featured in #515
Sensible Benchmarks For Evaluating The Effectiveness Of Your Engineering Organization
- Rebecca Murphey tl;dr: A lot of engineering leaders are looking for benchmarks to understand what “good” looks like. The problem is, most benchmarks out there offer a long list of metrics and encourage spending time on areas that are already going well. In this blog post, you’ll learn how we landed on the five fundamental metrics in our benchmarks and how you should use them to drive meaningful change in your engineering organization.featured in #515
A Useful Productivity Measure?
- James Shore tl;dr: James is using value-add capacity i.e. the % of time on value-add work, as a productivity proxy for the eng organization. While this number is easily prone to gaming, it shifted the conversation from constantly pressuring the eng team to deliver more, to helping it reduce the time engineers spend on non-value-adding activities.featured in #515
What Causes New Engineers To “Sink Or Swim”?
- Lizzie Matusov tl;dr: Consider these tips to more effectively ramp up new teammates: (1) Structure early learning opportunities. New engineers can more quickly ramp up to the context and domain knowledge required to do their work. (2) Be clear about role expectations. Establishing clear expectations for the role is often overlooked in the chaos of growing a team. (3) Prepare the first few tasks ahead of time. Give engineers a series of tasks that build on organizational and system context so they can apply their knowledge more directly and build confidence.featured in #514
Give Your Team Permission To Fail
- John-Daniel Trask tl;dr: The future of software engineering seems even more unknowable these days. Here, JD Trask of Raygun makes the case for getting comfortable with change — and with failure. By encouraging experimentation, even when it looks like a tangent, even when it barely works, we make real discoveries and developments. Permission to fail is permission to try; let your team just try things.featured in #514
Getting An Engineering Executive Job
- Gergely Orosz tl;dr: Gergely covers the following from Will Larson’s book: (1) Deciding whether to pursue an executive role. (2) Why each executive job search is unique, and how that will shape your process. (3) Finding executive roles externally and internally. (4) Navigating the often chaotic executive interview process. (5) Negotiating an executive contract. (6) Deciding whether to accept an executive offer once you have it.featured in #513
An Open Letter To Auth Providers
tl;dr: The first job of any auth company is to protect its customers – before anything else. Somewhere along the way it feels like a lot of auth providers lost sight of the thing that matters: You, their customers.featured in #513
featured in #513
3 Critical Skills You Need To Grow Beyond Senior Levels In Engineering
- Irina Stanescu tl;dr: (1) Learning to scale yourself: Maximizing what you can do on your own by ruthlessly prioritizing your time and teaching / delegating as much as you can. (2) Navigating ambiguity: detective work, isolating uncertainty, dividing and conquer, making decisions with incomplete information, being able to pivot. (3) Influencing without authority.featured in #513
3 Critical Skills You Need To Grow Beyond Senior Levels In Engineering
- Irina Stanescu tl;dr: (1) Learning to scale yourself: Maximizing what you can do on your own by ruthlessly prioritizing your time and teaching / delegating as much as you can. (2) Navigating ambiguity: detective work, isolating uncertainty, dividing and conquer, making decisions with incomplete information, being able to pivot. (3) Influencing without authority.featured in #512