/Leadership

Engineering Maturity Model

- Mike Fisher tl;dr: “It’s all about layering. The reason I can build a house is because I know what goes first, second, third, and fourth…” I think this is the same thing with great engineering organizations, it’s all about layering, knowing what goes first, second, third, and fourth.” Mike defines and describes these layers.

featured in #409

Uber’s Engineering Level Changes

- Gergely Orosz tl;dr: “Uber addressed this inconsistency in levels by updating engineering levels to be more in-line with the rest of the industry. The company pretty much renamed senior 2 engineer as staff engineer, and updated the titles from L6. They also added a new level 9.”

featured in #409

Is Critical Thinking The Most Important Skill For Software Engineers?

- Gergely Orosz tl;dr: “If someone cannot explain a concept without jargon, I now doubt they truly understand what they are talking about. The true test of properly understanding a given topic is whether you can teach it to someone else. Explaining your thoughts without the use of jargon - or gradually introducing jargon - is a form of teaching, as you need to adopt to someone who has less domain knowledge.” Gergely provides us with 4 tips on how to improve our critical thinking skills.

featured in #408

From Assumption To Next Step

- John Cutler tl;dr: John discusses how to go from risky assumption to next steps using a single phrase. “One of the significant challenges was what to do with all of the discomfort and anxiety-inducing assumptions. Teams understood the theory — why it might benefit them to surface assumptions, designate “operating assumptions”, prioritize risky assumptions, and make plans to reduce uncertainty where it counts.”

featured in #408

The Silent Killer Of Your Operating Practice: Fear

- Amanda Schwartz Ramirez tl;dr: Amanda creates example scenarios and ways of mitigating 5 common fears: (1) Fear of failure. (2) Fear of losing control. (3) Fear of conflict. (4) Fear of losing credibility. (5) Fear of missing something.

featured in #407

Measuring Developer Productivity And Happiness At LinkedIn

- Viktoras Truchanovicius tl;dr: We developed a new internal product called the Developer Insights Hub. It visualizes developer experience and happiness metrics describing key developer activities such code building, reviewing, publishing, as well as the sentiment towards the tools being used… this post provides an overview of how we approached metrics selection and design, system architecture and key product features.

featured in #407

Fast-Forwarding Decision Making

- James Stanier tl;dr: “I’ll pitch the takeaway up front, and it’s this: hold yourself accountable for making decisions and progressing discussions as quickly as possible, by whatever means necessary. Be restless while a decision hasn’t been made. Dead time is your enemy. Be creative about ways of shaving minutes, hours and days from a decision point.” James gives several examples of how to approach this.

featured in #406

Why Engineering Teams Struggle To Scale Their Test Coverage

- Kirk Nathanson tl;dr: We talk to a lot of engineering leaders about QA and end-to-end testing. Something we hear all the time is how difficult it’s been to scale their automated test coverage beyond a few key workflows. Here are the three obstacles that are faced by companies of all sizes.

featured in #406

Time Is Emphasis: Planning Your Calendar As A Leader

- Molly Graham tl;dr: “The study analyzed the calendars of 27 CEOs, coding 60,000 hours. The study found that having explicit priorities and structure for your calendar and evaluating how you spend your time are some of the most important things you can do to end up spending the majority of your time on your strategic priorities.” Molly gives templates and examples.

featured in #406

The Best Managers Don’t Fix, They Coach — Four Tools To Add to Your Toolkit

tl;dr: How to coach - and not “fix” - team members through the following situations: (1) Outcome shift: when a team member is spinning on a problem and how to proceed. (2) Options exploration: you understand your team member’s challenge and what they would like to see happen. (3) Acknowledging strengths: a team member has imposter syndrome or lacks confidence. (4) A team member has unconscious assumptions that might be holding them back.

featured in #405