/Management

Manage Your Priorities And Energy

- Will Larson tl;dr: Will reflect on his shift from a 'company, team, self' framework to an eventual ‘quid pro quo' approach during his management tenure at Uber. His ‘quid pro quo' approach is: (1) Generally, prioritize company and team priorities over your own. (2) If you are getting de-energized, artificially prioritize some energizing work. Increase the quantity until equilibrium is restored. (3) If the long-term balance between energy and proper priorities can’t be balanced for more than a year, stop everything else and work on solving this issue e.g. change your role or quit. Will emphasizes the importance of remaining flexible and curious.

featured in #559

Build vs Buy: A Guide For Notification Systems

- Sam Seely tl;dr: A complete guide to evaluating a build vs. buy decision for products transactional notification system. This piece covers the challenges faced by teams evaluating whether to build or buy a notification system, what notification systems look like at scale and the requirements they share, how to use a framework to assess any build vs buy decision, how to apply that framework against the build decision for a notification system.

featured in #559

The Impact of Generative AI on Software Developer Performance

tl;dr: BlueOptima's study of 200,000+ enterprise developers uncovered surprising insights on the reality of Generative AI: (1) Only 12% of developers commit GenAI code without modification, suggesting limited real-world integration. (2) Modest productivity gains of only 4%, indicating marketing claims are premature. (3) A decline in quality with high AI usage.

featured in #559

The Senior Shortcut

- Camille Fournier tl;dr: “Many have predicted the death of the “junior engineer” thanks to AI; after all, if AI can do all of the simple tasks, we don’t need to hire people who are only capable of handling those tasks anymore. And indeed, I was at a dinner of director+-level engineering leaders recently where many said they had turned all of their hiring to solely focus on “senior engineers” in lieu of anyone else. Anyone who has thought about this for a moment sees the obvious problems. How do people ever become “senior engineers” if they don’t start out as junior ones?” Camille explores this paradox. 

featured in #559

The Senior Shortcut

- Camille Fournier tl;dr: “Many have predicted the death of the “junior engineer” thanks to AI; after all, if AI can do all of the simple tasks, we don’t need to hire people who are only capable of handling those tasks anymore. And indeed, I was at a dinner of director+-level engineering leaders recently where many said they had turned all of their hiring to solely focus on “senior engineers” in lieu of anyone else. Anyone who has thought about this for a moment sees the obvious problems. How do people ever become “senior engineers” if they don’t start out as junior ones?” Camille explores this paradox. 

featured in #558

Are You Successful?

- Paulo André tl;dr: “It's a long story but I recently started a CTO role and it made me reflect again on what is success for me in a role like this: (1) Results. (2) How those results are achieved. (3) How you make people feel.” While most care about the results, the best way to achieve them in a way that endures is by focusing on the list above in reverse: If people feel good about being in the team, about working with you and others, about their learning, they'll excel at doing their part in implementing systems that deliver results and results will be sustainably achieved.

featured in #558

Leading vs Lagging Indicators

- Rasmus Makwarth tl;dr: “Focusing on outcomes over outputs is a great framework to ensure that product teams think about delivering value, not just features. If you can’t tie a business outcome to a feature, you may want to reconsider its priority.” Rasmus discusses six leading indicators product teams should be tracking besides technical indicators. 

featured in #558

How To Regain Control Of A Meeting

- Wes Kao tl;dr: “For those of us with a collaborative leadership style, it’s important to have scripts you can realistically picture yourself saying.” Wes’ underlying rule is by mentioning the cost of going on a tangent, you remind them that the tangent is not free. She shares three different scripts to regain control of a meeting.

featured in #557

Status Games

- Phil Booth tl;dr: “Because of all that evolutionary pressure, there are many little cues and behaviours embedded in our personalities, which help to make society work. The way we stand or sit, the way we speak, the direction we choose to look, what we do with our hands; these are all ways in which we project our status. Every interaction between people is filled with these little status transactions and most of the time we don't even realise it.” Phil discusses how this impacts engineering orgs and how to manage accordingly. 

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7 Questions I Get Asked Frequently As An EM

- Nitin Dhar tl;dr: Nitin provides example answers to each of the following: (1) What is the KTLO cost for the team? (2) What is the impact of project X? (3) When will project X be live to customers? (4) What's the overall impact of your team? (5) How much tech debt do you have? (6) What's the team's mean time to recovery (MTTR) from incidents? (7) How much churn (throwaway work) have you seen in recent sprints?

featured in #557