tl;dr:(1) Think about what you need engineering managers to do. (2) Refine those tasks into four or five key skills for the role. (3) Create an interview to evaluate each skill. (4) Create a rubric to score each of those interviews. (5) Train the interviewing team on the new rubric. (6) Remove interviewers from the loop if they refuse to use the rubric.
tl;dr:Two pieces of advice if you feel burnt out: (1) Avoid making career decisions while in a bad mental place - take a two week vacation. (2) Great careers are not linear but often have a number of lulls. When you’re high energy, these lulls are opportunities to learn and accelerate your trajectory. When you are low energy, they are opportunities to rest.
tl;dr:Infrastructure teams have 2 modes of operation: (1) A foundation mode where tasks are mandatory e.g. compliance, security, scaling a popular product. (2) Innovation mode where teams have the flexibility in prioritizing and solving problems - teams have less experience here so Will guides us through the process of problem discovery, prioritization and validation.
tl;dr:A strong team concept is where "ownership, work, and accountability are generally assigned to teams." In a weak team, work is assigned to individuals and is driven through "interpersonal connections rather than process." Will reflects on both, and how our environment is geared towards strong teams.
tl;dr:Will's tips on managing staff-plus engineers include: (1) sponsor and support more than direct.(2) Help redefine what success. A staff engineer’s "flywheel of feedback" is less immediate and that should be managed accordingly. (3) Give frequent feedback and explain why.
tl;dr:Title gives a sense of seniority amongst peers, a seat at the table of higher engineering discussions, a bump in compensation at larger companies and potential access to interesting work. Pursuing title alone can be counter-productive, and "focusing on developing your approach and skills will be far more impactful."
tl;dr:Will runs us through his "toolkit" to maintain technical quality, including prioritizing leverage points, establishing a technical quality team, and more. Underlying any approach is the philosophy to "start with something small, and iterate on it until it works."
tl;dr:"One of the most effective ways to get luckier is to be more visible within your organization." Will outlines ways to create internal and external visibility for yourself.
tl;dr:At Calm's monthly all-hands, Will was motivated to "boil each project down to a single well-formed metric that told the story: a target, a baseline, a trend and a timeframe."
tl;dr:Current best practices around D&I aren't necessarily impactful. Will believes the following result in genuine progress (1) Don’t tokenize others (2) Don’t center yourself (3) Don’t be comfortable, and focus on what actually works.