/Career Advice

The Pleasure Of Pattern

- Kent Beck tl;dr: For over 20 years, Kent has asked why are so many programmers musicians? He’s finally able to answer this: “talent for music and programming occur together because accomplishment in each relies on enjoying seeing patterns. See a pattern, feel good, look for more patterns.” He believes his chaotic early life left him with a brain wired to crave moments of order... and the innate ability to see patterns led him to activities where he got frequent mental rewards, and this is what drives his desire to program. 

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The Compounding Seeds Of Creativity

- David Heinemeier Hansson tl;dr: “Early on in my career, I learned a very important lesson about creativity: It can’t be saved for later. Creativity is perishable, just like inspiration. It has to be discharged regularly or it will spoil. And if you let enough of it go to waste, eventually your talents will sour and shrivel with it.” David discusses how the best folks are able to find creativity in the mundane parts of their jobs, and that is what separates them.

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Mastering Programming

- Kent Beck tl;dr: “From years of watching master programmers, I have observed certain common patterns in their workflows. From years of coaching skilled journeyman programmers, I have observed the absence of those patterns. I have seen what a difference introducing the patterns can make. Here are ways effective programmers get the most out of their precious 3e9 seconds on the planet. The theme here is scaling your brain.” 

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Speak In Stories

- Andrew Bosworth tl;dr: Andrew, CTO at Meta, discusses the importance of storytelling at work: “Too often we present our work as a series of facts. The sad truth is that most humans are bad at remembering facts. When our audience is in a related conversation days later the data we shared isn’t likely to be top of mind anymore. Our impact remains localized. But humans are amazing at remembering stories. We are suckers for anything with narrative context, dramatic tension, and a satisfying or poignant resolution.” 

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Should You Stay Technical As An Engineering Manager?

- Nicola Ballotta tl;dr: Dedicating 20% of weekly time to technical activities to stay technical is a good balance. Suggested activities to stay technical are: (1) Joining technical meetings to stay up-to-date and engaged with the team. (2) Contributing to documentation to solidify understanding. (3) Building internal tools to maintain coding skills and create resources. (4) Presenting team projects to understand and simplify technical concepts. (5) Participating in code reviews to stay connected with the codebase. (6) Continuous learning through tech talks, conferences, online courses.

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Lessons Learned

tl;dr: “You learn a lot during thirty years. I tried to write about most of it in this blog... but some things are smaller and just don’t fit. Each one of these is rooted in at least one epic failure: (1) Always clean up right after a release. Everyone is tired, and cleanup work is boring. If you do not clean up then, you will never clean up and the mess will get worse, far worse. (2) Do the right thing when you start. Only take more shortcuts the closer you are to the deadline. If you take a shortcut, note it, and clean it up right away after the release.” And more. 

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Becoming an Engineering Manager - Is It For You?

- Anton Zaides tl;dr: Anton provides us with a short quiz where you generate a score to determine if management is a good fit for you, with the following questions: (1) Do you like to code? (2) How do you deal with focus changes? (3) How do you deal with focus changes? (4) How do you deal with focus changes? (5) Can you be decisive and stand your ground?

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Etsy Engineering Career Ladder

tl;dr: How core competencies map against engineering levels (beginner to expert) within Etsy’s engineering org. Competencies are: (1) Delivery e.g. scoping and prioritization, testing and monitoring, shipping. (2) Domain Expertise e.g. language, tools, business and product sense. (3) Problem Solving e.g. architecture & design patterns, critical thinking. (4) Communication e.g. collaboration, relationship-building. (5) Leadership e.g. accountability, responsibility, mentorship.

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Navigating Ambiguity

- Will Larson tl;dr: “Navigating deeply ambiguous problems is the rarest skill in engineers, and doing it well is a rarity. It’s sufficiently rare that many executives can’t do it well either, although I do believe that all long-term successful executives find at least one toolkit for these kinds of problems.” Will shares his playbook and approach here. 

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The “Errors” That Mean You’re Doing It Right

- Jason Cohen tl;dr: The following “errors” are the natural by-product of good decisions and a necessary side-effect of success, and celebrated as such. The first 5 are: (1) Re-adding features/bugs you removed from the backlog. (2) Pivoting a strategy just after creating it. (3) Refactoring infrastructure after growing 10x. (4) Adding words because messaging was too terse. (5) Adding back features you removed. 

featured in #482