/Leadership

What Is Negative Engineering?

- Jeremiah Lowin tl;dr: "If positive engineering is taken to mean the day-to-day work that engineers do to deliver productive, expected outcomes, then negative engineering is the insurance that protects those outcomes by defending them from an infinity of possible failures." Jeremiah discusses the impact on productivity. 

featured in #323

How To Eliminate Organizational Debt

- Aaron Dignan tl;dr: (1) Launch a bounty programs so any employee that encounters a policy or process hindering their ability to deliver value can submit it with a recommendation. (2) Practice continuous governance so individuals have the power to recommend changes to their own roles. (3) Don’t rush to a policy and process for everything as there can be an efficiency cost to keeping things open-ended.

featured in #322

Pinterest’s Model for the Future of Work

- Jeremy King tl;dr: "We are going to ask our employees to be in the office a maximum of 25% of their time. For the balance of that time, employees can be wherever they want, either in or out of the office. We really want to earn employee’s in-office time and be incredibly intentional about when we ask folks to travel."

featured in #322

Leading Your Engineering Team Through An Unexpected Product Pivot

- Najla Elmachtoub tl;dr: "I want to share how my team at Etsy recovered from failing really slowly. We launched a high-profile product that didn’t meet customer needs after doing a nine-month waterfall buildout, and senior leadership decided that we needed to rethink our approach from the ground up. We didn’t know exactly what the end result would be, but we agreed to pivot the product over a three-month timeline."

featured in #321

State Of Engineering Time 2022

tl;dr: The Stack Overflow memes are true: 60% of senior engineers commit 10-100 lines/week of copied and pasted code. And there is more: read the report to learn how 600 engineers (ICs and managers) spend time, from wrangling machines to wrangling people.

featured in #321

A Manager’s Guide to Helping Teams Face Down Uncertainty, Burnout and Perfectionism

tl;dr: Tips of how to help your team... (1) Work through uncertainty - tips include acknowledging what's happening, investing in collective rituals. (2) Push back against perfectionism - tips include identifying different work styles, sharing at 80%. (3) Beating burnout - tips include look for warning signs, protecting your teams time.

featured in #320

Shipping To Production

- Gergely Orosz tl;dr: "In this issue we cover: (1) The extremes of shipping to production. (2) Typical processes at different types of companies. (3) Principles and tools for shipping to production responsibly. (4) Additional verification layers and advanced tools. (5) Taking pragmatic risks to move faster. (6) Deciding which approach to take. (7) Other things to incorporate into the deployment process.

featured in #320

State Of Engineering Time 2022

tl;dr: The Stack Overflow memes are true: 60% of senior engineers commit 10-100 lines/week of copied and pasted code. And there is more: read the report to learn how 600 engineers (ICs and managers) spend time, from wrangling machines to wrangling people.

featured in #320

The Warrior And The Sage

- Ed Batista tl;dr: A set of attitudes leaders display while enacting these two roles. A warrior's "purpose is overcoming resistance, where life is a series of battles," where a Sage's purpose is "learning and helping others learn, where, life is a series of mysteries to be studied." Ed notes that the Warrior's mindset becomes less useful as leaders grow more senior, and the Sage mindset increasingly important.

featured in #319

35 Impactful Questions Managers Should Ask Themselves Regularly

tl;dr: Broken into 5 categories: (1) Questions for gauging morale e.g. Who haven’t I heard from in my team? (2) Tracking team performance e.g. is each member on the team overperforming, on track or underperforming? (3) Measuring effectiveness as a manager e.g. What more can I say no to? And more.

featured in #318