Stop Apologizing For Reasonable Business Decisions
- Wes Kao tl;dr: “As a leader, the one thing you are expected to do is make hard decisions. Unfortunately, most of us are wired to avoid conflict. So when it comes time to communicating these decisions, many leaders subconsciously look for shortcuts that allow us to get this over with as soon as possible. One of these shortcuts is defaulting to apologizing to smooth things over, while telling yourself the story that you’re being an empathetic, vulnerable leader.” Wes shares how this is a bigger deal this decays relationships with your team.featured in #588
Looking Under the Lamppost (On Problem-Solving)
- Ed Batista tl;dr: Ed explores how we often avoid solving difficult but necessary problems in favor of easier, more comfortable ones. It argues that while this is understandable, true growth and meaningful solutions require the courage to venture into uncertainty.featured in #588
Measuring Programmer Influence, Kinda Sorta
- Kent Beck tl;dr: “Can we use data to figure out who among a large team contributes most? No, if what we are looking for is a reliable, definitive answer. Data, however, may give us hints of pockets of certain kinds of impact resulting from certain kinds of behavior.”featured in #587
This 90-Day Plan Turns Engineering Leaders Back Into Frontline Developers
- David Loftesness tl;dr: David Loftesness - engineering leader at Amazon, Twitter and Eero - wants to remind managers itching to get back to the technical trenches that this option is on the table — and it’s not a step backward. But there will be organizational, communication, and even psychological hurdles ahead, from navigating resistance from your manager to dusting off the cobwebs on your coding skills, especially with how rapidly the tech landscape is changing lately.featured in #587
featured in #586
Is Engineering Strategy Useful?
- Will Larson tl;dr: “This chapter starts by exploring something I believe quite strongly: there’s always an engineering strategy, even if there’s nothing written down. From there, we’ll discuss why strategy, especially written strategy, is such a valuable opportunity for organizations that take it seriously.”featured in #586
This Is How You're Eroding Accountability
tl;dr: “Most management teams aren’t dumb and do their best to establish strong accountability cultures. But we wanted to share a few common ways that smart people screw up accountability on their teams, often despite the best of intentions – and what to do about them.”featured in #586
featured in #585
Distributed Systems And Organization Design
- Ted Neward tl;dr: Engineers (and their managers) have spent much of the last forty years learning the various repercussions and implications of distributed systems. As an engineering manager, I've discovered that there is a remarkable similarity between distributed systems design and engineering organization design.featured in #585
"We're A Product Engineering Company!" - Engineering Strategy At Calm
- Will Larson tl;dr: “Like almost all startups, the engineering team was scattered when I joined. Was our most important work creating more scalable infrastructure? Was our greatest risk the failure to adopt leading programming languages? How did we rescue the stuck service decomposition initiative? This strategy is where the engineering team and I aligned after numerous rounds of iteration, debate, and inevitably some disagreement. As a strategy, it’s both basic and also unambiguous about what we valued, and I believe it’s a reasonably good starting point for any low scalability-complexity consumer product.”featured in #584