …

7 min read ·

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 …

A few thoughts I have about writing:

What a deal!

Posted October 8, 2011

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 …

(Credit: Wired magazine. )

After startups raise money, their next biggest problem becomes

21 July 2023 · 25,673 views

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

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

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 …

Screenshots via the author

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.

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 …

Westend61/Getty Images

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

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.

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

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

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.

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, …

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.

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

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

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

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.

Photo by Glenn Carstens-Peters on Unsplash

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

Mike Hewitt /Getty Images

” 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*.*

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 …

The Truth About Git Metrics Tools January 24, 2023

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 …

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

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

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 …

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

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

3 February 2023 | by Todd Wenning, CFA

I’ve stopped wearing merino base layers. The change wasn’t deliberate, sudden, or driven by a deep concern for the wellbeing of rare sheep. Instead, it happened naturally over time, because the latest generation of synthetic next-to-skins …

For the last handful of years I’ve been too busy to do a lot of things. Too

I like to be immersed in useful information, and often dreamed of ways to have it literally floating above me so that I could glance up and see something new and interesting.

I spoke with someone recently who didn’t know where to start with their first hire in Developer Relations. As folks who know me appreciate, I think of the Developer Relations organization as the following distinct functional areas:

Teams naturally start to incur management debt as they grow and become more complex, just as codebases incur tech debt. The combined weight of past decisions creates a web of precedents and exceptions that can cause problems of varying size …

We’ve all been through reorgs before. When you’re an individual contributor, they tend to be mysterious, often frustrating management exercises. Your boss changes suddenly, or your team is dissolved into other teams, or you’re moved into an …

I’ve been writing about how to use systems thinking in software engineering management. I want to continue addressing a practical point: how to make change happen as an Engineering Manager (EM).

Too many companies bet on having a cut-throat, high-pressure, take-no-prisoners culture to drive their financial success.

Over the last few months I’ve worked with teams to help them adapt Shape Up to their specific context. Talking to a wider variety of teams has been eye-opening. It’s helped me discover many hidden factors that were present at Basecamp when …

Last week I was on a panel addressing the topic of burnout. It’s a topic that pops up with some frequency, yet the misconception that burnout is a personal problem seems to persist.

Strategic leadership can often sound abstract and hard to put into words. Not only that, the majority of the CTOs, VPs and engineering leaders I work with are so busy running from meeting to meeting, handling team issues or trying to scale, …

Pros of working directly for CEO:

“The very business of getting an organisation made up of individuals, no matter how disciplined, to pursue a collective goal produces friction just as surely as applying the brakes of a car.”

The concept of “healthy teams” is something I stole from the Engineering Org at Pluralsight before the Vista acquisition. Most people attribute healthy teams to buzzwords like “collaboration” or “psychological safety.” The people who had …

Guiding principle in effective product development culture.

When work is coming at you from all directions, it’s easy to push even the simplest tasks aside. You may find yourself repeatedly looking at the same paperwork or email and promising to get to it later.

👋 Hi, this is Gergely with a bonus, free issue of the Pragmatic Engineer Newsletter. We cover one out of five topics in today’s subscriber-only The Scoop issue. Subscribe to get this newsletter every week 👇

Hiring folks in leadership roles is very challenging. One difficulty is that almost every candidate who gets to that level is generally good at communication, charismatic in their demeanor, and well trained to say the right things to get …

Picture this: you just landed the Product Management (PM) job of your dreams. On day one, you meet your partner-in-crime Engineering Manager (EM) at your new gig. Before you know it, you’ve been assigned your first problem to solve. Now, …

We’ve seen sharp focus pulled onto the growth of plugins on WordPress.org in the last couple of weeks. For many years, it’s been possible to see a plugin’s active install growth rate on the Plugin Repository.

Every developer knows the satisfaction that comes from building a software system. Type in a stream of characters and somehow you’ve built something that appears magical to others. This is the Builder’s dream. The thrill about learning …

Career advice as a genre is almost fatally flawed. With 160 million American workers across thousands of occupations in hundreds of industries, saying anything that is of use to all of them is practically impossible. The most common counsel …

The Connectivity Standards Alliance has certified and released the first version of the Matter smart home interoperability protocol Tuesday and I couldn’t be happier. This means that member companies can now put their devices through the …

How to plan? How hard could it be? 4k words on sunny October afternoon for people in tech observing the Season’s Traditional Annual Planning Process, inspired by a recent interview question (and 25 years of variously painful planning …

Crowded Boat II, Robert Goodnough

The Dirty Work Theory: The lamentable work that many people avoid are great places to look for high impact, low hanging fruit.

From a software developer’s perspective, the complexity of a production system makes it abstract and distant, so we tend to shut it out and focus on the immediate work of writing code.

If you’ve ever finished a busy week of work wondering what you’ve accomplished, you’re not alone.

In mathematical queueing theory, Little’s result, theorem, lemma, law, or formula is a theorem by John Little which states that the long-term average number L of customers in a stationary system is equal to the long-term average effective …