/Management

Stop Asking Your Developers The Three Standup Questions

- James McGill tl;dr: Code Climate VP of Engineering, James McGill, thinks you should stop asking your team the three classic standup questions. In this two-post series, he 1) demonstrates how you can answer those questions with engineering data and 2) proposes three new, more impactful questions to ask instead.

featured in #302

Organizing And Scaling An Effective Data Team

- Rob Dearborn tl;dr: The scope of a data team should include: (1) Ensuring focus on the right hierarchy of input & output metrics. (2) Steering the roadmap through insightful analysis & research. (3) Driving optimization through experimentation and ML. (4) Developing and maintaining data infrastructure. Rob outlines how the data team should evolve, and it's function within a startup, as it grows.

featured in #302

Why Don't You Use...

- Brendan Gregg tl;dr: "Working for a famous tech company, I get asked a lot "Why don't you use technology X?" X may be an application, programming language, operating system, hypervisor, processor, or tool." Brendan provides a list of common reasons.

featured in #302

Power Struggles Among Nice People

- Ed Batista tl;dr: People are driven by 3 distinct needs: a need for achievement, need for power and need for affiliation, and Ed discusses how that plays into power dynamics at companies. "Effective leaders consistently get out of their comfort zone to experiment with new behaviors, especially when such efforts feel awkward or inauthentic." Something Ed encourages us to try.

featured in #301

Levels Of Technical Leadership

- Raphael Poss tl;dr: Raphael discusses "why and how a tech company can offer a career path to its engineering technical leaders," notably the different tracks for “deep ICs” versus “broad ICs.” Raphael acknowledges 2 "pressure points" within a growing org: (1) The need to grow increasingly skilled technical leaders. (2) An increasing misalignment between leadership responsibilities and existing responsibilities for anyone on the IC track.

featured in #301

Compose Chat Messaging Tutorial

tl;dr: Experience deeply customizable UI components powered by the Jetpack Compose framework, with built-in support for theming, right-to-left support, custom reactions, attachments, data formatting, and many more awesome features!

featured in #301

How To Do Less

- Alex Turek tl;dr: When your reports are complaining that nobody can do code reviews or seem increasingly stressed in standups, these are signs that your team may be doing too much. "You’re stuck in a trap, and thrashing won’t get you out. You can escape by stopping your current approach, and doing something new. You’re going to deliberately overshoot, cutting down WIP, and then maintaining a healthy amount going forward."

featured in #301

Hard To Work With

- Will Larson tl;dr: "I’ve seen a staggering number of folks fail in an organization primarily because they want to hold others to a higher standard than their organization’s management is willing to enforce." When this issue is escalated, "the manager transforms the performance issue into a relationship issue." Will discusses his approach to resolve the issue.

featured in #300

5 Ways To Move Fast, Ship Customer Value, And Promote Developer Autonomy

- Chris Bell tl;dr: Knock’s co-founder and CTO Chris Bell outlines the five principles they’ve used at Knock to ship value to customers every week and to create a culture of autonomy and ownership.

featured in #300

Executive Onboarding: Shishir's Tips and Best Practices

- Shishir Mehrotra tl;dr: CEO of Coda provides 3 rules for execs in the first 8 weeks of a new role: (1) The most important instinct to resist as a new exec is to "prove yourself fast." Your primary job is to learn and mimic how things were operating before. (2) Fill your time with learning in a methodical, prioritized way outlining areas you want to focus on learn. (3) Take on a single starter project that is not a critical path.

featured in #299