/Management

The Ultimate Guide to Running Executive Meetings - 25 Tips from Top Startup Leaders

tl;dr: "Tons of tactical suggestions for sidestepping common executive meeting potholes — from questions to ask yourself as you’re first designing the meeting, specific frameworks for deciding what makes it on the agenda, to tips for sharing the findings across the entire org."

featured in #262


How To Find Engineering Leadership Roles

- Will Larson tl;dr: Senior leadership roles are often unposted and delegated to exec firms. Will outlines several ways to find such roles: (1) Through peers. (2) Exec recruiters through your network. (3) Crowd-sourced searches, such as small mailing lists. (4) Twitter.

featured in #262


The Pragmatic Engineer Test: 12 Questions On Engineering Culture

- Gergely Orosz tl;dr: "12 questions to get a sense of what a tech company is like to work at, based on things most job postings do not mention:" (1) Are code reviews and testing both part of the everyday development process? (2) Do you follow an internal open-source model, where any engineer can access and contribute to most other codebases - with appropriate code ownership in place?

featured in #261


State Of Internal Tools 2021

- Kevin Garcia tl;dr: Developers spend ~40% of their time on software to help their business run. We surveyed 650 developers to find out why. Our report covers 1) which companies spend the most time, 2) what developers are building, and 3) how they are measuring success.

featured in #260


My Team Is Going In Circles, Help!

- Lara Hogan tl;dr: Assuming that outcomes are documented, clear, measurable and visible to all, lead the team through an exercise to generate a responsibilities document together. Lara illustrates this here. You're listing roles in the team and their responsibilities. If the team continues to feel stuck, coaching them using "truly curious open questions," while drafting a list of what folks need. 

featured in #260


The Value Of In-house Expertise

- Dan Luu tl;dr: "Twitter has a kernel team!?" Everyone is surprised to learn this but, as Dan explains: "a company Twitter's size is going to regularly run into kernel issues... without a kernel team or the equivalent, the company will muddle through the issues, running into unnecessary problems as well as taking an unnecessarily long time to mitigate incidents."

featured in #260


How New Managers Fail Individual Contributors

- Camille Fournier tl;dr: (1) Doing all technical design work yourself. (2) Doing all the project management yourself. (3) Neglecting to give feedback on non-technical issues. (4) "Hoarding information" i.e. not providing business context to your team or distilling and communicating it effectively. (5) Focusing too much on your personal output and not the team's output.

featured in #259


The Developer's Guide to Directory Sync / SCIM

tl;dr: SCIM is a popular protocol for user lifecycle management - i.e. making sure that users are added and removed from an app with the right permissions. Should you do just-in-time provisioning or sync to a directory. Let's dig into the details.

featured in #259


Responsible Tech Playbook

tl;dr: "We have a duty to ensure our systems don’t degrade our society. But in the tumult of so many software projects, it can be difficult to step back and understand the implications of our work." This is a catalog of techniques that can be used to address this problem.

featured in #259


What I Learnt Becoming A Tech Lead

- Tom Gamon tl;dr: (1) Don’t write code on the critical path i.e. where you're the blocker to deploy. (2) Defending your calendar. (3) It’s not necessary to be in every conversation. (4) You don’t have to be the most experienced engineer in the team, and more.

featured in #259