/Management

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.

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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. 

featured in #483