/Leadership

The Impossibility Of Making An Elite Engineer

- Kent Beck tl;dr: “While all elite engineers face these contradictions, there are as many paths through them as there are engineers.” Kent discusses the pattern he’s seen elite engineers take on with the following: (1) Longevity and diversity of projects. (2) Success and failure. (3) Mentored and self-directed. (4) Urgency and slack. 

featured in #548

Your Company Needs Junior Devs

- Doug Turnbull tl;dr: “Coaching junior employees becomes its own force multiplier for innovating at scale. It’s not about the added labor, it’s about a psychologically safe culture that values teaching and learning, and the innovation that this unlocks.”

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Founders Create Managers

- Camille Fournier tl;dr: “The only solution to this is to think early and often about the systems of accountability you have to set up. This is much, much harder than micromanaging details, because every system of accountability you set up will eventually be gamed. So in addition to accountability, you need to foster a strong, ethical company culture that encourages transparency while allowing for some mistakes.”

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Tone And Words: Use Accurate Language

- Wes Kao tl;dr: “You make decisions, allocate resources, and make plans — all based on words. This is why it’s important that your language accurately reflects a few things: intent, meaning, severity, level of certainty, stakes and power dynamics.” Wes describes how to use words that accurately reflect what you mean.

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Finding The Goldilocks Zone: Just The Right Amount Of Process

- AbdulFattah Popoola tl;dr: “All the struggling organizations I have worked in shared one common characteristic. They had process deficiencies: some did too little, while some did too much. The best-performing orgs? They did just right. This post offers suggestions and tips for leaders seeking to introduce change.”

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Technical Coherence

- Jack Danger tl;dr: “Software development slows down over time. I wrote a whole book to help leaders reverse this slowdown and the central point of the book is a process any engineering leader can apply. I call this process Technical Coherence and you can mostly achieve it in a single meeting with your leaders. You can implement it in your org gradually or all at once.”

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Ad Hoc Infrastructure

- Kent Beck tl;dr: “My intention in this note is to reclaim the phrase ad hoc from those who use it as a pejorative, especially as applied to infrastructure. Instead, building infrastructure ad hoc is the safest, most efficient strategy. It carefully balances the risks inherent in creating infrastructure, stages investment, and realizes economies of scale.”

featured in #546

Technical Coherence

- Jack Danger tl;dr: “Software development slows down over time. I wrote a whole book to help leaders reverse this slowdown and the central point of the book is a process any engineering leader can apply. I call this process Technical Coherence and you can mostly achieve it in a single meeting with your leaders. You can implement it in your org gradually or all at once.”

featured in #546

Differing Values In A Team Are Costly

- Raphael Gaschignard tl;dr: “A team has a set of values, and members of those teams have values. If everyone is in perfect alignment, you might argue that there are blind spots. But if people are highly performant along those axes, then the blind spots almost don't matter. Meanwhile, if you have a team of 2 people, and they have a huge values gap, their job now becomes a tug-of-war, on top of the normal work of building things.”

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Heartbeats: Keeping Strategies Alive

- James Stanier tl;dr: “The heartbeat is a communication that looks back at the strategy, recaps the key points, and then shows how it has been implemented in the time since the last heartbeat. It's a chance to show how the strategy is living and relevant, and that it's not just a document that was written once and then placed on the shelf.” James shares strategies for doing so. 

featured in #545