/Management

How To Scale A Unicorn-Building Engineering Team (And Stay Sane)

- Gad Salner tl;dr: How can you expand all of your critical engineering domains at the same time? By enabling your "engineers to lead and own your group’s level-up." Gad walks us though a framework where a "task force" - two engineers and a manager from within the eng org - is assigned a domain e.g. monitoring, onboarding, testing. These task forces go through 6 step process outlined here to identify, predict and solve pain points that the org may hit during growth.

featured in #304

Emerging Architectures For Modern Data Infrastructure

- Matt Bornstein Jennifer Li Martin Casado tl;dr: "To help data teams stay on top of the changes happening in the industry, we’re publishing in this post an updated set of data infrastructure architectures. They show the current best-in-class stack across both analytic and operational systems, as gathered from numerous operators we spoke with over the last year."

featured in #304

On Holistic Secrets Management

tl;dr: If secrets sprawling uncontrollably across cloud secret managers and external platforms sounds familiar, then you need to redefine what managing secrets means at enterprise scale by taking a universal approach. Schedule a demo to learn more from our team. 

featured in #304

Bottleneck #02: Talent

- Tim Cochran Roni Smith tl;dr: Common tech debt bottlenecks by companies entering growth. The authors cover the common signs you are approaching a scaling bottleneck i.e. frustration from employees, stretching to hit deadlines, dependency on people and more. And strategies on how to get out of the bottleneck i.e. Use your technology and innovation as a hiring differentiator, hire more T-shaped technologists than specialists, utilize non-senior developers, and more. 

featured in #304

Twin Anxieties Of The Engineer / Manager Pendulum

- Charity Majors tl;dr: Leaving management for an IC role creates anxiety that you may not be able to return to management later on. Charity doesn't think so. If you’re a good manager, you'll improve as an IC and will "spend the rest of your career fending off management opportunities." Moving back to IC also creates anxiety around performing again as an engineer. "After 2 or 3 years of management, it’s pretty easy to go back to engineering. After five years, it gets progressively harder. But it can be done."

featured in #303

How To Criticize Coworkers

tl;dr: Principles of good feedback: (1) Praise in public, criticize in private. (2) Use “I” language instead of “you” language. (3) Be as specific as possible using SBI (situation-behavior-impact). (3) Be on the same side. (4) Stop if you’re too worked up. (5) Use a tight feedback loop i.e give at least 2 examples.

featured in #303

Embrace Developer Autonomy: How Data Can Help You Stop Micromanaging Your Team

- Hillary Nussbaum tl;dr: Engineering Managers need visibility into what their team is working on, but it's not productive to tap on shoulders or turn every meeting into a status update. Here's how you can get the visibility you need from data that already exists in your engineering workflow, so you can dedicate your 1 on 1s, standups, and check-ins to higher-value interactions, whether that’s team-building, problem-solving, innovation, or professional development.

featured in #303

Staff Engineering At Carta

- Dan Fike tl;dr: There are 4 distinct archetype for the staff engineer role: (1) Tech lead: working on roadmapping, planning, and "glue work." (2) Architect: designing systems and acting as a source of wisdom for others. (3) Solver: stabilizing and delegating. (4) Right hand: "furthering the agenda of management and business partners." 

featured in #303

5 Coding Interview Questions I Hate

- Vladimir Klepov tl;dr: Questions include: (1) What happens if you build a circular prototype chain? (2) How to migrate from webpack 3 to webpack 5? (3) What’s the fastest way to convert a string to number? And more.

featured in #303

Migrations Done Well

- Gergely Orosz tl;dr: "If you do some groundwork before starting the migration, you’ll reduce risk, gain confidence and understand the scope of the migration better." Gergely breaks the migration process into the following steps: (1) Preparation for migrations. (2) Pre-migration steps, such as monitoring and validation. (3) The migration itself, covering downtime, strategies & toolset. (4) After the migration. (5) The migration long-tail.

featured in #302