tl;dr:"If you want to coach a team, you gotta know the game." Charity wouldn't recommend becoming an EM without 5-7 years engineering experience. You don't have to be the best engineer to be a great manager. The key is to have both social and technical skills.
tl;dr:"The time elapsed between writing and shipping is the room temp petri dish where pathological symptoms breed." Focus relentlessly on the length of time between when a line of code is written and deployed to production. Fixate on shrinking this interval as it forces us to do the right things - write small diffs, review code quickly, etc.
tl;dr:"It’s nigh impossible to have a high-performing team with a long lead time, and becomes drastically easier with a dramatically shorter lead time." Merging to deployed should be under 15 minutes. Charity outlines issues why tests could be slow.
tl;dr:Charity is asked for advice by an engineer who has "accidentally" becomes the most senior on a team. Her advice is to leave. A "real senior engineer" has managed 2-3 teams, stacks, languages over a 5-8 year period.
tl;dr:Charity often talks to engineers who feel stuck in their role and offers insights in how to approach the issue - "generalists level up faster than specialists," it's easier to level up quickly at fast-growing companies, and more.
tl;dr:Although hierarchy is deeply established in our culture, management shouldn't be seen as a promotion - "we should invert the hierarchy and embrace management as a service role, a support position." Charity shares a roadmap to change company culture.
tl;dr:"People make career moves for a complex mix of altruism and self-interest." Charity outlines main motivations to become managers concluding that management is "a role of service to others not dominance over others; staffed by people who genuinely take joy in that people side of sociotechnical problem solving."
tl;dr:Charity doesn't believe so - metric can be gamed, preferring a combination of (1) impact focused, outcome-based management (2) team level health metrics (3) engineering ladder and regular lightweight reviews (4) managers who are well calibrated across the org. Teams should also use the 4 DORA metrics.
tl;dr:In the early stages of Charity's business when the founding team was still establishing the core business, bringing remote workers into brainstorming sessions didn't work. She learnt that remote workers require more structure & clear remits, which can only be provided once a business has a degree of focus.
tl;dr:Engineering productivity is hampered by outside management requesting features, shifting priorities, etc... SLOs are the "abstraction layer" for those trying to interact or collaborate with your team. Charity runs through how this works.