/Management

The Engineering Executive’s Role In Hiring

- Will Larson tl;dr: Will discusses your role as an executive in your organization’s hiring, the components you need to build for an effective hiring process and provides concrete recommendations for navigating the many challenges that you’re likely to run into while operating the hiring process. He gives you enough to get started, build a system that supports your goals, and start evolving it into something exceptionally useful.”

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Why Top Engineering Teams Are Using Multi For Collaboration

- Alexander Embiricos tl;dr: With teams being more distributed than ever before, Multi is bringing the joy of building together back by making your apps and operating system multiplayer. With Multi, multiple people can share screen at the same time, cursor sharing and drawing is effortless, and automatic deep links make sharing context one click away.

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An Effective Team Communicates Much Like Optimized Code: With Clarity, Modularity, And A Focus On Simplicity.

- Addy Osmani tl;dr: “Just as we strive for optimized, clean code, our teams should aim for clear, modular, and simple communication.” Addy shares tips from his time at Google: (1) Optimize communication for the target audience. (2) Speak clearly and slowly. (3) Opt for concise messages rather than apologizing for long ones. (4) Use simple and common words. Remove unnecessary and unrelated words. (5) Avoid English idioms and slang phrases if working with a global team. (6) Use inclusive language that considers all educational backgrounds.

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8 Reasons Why WhatsApp Was Able To Support 50 Billion Messages A Day With Only 32 Engineers

tl;dr: (1) Single responsibility principle. (2) Tech stack. Erlang provides scale with a tiny footprint. (3) Leveraged robust open source and third party libraries. (4) A huge emphasis was given to cross-cutting concerns to improve quality. (5) Diagonal scaling to keep the costs and operational complexity low. (6) Critical aspects were measured so bottlenecks were identified and eliminated quickly. (7) Load testing was performed to identify single points of failure. (8) Communication paths between engineers were kept short.

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Hire For Floors, Not Ceilings

- Jacob Kaplan-Moss tl;dr: Jacob uses the sports performance analogy of "floors" and "ceilings" to discuss hiring practices. In sports, an athlete's "ceiling" denotes their peak potential, while their "floor" represents their worst performance. Jacob identifies four performance archetypes, from consistently excellent athletes to those who are unpredictably variable. Drawing parallels to hiring, Jacob argue that employers often mistakenly prioritize a candidate's potential (ceiling) over their consistency (floor). He emphasizes that a consistently average performer is often more valuable than an unpredictable one, stating, consistency and reliability should be prioritized over sporadic potential.

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Akin's Laws Of Spacecraft Design

- Matt Rickard tl;dr: The article presents 45 laws by David Akin, Professor of Aerospace Engineering, including: (1) Engineering is done with numbers. Analysis without numbers is only an opinion. (2). To design a spacecraft right takes an infinite amount of effort. This is why it's a good idea to design them to operate when some things are wrong. (3). Design is an iterative process. The necessary number of iterations is one more than the number you have currently done. This is true at any point in time. (4). Your best design efforts will inevitably wind up being useless in the final design. Learn to live with the disappointment. (5). Three points determine a curve.

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Time Demands On Leaders

- Mike Fisher tl;dr: Mike delves into the challenges technology leaders face in carving out time for deep thinking, essential for tasks like strategic visioning or major architectural changes. The article explores innovative leadership structures, like Telstra's division into 'leaders of work' and 'leaders of people' and the U.S. military's pairing of commissioned and noncommissioned officers. For tech leaders, a proposed approach is pairing an engineering manager with an architect or tech lead. Mike explores the potential benefit of shared leadership responsibilities, allowing for both transactional interactions and deep strategic thinking.

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What Makes A Strategy Great

- Jason Cohen tl;dr: Jason discusses the following characteristics of a great strategy: (1) Simple: Reshapes complexity to be manageable and actionable. (2) Candid: Dares to spotlight the most difficult truths. (3) Decisive: Asserts clear decisions and accepts their consequences. (4) Leveraged: Magnifies strengths into durable competitive advantage. (5) Asymmetric: Defeats uncertainty with higher upside than downside. (6) Futuristic: Solves for the long-term.

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Why Outsource Your Auth System And How To Sell The Decision To Your Company

- Joe Stech tl;dr: Build vs Buy. Open source vs commercial. You are often asked to determine the right options for your organization, whether it's new tooling, infrastructure, or critical security components. Wouldn't it be awesome if you had a blueprint to follow? Check out these considerations that are tied to selecting an authentication solution, but have been used by other engineering leaders recently in build vs buy decisions they have on their radar. 

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How Games Typically Get Built

- Gergely Orosz tl;dr: Insights into the world of game development, contrasting it with traditional software development. Game development involves programmers, designers, artists, animators, writers, and sound designers. Games typically undergo a prototype stage, followed by full production, where multiple teams work in parallel, often leading to integration challenges. The game development life cycle consists of three main phases: pre-production, production, and release. Gergely emphasizes that while game development borrows practices from software development, such as TDD and agile methodologies, it requires adaptations to fit the unique challenges of the medium.

featured in #442