/Career Advice

Speak In Stories

- Andrew Bosworth tl;dr: Andrew, CTO at Meta, discusses the importance of storytelling at work: “Too often we present our work as a series of facts. The sad truth is that most humans are bad at remembering facts. When our audience is in a related conversation days later the data we shared isn’t likely to be top of mind anymore. Our impact remains localized. But humans are amazing at remembering stories. We are suckers for anything with narrative context, dramatic tension, and a satisfying or poignant resolution.” 

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Should You Stay Technical As An Engineering Manager?

- Nicola Ballotta tl;dr: Dedicating 20% of weekly time to technical activities to stay technical is a good balance. Suggested activities to stay technical are: (1) Joining technical meetings to stay up-to-date and engaged with the team. (2) Contributing to documentation to solidify understanding. (3) Building internal tools to maintain coding skills and create resources. (4) Presenting team projects to understand and simplify technical concepts. (5) Participating in code reviews to stay connected with the codebase. (6) Continuous learning through tech talks, conferences, online courses.

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Lessons Learned

tl;dr: “You learn a lot during thirty years. I tried to write about most of it in this blog... but some things are smaller and just don’t fit. Each one of these is rooted in at least one epic failure: (1) Always clean up right after a release. Everyone is tired, and cleanup work is boring. If you do not clean up then, you will never clean up and the mess will get worse, far worse. (2) Do the right thing when you start. Only take more shortcuts the closer you are to the deadline. If you take a shortcut, note it, and clean it up right away after the release.” And more. 

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Becoming an Engineering Manager - Is It For You?

- Anton Zaides tl;dr: Anton provides us with a short quiz where you generate a score to determine if management is a good fit for you, with the following questions: (1) Do you like to code? (2) How do you deal with focus changes? (3) How do you deal with focus changes? (4) How do you deal with focus changes? (5) Can you be decisive and stand your ground?

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Etsy Engineering Career Ladder

tl;dr: How core competencies map against engineering levels (beginner to expert) within Etsy’s engineering org. Competencies are: (1) Delivery e.g. scoping and prioritization, testing and monitoring, shipping. (2) Domain Expertise e.g. language, tools, business and product sense. (3) Problem Solving e.g. architecture & design patterns, critical thinking. (4) Communication e.g. collaboration, relationship-building. (5) Leadership e.g. accountability, responsibility, mentorship.

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Navigating Ambiguity

- Will Larson tl;dr: “Navigating deeply ambiguous problems is the rarest skill in engineers, and doing it well is a rarity. It’s sufficiently rare that many executives can’t do it well either, although I do believe that all long-term successful executives find at least one toolkit for these kinds of problems.” Will shares his playbook and approach here. 

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The “Errors” That Mean You’re Doing It Right

- Jason Cohen tl;dr: The following “errors” are the natural by-product of good decisions and a necessary side-effect of success, and celebrated as such. The first 5 are: (1) Re-adding features/bugs you removed from the backlog. (2) Pivoting a strategy just after creating it. (3) Refactoring infrastructure after growing 10x. (4) Adding words because messaging was too terse. (5) Adding back features you removed. 

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Demystifying Project Estimation

- Nicola Ballotta Jordan Cutler tl;dr: “Estimating a project or the latest feature you aim to deliver holds incredible value, not only for the business your team serves but also for you and your team. In fact, estimations bring clarity and alignment, which are crucial for delivering quickly and with minimal stress.” The article covers the purposes and challenges of estimation, and gives practical examples and tips. 

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Almost Everyone I’ve Met Would Be Well-Served Thinking More About What To Focus On

- Henrik Karlsson tl;dr: Henrik discusses the concepts of “Exploring” and “Exploiting” to help find focus. When you “Explore”, you look for what makes you feel alive. When you “Exploit”, you trip everything but your top 1-3 priorities. Breaking inaccurate mental models is critical, and can happen in two ways: “(1) Find people who understand things better than you and read what they have to say. Read with the intention of answering your questions. If you can’t find the answers, email them. (2) Perform experiments. State your assumptions and find ways to test if they are false. Most of the time, the slot machine of an experiment yields nothing. But that’s ok. A few will rearrange the world around you."

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Legacy Seam

- Martin Fowler tl;dr: "When working with a legacy system it is valuable to identify and create seams: places where we can alter the behavior of the system without editing source code. Once we've found a seam, we can use it to break dependencies to simplify testing, insert probes to gain observability, and redirect program flow to new modules as part of legacy displacement." Martin shows practical examples of how to approach this.  

featured in #478