5 Ways to Prioritize Your Engineers’ Time
tl;dr: Muts Inayama, VP of Product & Eng at Imgur, provides 5 top tips "to ensure engineers stay on track, understand their priorities, and remain motivated to create the best product possible." Promoted by Streamfeatured in #237
featured in #236
A Manager’s Guide to Holding Your Team Accountable
- Dave Bailey tl;dr: Holding people accountable feels uncomfortable so we can let it slip. Accountability and feedback are essential to high-functioning teams, and Dave provides a primer on both feedback and accountability, highlighting questions we can ask our team to ensure both are present.featured in #236
Amazon's Bezos Says Three Good Decisions a Day 'Enough' (Video)
tl;dr: As a senior exec you get to make a few decisions a day so getting 8 hours of sleep and organizing "high IQ" meetings earlier both help to make good a few decisions.featured in #236
Finding Collective Ownership of the Codebase
- Britton Broderick tl;dr: Software engineering is a social activity, not an individual activity. Enabling that social element is key and making sure that the team writes and owns code collectively, as opposed to one individual, is crucial. Britton showcases how and why this is true.featured in #235
Coachability: The Overlooked Factor In People Development
- Cate Huston tl;dr: "Coachability" has two axes on a matrix - receptiveness and actionability. Being both receptive and actionable is ideal but can come in an unhealthy form as a people pleaser. The healthier way to operate is when you know yourself, "when everything feels very clear" and feedback fits into your mental model.featured in #234
Maker to Manager - How We Support New Leaders
tl;dr: Skyscanner created a 6 month onboarding program for engineers to experience a management career path, based on three tenets - (1) Education of basic management concepts. (2) Experience of in line-management responsibility where the engineer will be responsible for developing and growing. (3) Exposure where the eng have a mentor to help with day to day issues.featured in #234
10 Admirable Attributes Of A Great Technical Lead
tl;dr: (1) Having an opinion yet not being opinionated on everything. (2) Filled with energy yet calm in all situations. (3) Disown their team’s successes and own their team’s issues, and seven more traits.featured in #234
How HashiCorp Makes Writing A Priority
- Rebecca Acree tl;dr: Remote work has made documentation essential and Kevin Fisher, chief staff at Hashicorp, provides this advice to managers: (1) Lead by example, larger companies should start with one team to see what works. (2) Make docs an expectation e.g. integrate writing into your interview process. (3) Establish a process defining what needs documentation i.e. a major change in a team or minor change affecting multiple teams.featured in #232
Nurturing Design In Your Software Engineering Culture
- Nick Tune tl;dr: Tactics to improve the "design mindset in your engineering culture," such as (1) the use of pair programming and mobbing because to vet every and debate small decisions. (2) "A good understanding of the business domains" so engineers and architects can create business-optimized designs, and more.featured in #232