/Leadership

Should Managers Still Code?

- James Stanier tl;dr: “The short answer is that it depends exactly on what you mean by coding. I think that there is a big difference between being in the code and writing code. All managers should be in the code, but not all managers should be writing code.” James elaborates.

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The Trouble With “Good Enough"

- Wes Kao tl;dr: “If you say “good enough” and there are 50 operators listening, it can be expected that there will be 50 different ideas of what “good enough” means. This is a problem (and opportunity) for you.”

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Manager Antipatterns

- Ted Neward tl;dr: “There's a whole host of mistakes that companies often fall prey to with respect to those they have leading teams, and I thought it a good idea to collect them into one place, under the umbrella heading of "manager antipatterns”.”

featured in #595

Manager Antipatterns

- Ted Neward tl;dr: “There's a whole host of mistakes that companies often fall prey to with respect to those they have leading teams, and I thought it a good idea to collect them into one place, under the umbrella heading of "manager antipatterns”.”

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Pause – Decision-Making Superpower

- Michał Poczwardowski tl;dr: “Press pause and take your time to help yourself by: (1) Detaching from emotions that blur your judgement at the moment. (2) Making sure that you can check for blind spots. (3) Getting a new perspective. People may demand answers immediately, and the pressure can be high, but they rarely argue with rules. You can say: "I have a rule that I never answer immediately.”

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Decision-Making Pitfalls For Technical Leaders

- Chelsea Troy tl;dr: “In my experience, it is at least the case that when programmers become trial-by-fire managers, they realize they don’t know how to do their jobs. Technical leadership — tech lead roles, principal eng roles, and even the dreaded “player-coach” role—those sneak up on people. A lot of times there’s still programming involved, so folks feel prepared. Their experience has exposed them to technical decisions and it got them promoted, so the way they do it is probably fine. Right?” Chelsea discusses 3 pitfalls she commonly sees. 

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Diagnosis In Engineering Strategy

- Will Larson tl;dr: Will covers: (1) Why diagnosis is the foundation of effective strategy. Conversely, how skipping the diagnosis phase consistently ruins strategies. (2) A step-by-step approach to diagnosing your strategy’s circumstances. (3) How to incorporate data into your diagnosis effectively. (4) Dealing with controversial elements of your diagnosis. (5) Why it’s more effective to view difficulties as part of the problem to be solved, rather than a blocking issue. (6) The near impossibility of an effective diagnosis if you don’t bring humility and self-awareness to the process.

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Eyes Light Up (ELU)

- Wes Kao tl;dr: Wes introduces "Eyes Light Up" as a key indicator of effective messaging for leaders. Rather than relying on intellectual feedback, she advises watching for genuine excitement in your audience's eyes. These visceral reactions are more valuable than verbal responses. Stop when eyes glaze over, pivot when interest wanes.

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The Rotation Program That Keeps This Startup’s Engineers Learning — And Not Leaving

- Krista Moroder tl;dr: Over the past several years, Moroder has helped formalize the rotation program at Checkr, and she’s scored some pretty brag-worthy retention stats as a result. “Two years ago, non-regrettable attrition was zero, and the year after that, it was 2% — because one person left. Across the board, my team is extremely tenured right now,” says Moroder. “For staff engineers and above, about 60% of them have been here six years or longer.

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The Quest To Understand Metric Movements

tl;dr: “At Pinterest, we have built different quantitative models to understand why metrics move the way they do. This blog outlines the three pragmatic approaches that form the basis of the root-cause analysis (RCA) platform at Pinterest. As you will see, all three approaches try to narrow down the search space for root causes in different ways.”

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