/Management

Manage Like An Engineer

- Ben Balter tl;dr: Engineer-inspired “how we work” management principles: (1) Make work visible: Proactively share to the widest extent practical. (2) Write things down, especially the why and how. Ensure that everything has a URL. (3) Over communicate: Use a durable, searchable, and discoverable medium. Let others opt-in to context and subscribe to updates. (4) Bias for shipping: ship early, ship often. (5) Streamline and automate: Never force a human to do what a robot can. (6) Embrace collaboration: How we work is as important as what we work on. (7) Asynchronous first: Reserve higher-fidelity mediums for conversations that require them. (8) Practicality beats purity. 

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Keep Your Secrets From Leaking

- Alexandre Gigleux tl;dr: Secrets in your source code, when leaked, expose you to a security vulnerability due to illicit access to your private data. Sonar can find secrets in source code in your IDE using SonarLint and also detect them in your CI/CD pipeline using SonarQube and SonarCloud.

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My Diverse Hiring Playbook

- Jacob Kaplan-Moss tl;dr: (1) Adopt a “Rooney Rule”, which requires teams to interview at least one ethnic minority candidate for senior roles. (2) Use opportunistic hires strategically. (3) Focus outbound recruiting on underrepresented candidates. (4) Focus outbound recruiting on underrepresented candidates. (5) Cultivate a network of “connectors”. (6) Be explicit that you’re looking to build diverse teams. 

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How To Fix Broken Teams

tl;dr: “If you get to a place where you see a team like this, take a deep breath - things are going to be tough for a while.” The author shares the following steps: “The new manager needs to: (1) Fix process and run them well. (2) Manage out cynical culture carriers. (3) Get in the weeds and learn the system. (4) Hire at least some new teammates. (5) Make sure the mission is good. 

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The Skill That Gets You Fired Or Promoted: Managing Up

- Leah Tharin tl;dr: I always thought about "Managing up” like a funnel. It’s a skill to manage a funnel where you start with promises, and at the end of that funnel, there is a really bad outcome. Leah discusses managing every step in the funnel to prevent this from happening: (1) The # of promises you commit to. (2) The # of important promises. (3) The # of promises with a deadline. (4) Realistic time management, buffer. (5) Not letting important become urgent. (6) Regular, open communication. (8) Honest crisis management. 

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Keep Your Secrets From Leaking With Sonar

- Alexandre Gigleux tl;dr: Secrets in your source code, when leaked, expose you to a security vulnerability due to illicit access to your private data. Sonar can find secrets in source code in your IDE using SonarLint and also detect them in your CI/CD pipeline using SonarQube and SonarCloud.

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Those Five Spare Hours Each Week

- Will Larson tl;dr: Will hypothesizes, if we had five free hours each week, how would he spend them? He sees four valid options to build his career, as follows: (1) Write code or engage in detailed work within the engineering org. (2) Build broader context: expand your context outside the engineering org. Understand your peers work, goals and obstacles e.g. talk with customers. (3) Improve current systems: Work on your strategy or planning process. (4) Build relationships: Expand your internal or industry networks. 

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Bottleneck #06: Onboarding

- Tim Cochran Premanand Chandrasekaran tl;dr: Signs that your company is bottlenecked by an ineffective onboarding process, and best practice solutions: (1) New people cannot access tools and systems. (2) New developers cannot make a production deployment. (3) Newcomers feel orphaned. (4) Too much focus on individual work. (5) Not enough openness to change. (6) Seemingly simple things take too long. (7) Fast turnover. (8) Documentation can't answer questions from new hires. 

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3 Questions That Will Make You A Phenomenal Rubber Duck

- Dan Slimmon tl;dr: Dan’s 3 favorite questions to ask when someone is stumped on a complex problem: (1) “How did you first start investigating this?” This helps us regain perspective as our focus shifts from one thing to another to another. (2) “What observations have you made?” This helps recall some of our observations. Since there are many - small and large, interesting and boring, relevant and irrelevant - we tend to not hold all of them in our head. (3) “If your hypothesis were wrong, how could we disprove it?” People get a single idea in their head about the cause of the problem, and this encourages them to shake that idea for others.

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The Research On What Makes A Great Manager Of Software Engineers

tl;dr: Engineers and managers rank the top attributes of engineering managers, and their relative importance. Researchers at Microsoft evaluated how engineers and managers relate and differ in their views, and how software engineering is different from other jobs in the perceptions about what makes great managers. The best managers (according to engineers) are those that create a positive environment, enable autonomy, and present growth opportunities. These factors are often more important than just being technical.

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