/Management

The Seniority Rollercoaster

- Gergely Orosz tl;dr: "I’m a senior engineer, and I received a below-senior offer at a larger tech company. The pay is better, but I feel it’s unfair I don’t have the senior title I’ve already earned. What can I do?" Gergely guides us through the reasons for down-leveling, how to handle it when switching jobs and how to get ahead as a manager.

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The Three Pillars Of A Positive Engineering Culture

- David Carboni tl;dr: A work culture that creates a strong positive environment of self-belief for is critical, starts with leadership, and forms the basis of the 3 pillars. (1) Autonomy so "people feel free to do good work because they want to." (2) Connection, as "we’re hard-wired for connection and belonging." (3) Mission, "when the chips are down, knowing that you’re in this together, for something greater than yourselves."

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Why We Don't Do Daily Stand-Ups At Supercede

- Jezen Thomas tl;dr: "Daily stand-ups are not only a waste of time and make software development more expensive, but they demoralise developers and make them want to change jobs." Setting aside the experience of doing so across ;multiple timezones, Jezen argues that "engineers align themselves." Especially if you hire good ones..." They read the discussions in pull requests, commit messages, chat, etc...

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Inflicting Help

- Ed Batista tl;dr: "Inflicting help" occurs when you fail to provide the type of help that's been requested of you e.g. you provide the right help but at the wrong time, you help "too much", or provide the wrong type of help altogether. "It's essential to understand and regulate the emotions that underlie our helping impulse." Ed recommends slowing down and asking whether if what "I'm doing is actually what's been requested."

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Create Capacity Rather Than Capture It

- Will Larson tl;dr: "It’s more effective to capture existing capacity than create new capacity" in a large company. The opposite is true in startup & growth companies. In large companies: "If you need more headcount, convince leadership to require every team to send a volunteer to work on your project. If you’re missing a leader, oblige one on a peer team to move to yours." Hiring is slow and restrictive.

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Writing For Distributed Teams

- Vicki Boykis tl;dr: Vicki only sent 11 emails last year. The reason is that Automattic - behind WordPress.com and Tumblr - use P2s for everything. These are effectively blog posts where you can tag co-workers and cross post to other P2s, Vicki shares an example. Despite the fact that the company still uses Slack, information isn't lost in the same way it is elsewhere.

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6 Principles For Building A World Class TPM Team

- Sophia Vicent tl;dr: TPM (Technical Program Manager) team at DoorDash drives complex, cross-functional engineering initiatives upheld by these principles. The TPM has a: (1) Strong leadership position in engineering. (2) Highly leveraged. (3) Empowered to fiercely prioritize the work they drive. (4) Consistently drives technical clarity. (5) Tackles difficult problems in a blameless culture. (6) Valued for its ability to bring order to chaos.

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The Local Minima Of Suckiness

- Vicki Boykis tl;dr: "No one becomes a good software engineer by themselves." Vicki believes that there are 3 things developers need in order to improve, each explained in detail: (1) The room to make mistakes. (2) Repeated exposure to best practices. (3) Understanding how to ask good questions, or learning how to learn.

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Run Code Faster Than The Speed Of Light

tl;dr: Nanos is a Linux binary-compatible unikernel that runs one and only one application in the cloud. Faster and safer than Linux.

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Engineering Manager Archetypes And Career Paths

- Charity Majors tl;dr: "If your heart is pulling you in one direction, by all means, follow it." Charity explores the following career paths: (1) The junior engineer who became an early manager. (2) The novice manager who wants to go back to engineering, six months in. (3) The manager who wants to go back to engineering, but only temporarily. (4) The manager who was forced into it and wants out... has wanted out for years, and 3 more.

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