/Management

Should You Stay Technical As An Engineering Manager?

- Nicola Ballotta tl;dr: Dedicating 20% of weekly time to technical activities to stay technical is a good balance. Suggested activities to stay technical are: (1) Joining technical meetings to stay up-to-date and engaged with the team. (2) Contributing to documentation to solidify understanding. (3) Building internal tools to maintain coding skills and create resources. (4) Presenting team projects to understand and simplify technical concepts. (5) Participating in code reviews to stay connected with the codebase. (6) Continuous learning through tech talks, conferences, online courses.

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The Snow Melts At The Periphery

- James Stanier tl;dr: The initial signs of trouble in an organization are not at the center where engineering or management are situated, but at the edges. This is because people at the edges are the most exposed to the outside world i.e. where bad reviews are posted, where customers ask for help, and where social media complaints about unacceptable bugs are posted. As you become more senior in an organization, it is easy to become isolated from the outside world. James explains how to tackle this. 

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Microsoft's New Future Of Work Report

- Abi Noda tl;dr: The report focusses on LLMs e.g. GitHub Copilot and its impact on software development, suggesting it has the potential to improve productivity and reduce cognitive load. However, its benefits are distributed unevenly across users and it introduces new challenges. Key takeaways: (1) Benefits of LLMs in software engineering depend on the specific task e.g. easier to start a project with an LLM but difficult to change generated code. (2) Issues arise with writing prompts and overreliance e.g. burdensome to inspect code, accepting incorrect code. (3) LLMs help the least experienced the most. (4) Adoption is influenced by how well AI tools fit within workflows. (5) Analyzing and integrating information become more important than generating code. 

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Useful Tradeoffs Are Multi-Dimensional

- Will Larson tl;dr: Tradeoff decisions often result in disappointment e.g. you can’t deploy software quickly and test it thoroughly, you have to sacrifice usability due to safety features. Will believes the key is to introduce a new dimension to the decision making process. His approach: (1) Believe and socialize that there is a new dimension to discover. (2) Get specific on stakeholder requirements. (3) Seeing dimensions is the same as seeing layers of context. Expand your contextual awareness or pull in a team with knowledge. (4) Test new dimensions for usefulness quickly. Don’t go too deep. (5) Ask those who’ve solved similar tradeoffs. (6) Only add a dimension if it provides significantly better outcomes. 

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Becoming an Engineering Manager - Is It For You?

- Anton Zaides tl;dr: Anton provides us with a short quiz where you generate a score to determine if management is a good fit for you, with the following questions: (1) Do you like to code? (2) How do you deal with focus changes? (3) How do you deal with focus changes? (4) How do you deal with focus changes? (5) Can you be decisive and stand your ground?

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How To Measure The Impact Of Generative AI Code

- Ben Lloyd Pearson tl;dr: What’s the ROI of your GenAI code? By the end of 2024, GenAI is projected to generate 20% of all code – or 1 in every 5 lines. Learn how to use PR labels to get telemetry on GenAI code, allowing metric tracking that compares AI-generated code against unlabeled PRs. With this free automation, you can track the ROI of your GenAI investments and identify potential security and compliance risks.

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Etsy Engineering Career Ladder

tl;dr: How core competencies map against engineering levels (beginner to expert) within Etsy’s engineering org. Competencies are: (1) Delivery e.g. scoping and prioritization, testing and monitoring, shipping. (2) Domain Expertise e.g. language, tools, business and product sense. (3) Problem Solving e.g. architecture & design patterns, critical thinking. (4) Communication e.g. collaboration, relationship-building. (5) Leadership e.g. accountability, responsibility, mentorship.

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Trifectas Go All The Way Up

- James Stanier tl;dr: Trifectas are a group of three people from different disciplines i.e. engineering, product and UX, who work together to achieve a goal. They are often smaller teams lower down the org. James advocates and explains how and why trifectas should exist throughout the org - in senior leadership and middle management too. They ensure that the leadership team is aligned with the long-term strategy of the organization, allows for clear accountability, creates positive tension between disciplines and enables issues to be resolved quickly.

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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.

featured in #484