/Management

Hiring vs Nurturing Managers

- Joao Alves tl;dr: Joao establishes a "golden ratio" to craft an engineering management team: 2/3 hired, 1/3 nurtured. This is to get a team that could "get my back and, at the same time, help the rest of the crew navigate their new roles" also creating internal opportunities without forcing many great individual contributors to become a manager.

featured in #231

Focus On Your First 10 Systems, Not Just Your First 10 Hires — This Chief Of Staff Shares His Playbook

tl;dr: A discussion with Hashicorp's Chief of Staff, Kevin Fisher, reveals that early systems in a company's life set explicit norms - e.g. How do decisions get made? How are meetings structured? These are easy to build when the company is small, but very hard to change as the company scales. Kevin runs through guiding principles to establish these systems.

featured in #230

Clarity Is An Underrated Skill

- Tom Gamon tl;dr: When talking about code, you'll generally refer to hundreds of lines of code so clarity is key. Some tips: (1) make the implicit explicit - avoid words like "clearly" and "obviously", (2) Be succinct, (3) Avoid ambiguous pronouns.

featured in #230

The Art Of Self-organizing Engineering Teams

- Tom Sommer tl;dr: "Purpose, mastery, and autonomy are helpful concepts to enable self-organization. They allow us to guide and create alignment, set up effective processes and workflows, and provide the ability to adjust and change as needed." Tom outlines each in this post.

featured in #229

We Need To Talk About Your Q3 Roadmap

- Lara Hogan tl;dr: People are "exhausted and depressed" from the pandemic, police violence, hate crimes. Burn out amongst employees is frequent. Lara outlines how adjusting your upcoming roadmap and leave policies can help.

featured in #228

Forget Multi-Tasking. It's Context-Switching That Matters

- Saverio Morpurgo tl;dr: How do you juggle multiple projects simultaneously and (almost) never miss something? Usually that’s defined as multitasking, but it’s actually context-switching that’s the key. And they’re very different things.

featured in #228

Engineering Manager Resources

- Ryan Burgess tl;dr: A list of engineering manager resource links including books, podcasts, articles and more.

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Being A Manager In Terrible Times

- Lara Hogan tl;dr: There are two primary ways we can support direct reports: proactively, by creating a supportive and safe environment, and reactively, responding to individual crises. Lara outlines both.

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How To Build Organizational Resilience

- Ryn Daniels tl;dr: An organization needs 3 things to be resilient (1) Learning skills to develop a body of shared knowledge to prevent wasted efforts of addressing the same problems. (2) Tools, processes and psychological safety to communicate effectively. (3) Slack for engineers to be able to perform both proactive and reactive work.

featured in #227

Questions To Ask When Choosing A Programming Language

- Shekhar Gulati tl;dr: Shekhar outlines an approach using a decision making matrix and prompting key variables of what's valuable for the organization, such as productivity, suitability for architecture and efficiency.

featured in #226