Substrate

Experience becomes real when consolidated. I think this mainly stems from knowing how to ask the right questions that are expressly intended to cause a perception shift and require the consolidation of experience. Things such as: “What’s the most frequent anti-pattern that you see in our team’s work?” or “What types of work do we do that have the highest outcome leverage, and why, and how can we do it better?”

So I shifted my approach. I made a commitment to share what was going on, but also contextualize it so as not to create doubt or swirl in their minds about what was going on at the company.

Ways to contribute to an operation in two rough buckets: Determine the work to be done. Do the work. Player-coaches fit right between the two. When you are determining the work, I think of it as being the DJ. You and/or a team are choosing what track to play, for how long, in what sequence, and at what time. This enables the individuals you manage to go and actually play that song.

“What can I do to help you get there and make a decision?” What a fantastic question — and especially when holding space for friends to think things through.

Here’s the thing: the hero is the most damaging person on a team, particularly on a team that’s supposed to be writing high-availability or otherwise mission-critical software. ​ The hero is a human patch. ​ When a team can rely on a hero, they don’t need to grow and learn collectively. They don’t need to get better. They can coast along, which serves no one in the end. ​ You’re clearly managing someone highly motivated, but you need to shape that motivation into something more constructive.

The leadership track shows up so that communication and decisions can be sensibly organized. ​ In Toxic Title Douchebag World, titles are designed to document the value of an individual sans proof. ​ A title has no business attempting to capture the seemingly infinite ways by which individuals evolve. ​ To allow leadership to bucket individuals into convenient chunks so they can award compensation and measure seniority while also serving as labels that are somehow expected to give us an idea about expected ability. This is an impossibly tall order and at the root of title toxicity. ​ the reality is that you are a collection of skills of varying ability. ​ Titles, I believe, are an artifact of the same age that gave us business cards and resumes. They came from a time when information was scarce. When there was no other way to discover who you were other than what you shared via a resume. Where the title of Senior Software Engineer was intended to define your entire career to date.

Managers should support 6-8 engineers. ​ Tech Lead Managers (TLMs). Managers supporting less than four engineers tend to function as TLMs, taking on a share of design and implementation work. For some folks this role can uniquely leverage their strengths, but it's a role with limited career opportunities. To progress as a manager, they'll want more time to focus developing their management skills. Alternatively to progress towards staff engineering roles, they'll find it difficult to spend enough time in the technical details. ​ Most folks find being oncall for components they're unfamiliar with to be disproportionately stressful. ​ An important property of teams is that they abstract the complexities of the individuals that compose them. ​ and avoid creating a two-tiered class system of innovators and maintainers.

As I do less development, I am thinking more as stakeholder and less as an engineer. ​ I also pay special attention to more introvert people and encourage them to share their opinion on the subject. ​ I am a believer that a great manager is the one that, if absent, no one will notice, because they have created such an environment where everyone can do a great job without being blocked by them. ​ I now tend to be careful when I ask something, by making sure the person understands the why.

Speaking of last year, in 2018, I flirted with the idea of moving into a management role. I spoke with a bunch of people about the idea but ultimately decided that it wasn’t the right time for me. ​ Through this process, I figured out the skills that I’d need to gain if I ever did end up wanting to be a manager, and I’ve been working on those skills since. Though, at this point in time, I still don’t think being a manager is the right path for me. Being a tech lead, on the other hand… ​ It felt kind of weird. While I had cultural credibility of my peers, I didn’t have institutional authority of the business.

This normalization of deviance means that people within an organization stop seeing problems as problems, making it impossible to learn from them. Stagnation kills resilience. ​ A change-resistant culture, however, risks burning out those new people, as they find that they are unable to make any meaningful changes. ​ Knowing what decisions were made and why can help prevent “we’ve always done it this way” as a fall-back reason for doing something. If you understand the constraints and trade-offs around why a past decision was made, you’ll be better equipped to understand if they are still relevant in your current context. ​ push authority for decision-making down closest to where the work gets done ​ If different members of an interview panel have very different views of how the organization works, that can be a sign of deeper issues. This often indicates implicit power structures or lack of clarity around process that can be frustrating to deal with and difficult to change.

Sharing suffering is actually one way to minimize suffering, and minimizing suffering is at the core of my beliefs on compassionate teams. ​ If you're a senior engineer wondering what's next, try turning your attention to your team. I would bet that you'll learning something worthwhile.

The core observations from Fred Brook’s The Mythical Man Month is that assigning more folks to work on a project often slows down delivery. Part of that is the predictability tax.

That is, involve your team in co-creating what success looks like — instead of purely asking them to execute and get you there.

Many managers think a lot about how they treat their team, but few have a philosophy about those that leave it.

"You likely have to get management approval for a $500 expense... but you can call a 1 hour meeting with 20 people and no one notices."— Farbod Saraf (@farbodsaraf) October 26, 2017

Something I am working on professionally is being okay with not being liked. I get very hung up on if people like me or not, when that is something I have no control over. I only control my output and actions towards impactful change.— sarajo (@SaraJChipps) February 11, 2019

File issues about the problem you’ve observed or the outcome you want, not about the approach you think should be taken to resolve them.— Rob Rix‎ (@rob_rix) January 31, 2019

The more senior you are, the longer timescales you operate in. Weeks/months become year/5 years/+. And the feedback loops much longer as well (many years).That transition is tough, but what is most difficult is adapting your notion of patience and when to apply impatience.— Julia Grace (@jewelia) August 16, 2018

“@anildash @KristyT I don't even think this is really about whether an org is good or bad. I see this as human nature. People who proclaim themselves vividly as X get *really* defensive when called out on not behaving true to X”

“For more open-ended problems, much of the challenge lies in figuring out what to do next. These rich questions offer deep satisfaction on longer time scales, but without a clear sense of progress, each day ends ambiguously. Was today good? Will these tinkerings add up to anything? In what timeframe? Who knows. Ultimately: what structures around progress, self-correction, and operations can help us in open-ended mode? These questions are intensely personal, but I hope that notes from my journey here may help your own.”

Good questions! Let me organize my thoughts on these in a lil thread https://t.co/qGp0zVaOZn— Brian Michel (@brianmichel) November 3, 2018

I was thinking about how happy I am when I get the kind of praise I need. It doesn’t make me feel smug or complacent, it makes me feel strong and empowered and like what I’m doing matte…

I’m hearing a lot about hiring mandates in my social circle these days. My friends are being told that their next hire has to be a

Everyone likes to talk about leadership—we are culturally conditioned to view success as a progression through leadership positions—but there is far less

I’m often asked about the characteristics of great engineering managers. This is a question that almost always has a long answer that…

“what's your manager's job?”

“When features are implemented through a single team, you need to be good at prioritizing. It shouldn’t be easy to add every little feature to the product. By making all features compete for priority, you make sure the best features get the attention.”