Engineering Team Management

An article to discourage the faint-hearted recruits.

“The second you became their manager you forfeited the right to joke around in any capacity about their employment at the company.”

9 fundamental principles of the behavior required to be a great manager.

Mistakes: “1) Thinking people give feedback the way they want to receive it; 2) Trying to do everything yourself; 3) Communicating something one time is enough; 4) You have to have everything together all the time.”

“Avoid at all costs the combination of: new manager, 1 report, report is new-to-industry, manager is not a subject-matter expert.”

A full, detailed guide on modern management practices.

Some of these points needs nuance, but others are a good taste of things to come for first-time managers.

The biggest difference between manager (accountable) and engineers (responsible): “'Bad things' happen for the person accountable, whereas the person responsible can move on to the next project.”

The author use a parable in which problems are monkeys. Unexperienced managers let monkeys being transferred to them, accumulates on their back and compounds. From this, the book teach you how to change from taking on responsibilities to delegating them so you don't become a bottleneck.

What DO engineers want? Money, purpose and respect.

“Google's data indicated that psychological safety, more than anything else, was critical to making a team work. (…) The behaviors that create psychological safety — conversational turn-taking and empathy — are part of the same unwritten rules we often turn to, as individuals, when we need to establish a bond.”

“The practice of software engineering, and its history is, itself, a complex study in humanity, coordination, and communication.”

It's cargo-cultish to imitate the big names in our industry as a path to success. Instead, the take home from this article “would be that managers and other leaders should be like ecologists; who measure, observe and nurture their ecosystems. Doing so will help build a unique workplace that will yield great results.”

Paraphrasing Andy Grove's book, High Output Management, “the job of an executive is: to define and enforce culture and values for their whole organization, and to ratify good decisions.” The article also details the failures modes of a CEO: forcing his own decisions downstream, or various ways of not resolving conflicts.

Tolstoy's thesis to business.

Establishes and describes what leaders should be and do.

A reference of leadership's competencies and skills.

“1. Defining and interpreting the meaningful "outside" of the company; 2. Answering the two-part question: What business are we in and what business are we not in? 3. Balancing sufficient yield in the present with necessary investment in the future; 4. Shaping the values and standards of the organization.”

A study on what CEO of large companies spent their time on, and how. Opens a new window into what leadership is all about and into its many components and dimensions.

After insisting on the importance of context and narratives, the author provide an interesting template (good for inspiration) of ritual and recurring internal communication devices.

“These are the things we (marketers) used to do with individuals and bodies. They've all become automated. The CIO is the marketing chief now.”

“The prototypic visionary leader profile is so similar to that of a narcissist, if boards aren't careful, they're going to end up choosing people who are narcissistic as CEOs”.

CTO manage a small staff of hackers. VP of Engineering lead an organization of engineers.

Another way to look at thing: placing these roles along the “Process Orientation” and “Technical Capability” quadrants.

The premise is a little misleading, as what is detailed there is the journey, in a startup, of the technical founder growing with the company to become a CTO. At which point the position described in the article is not CTO, but VP of Engineering.

“How do I hire a VP of Engineering? After more than 20 years, eight companies, and thousands of hires, I'm starting to suspect this may be the wrong question. A better one is, What is a VP of Engineering?”

Bad signs of a CTO trying to recruit an engineering manager, or the perils of not believing in hierarchies.

“The irony is that you don't really notice a great manager.”

Google tried to prove managers don't matter. Instead, it discovered 10 Traits of the Very Best Ones.

A good boss: gets rid of rotten apples (no asshole rule) and protects people from idiocy from on high.

Not on solutions, no. But on customer's problems.

Some interesting points here, some others needs to be challenged.

Echoes my own experience on differences between expectations and reality in high growth and visible companies from the point of view of an engineering manager.

122 aphorisms providind insights into NASA project management success. Covers design, decision-making, managing staff, working with superiors and contractors.

Huge list, but need some curation.

“A lot of the work of an EM is wading into the slurry pit with a shovel so your team are free to get the job done”.

“Since software project managers have limited ability to evaluate individual developer capability, they should rely on a productive environment and developing talent.”

“1. I'm a senior developer; 2. Everyone writes tests; 3. We're so far behind everyone else (a.k.a. tech FOMO); 4. Code quality matters most; 5. Everything must be documented; 6. Technical debt is bad; 7. Seniority means being the best at programming”.

“I expect a 'senior' engineer to be a mature engineer.”

“I sat next to a senior software engineer for a year. Here's what I learnt.”

“A programmer with 5 years of experienced has more industry tenure than half of the entire industry.” Also see this follow-up comment of 10 things I've learned after 35 years.

“Don't act like know-it-all; Openly admit if they don't know something; Try to figure stuff out together”.

“It's intriguing that the stuff that really seems to make a difference in the quality of software never seems to be about software.”

Doesn't conclude on a definitive answer to the question, but details a model based on 53 attributes (!). Still a good source referencing other papers on the topic.

“Time, man. You gotta do your fucking time.”

From L3 to L8: a quick description of what makes an engineer at each level.

A great window into the somewhat nebulous title of Staff Engineer, also called Principal Engineer or Software Architect at times. I.e. a role in which you are a technical expert, but know how to solve non-obvious engineering issues, most of the time because they are rooted in social, communications and hierarchical complexities.

Once you've reached the Senior Software Engineer level, you're at the crossroad. Either you pursue engineering management or continue down the path of technical excellence to become a Staff Engineer. This isa collection of guides about the later position.

“They are smart yet kind. Knowledgeable, yet humble. Busy, yet approachable.”

This article let you understand how an independent consultant operates.

Niche job boards by domains, technology, roles and area.

List of companies without the kind of CS trivia questions that are associated with bad interview practices.

5 simple rules for hiring men, from 1924. Things haven't changed a lot in a century.

A compilation of advice and example, but containing a good description of a typical hiring pipeline.

A detailed description of a hiring process, a great source of inspiration for when your company gets big enough to start to formalize things up.

Cockroach Labs published their process “to create familiarity for candidates and account for bias, resulting in a better candidate experience and hiring decisions.”

“Testing programmers at something they aren't actually expected to be good at and expecting to learn something about how they would work at your company is delusional, and I think these kind of interviews only serve to make the hiring team feel smarter and ensure better outcomes for engineers with traditional CS backgrounds.”

Starts with anecdote of developers using a job interview as a vehicle to demonstrate their superiority. Then the author details a reasonable interview process that is trying to not waste anyone's time.

“1) Cut-Through on Crappy Tasks; 2) Knowing How to Finish; 3) Knowing How to Start; 4) Giving (And Receiving) Diagonal Feedback; 5) Harnessing the Value of Intangibles.”

A great source of inspiration.

An outline on how to recruit for engineering manager roles.

Questions to ask the company during your interview. Be prepared to answer them as a manager.

A sample of question to ask in job interviews to try to understand the values of a company.

The essential of Who, a popular book on recruiting executives.

“Instead of writing code, consider having the candidate read existing code and talk about how it works. 1) Reading code is 95% of what a developer does as part of their job. 2) A candidate can tell you a lot about their programming skill in the first five minutes of reading. 3) Stress is your enemy because it raises adrenaline which lowers IQ by several points, causing you to miss good candidates.”

“When it comes to writing code, the number one most important skill is how to keep a tangle of features from collapsing under the weight of its own complexity.”

The dark side on relying too much on algorithm challenges.

“Designed to help filter out the 99.5% of programming job candidates who can't seem to program their way out of a wet paper bag.”

Five multiple-choice questions to easily separate the real software engineers from the rest.

A satire of over-engineering for the sake of enterprise-grade software.

A huge database of questions sorted by topic to get inspiration from.

“A good negotiator is empathetic and collaborative. They don't try to control you or issue ultimatums. Rather, they try to think creatively about how to fulfill both your and their needs.”

This article explain the dynamic of that sneaky question and how to defuse it.

“Your salary negotiation — which routinely takes less than 5 minutes to conclude — has an outsized influence on what your compensation is.”

“First part will be about conceptualizing the negotiating process, about how to begin the process and set yourself up for maximal success. The second part will be advice on the actual back-and-forth portion of negotiating and how to ask for what you want.”

“Merge code every week. That's what you should be saying to your new Software Engineering hire.”

“Your organization has painfully slow onboarding. Endless HR videos, slow security processes, a mountain of fragile technology setup - these all make for a shitty and counterproductive start at a company. Optimize your onboarding to get people doing what you hired them to do.”

Navigating a new organization will be hard the first few weeks, and the presence of a manager can help speed things up.

The author developed an algorithm to ramp-up quickly when joining an existing team where he had a massive knowledge deficit and no pre-existing relationships.

Right after inheriting a position at the top of an organization of 50 engineers, the author bootstraped the relationship with that big team by meeting everyone in 30 minutes 1:1s. It was a huge time investment, and despite fears of being boring, it allows for recognizing patterns of what change was needed.

Daniel Pink summarizes it concisely: people are motivated by autonomy, mastery and purpose.

Reflecting on the postulates above, Bryan Cantrill defines that the role of management “is in constructing that environment, not micromanaging it. If engineering performance is suffering, it's (likely) a management problem: wrong problem, wrong mission, or wrong team -- or all three.”

“1. Autonomy for software engineers; 2. Curious problem solvers, not mindless resources; 3. Internal data, code, and documentation transparency; 4. Exposure to the business and to business metrics; 5. Engineer-to-engineer comms over triangle-communication; 6. Investing in a less frustrating developer experience; 7. Higher leverage --> higher {autonomy, pay}”.

The majority of us will not build the next unicorn: we statically have a better chance to build enterprise software. The twist? It might even be more interesting than you expect.

We learn in this book that employee happiness was not correlated to company success. A comment on HN details the questions that were highly correlated to company success.

“You're more involved with your employees than ever, yet they seem disgruntled, unhappy, and less productive than usual. Your check-ins seem to go unappreciated. And no one seems receptive to all of your great feedback on their work. What's going on? Well, we hate to break it to you, but you might be a micromanager.”

“'Screw it, let's do it'; Start sloppy; Start small”.

“Research shows that once the first step is made towards a task, following through becomes easier”.

Laws, Theories, Principles and Patterns that developers will find useful.

There is a spectrum between perfect efficiency and being completely flexible. This article explores ecosystems and the flows of material and energy between different organisms within the ecosystem. (hinted by HN comment)

If you still doubt management culture could make or break an industry: “inefficient management practices have kept southern European firms from taking full advantage of the IT revolution”.

“The people are smarter, your manager (and their manager) cares a lot about you and it's easy to move.”

“It's harder to be kind than clever”, or put another way by Abraham Joshua Heschel: “When I was young, I used to admire intelligent people; as I grow older, I admire kind people.”

“1. Change you; 2. Change the other; 3. Fly; 4. Stay and suffer.” A more concise way of saying the same thing as above.

“The actual company values, as opposed to the nice-sounding values, are shown by who gets rewarded, promoted, or let go.”

A list of books, web pages, and videos about how to design better organizations, divided into 3 categories: organization and motivation, health and wellness, and software development specific.

Scaling systems is not only a technical challenge. It has to be about teams and culture too. One lesson learned from the early days of AWS: “Giving developers operational responsibilities has greatly enhanced the quality of the services, both from a customer and a technology point of view. (…) You build it, you run it.”

A compilation of anonymous sources from AWS which ehoes the interview above: “teams are ostensibly autonomous and can make any important decision needed to meet their goals.”

The reason we often relies on these simple heuristics: “outside the lab, in real world, we cannot do well with just with logical rationality, we need ecological rationality - the kind of thinking that helps us get what we want in an environment that's uncertain and dynamic. This means exercising our instincts, using simple but robust rules of thumb.”

A collection of 109 models.

Huge compiled list of mental models. Became the basis of book.

“Collection of thinking tools and frameworks to help you solve problems, make decisions and understand systems.”

A formalized list of some wisdom you probably encountered elsewhere.

Laws, principles, mental models and cognitive biases.

105 cognitive biases with simple descriptions, brief and detailed examples.

“Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.” My favorite flavor of Occam's Razor, and a crucial mantra to defuse rampant paranoia in a highly political setting.

Or why after a period of intense euphoria and ambition, things slowly get back to their usual mediocrity.

A framework on “the degree to which people believe that they have control over the outcome of events in their lives, as opposed to external forces beyond their control.”

“Our ability to think in abstractions can weaken our judgement, as those abstractions may no longer be as true as they once were. Also a similarly dangerous evolutionary trait is our ability to think in analogy, where we make assumptions based on the comparison of two things that are not actually related.” Elon Musk explains it better.

“Leaders believe that they are being paid for fixing problems rather than for fostering breakthrough thinking.”

“Every sufficiently interesting game has a metagame above it. This is the game about the game. It is often called 'the meta'. (…) The meta is what you get after you master boring fundamentals. But observing the state of the current meta often reveals what boring fundamentals you need to learn.”

“A rule-of-thumb in improvisational comedy (…). It is also used in business and other organizations as a principle that improves the effectiveness of the brainstorming process, fosters effective communication, and encourages the free sharing of ideas.”

“Allow your intuition to guide you to a conclusion, no matter how imperfect — this is the 'strong opinion' part. Then – and this is the 'weakly held' part – prove yourself wrong.”

Research shows the devastating effect of interrupting developers: 1. 15 min is required to resume work; 2. A programmer get just one uninterrupted 2-hour session in a day; 3. Worst time to interrupt: during edits, searches & comprehension.

Excerpt: “We're all just big, complicated bags of emotion walking around; Power comes with the ability to receive a No; Learning to manage your focus, not your time.”

“is about being open and able to change your mind about important things, and being able to discern when you should.”

Anticipating an important result so much, humans by nature are susceptible to introduce subtle confirmation bias. To combat IPL, you might introduce random unknowns to suppress any attempt to game the system toward the object of your desire. I.e. avoid to cheat yourself to success.

6 universal principles of influence that are used to persuade business professionals: reciprocity, consistency, social proof, getting people to like you, authority and scarcity.

This HN comment perfectly describes the concept. “Unlike lying/fraud, where falsehood is instrumental, Frankfurt defined bullshit as potentially false speech where the truth simply wasn't important. Bullshit is characterized by giving the surface appearance of confidence, intelligence, or a convincing argument; whether it's actually true or not is besides the point.”

My takeaway: “Celebrating Slow Progress; Hunt for Key Milestones”.

“A tool for gaining a shared understanding of responsibilities”.

Highlighting unseen work in public allows managers to recognize efforts their reports are doing. Still, there is some cases in which it might put your colleague in a tight spot. So always ask if it's ok first.

Retelling of author's job at Apple: “John Louch was my boss. (…) John always shared everything with us, even the don't share this with your team stuff. We were people he trusted, so it was as it should be. It made you feel like you were part of something greater.” Or why sharing some open secret promote strong trust in your entourage.

A phenomenon discovered by Dr Meredith Belbin, and exposed in his 1981 book on Management Teams, where teams of highly capable individuals can, collectively, perform badly.

In a team with very talented contributors, everyone's is a chief engineer: you are expected to challenge the status-quo and questions other department's constraints. This allow smart engineers to avoid the trap of optimizing for something that should not exist in the first place. Might be a cure for the Apollo Syndrome.

Overconfidence, tunnel vision and conformity pressure can led a group astray.

Some kind of push backs shouldn't be interpreted as intentional sabotage, but as drowning people sinking the lifeboat in an attempt to save themselves.

“Community already exists, you just create a communication platform for it” (source) - Or why trying to create a community from the ground up might not be the right way of looking at things: a better and more subtle strategy would be to empowers the already existing channels and make them visible.

Yes. “Looking forward to the next 30 years of management trends, only a few things seem certain: Managers should be technical, and the definition of technical will continue to change.”

“Although we found that many factors can matter for happiness at work – type of occupation, level of education, tenure, and industry are also significant, for instance – they don't even come close to mattering as much as the boss' technical competence.”

“The best managers I met tended to be those that if the circumstance required it, could do the job of those two levels below.” (source) - Another way of putting it: managers needs domain knowledge and to know the work their reports do.

“Tendency of small, elegant, and successful systems, to be succeeded by over-engineered, bloated systems”.

In which we learn that, based on Tesler's law of the conservation of complexity, “the total complexity of a system is a constant: as you make the person's interaction simpler, the hidden complexity behind the scenes increases. Make one part of the system simpler, said Tesler, and the rest of the system gets more complex.”

“Efficiency tends to look messy, and good looks tend to be inefficient.” A reminder that sometimes we should just accept the messiness of the world.

An engineer's perspective on which priorities should be addressed first to increase robustness of systems.

“1. Make requirement less dumb; 2. Try to delete parts; 3. Simplify or optimize; 4. Accelerate cycle time; 5. Automate”. See full transcript.

“Boring, in the sense that it's well understood.”

A rephrasing of the above advice. “Choose the technology: 1. You know in and out, and are immediately productive with; 2. Which is sure to be around in 5-7 years, preferably 10-15; 3. For which you are comfortable hiring the next 15 engineers.”

A huge list of database templates collected over 25 years by Barry Williams to represent any business process.

Do not chase the hype. Yet. Micro-services only brings value past a certain infrastructure and organization size. This is a list of stuff you should focus on before bringing micro-services to the mix.

“People have been comparing software components to LEGO blocks for a couple decades. (…) Integrating two software systems is usually more like performing a heart transplant than snapping together LEGO blocks.”

When scientific method meet the practice of software development. My takeaways: the best metric is less lines of code, there is no 10x developers, too much unused configuration options, pair programing is for transfer of domain-specific knowledge and hackathon don't produce long term projects.

“Why Should Code Reviews Be Fast? (…) To optimize for the speed at which a team of developers can produce a product together, as opposed to optimizing for the speed at which an individual developer can write code.”

Explains how to perform code reviews and how to submit them.

Guidelines and heuristics to provide a reasonable approximation of the truth while developing embedded devices. Most also applies to software projects in general.

“If a part of your test suite is weak in a way that coverage can detect, it's likely also weak in a way coverage can't detect.” I.e. the great benefit of a coverage report is that it tells you what you forgot to think about when you wrote the test suite itself (source).

A list of questions by topic to help understand how you are building your tech and engineering team, trying to highlight red flags.

Another way to explain technical debt: “Scenarios like these create technical debt within the product code. A buried gap in Tetris represents technical debt. (…) Paying down technical debt keeps you competitive. It keeps you in the game.”

“The problem lies in "never reorganizing [the code] to reflect your understanding." (…) Organizationally, you pay in velocity and turnover; talented people are going to leave after a few rounds of bullshit.”

Default framing is around the backlog, which leads to an asymmetry in which failure is blamed on lacks of developer performance, and success is celebrated as the full realization of the PM's vision. But “technology is the bank that gave credit”, and technical debt should be called product debt “because product took the credit to get a feature faster and must pay back by investing the time to clean up.” The alternative? “Companies today need a frame of impact. In this world-view success is defin…

“My boss invited me for a one-on-one chat where they politely asked me to revert my change. I was aghast. The old code was a mess, and mine was clean! (…) I see now that my 'refactoring' was a disaster in two ways: I didn't talk to the person who wrote it; My code traded the ability to change requirements for reduced duplication”.

“the confidence, intelligence and extroversion that have long propelled ambitious workers into the executive suite are not enough online because they simply don't translate into virtual leadership. (…) Instead, workers who are organized, dependable and productive take the reins of virtual teams.” As the source paper say it best: “virtually, the emphasis shifts from saying to doing.”

“1. You have to adhere to employment laws within the country you're hiring from; 2. To employ someone full time, many countries require you to have a legally entity within that country; 3. Prioritize countries where we have the most interest; 4. Keep a healthy timezone overlap in each of our teams.”

Compilation of easy rules and processes to bootstrap a remote team.

“GitLab is the world's largest all-remote company”. Here is what it means and how it works.

“Remote workers are more productive than their office-bound counterparts.”

A nice wrap up on the numerous dispositions required to have a highly effective distributed team.

Resources on working remotely, including job boards, coworking spaces, and a list of companies embracing the culture.

“Employee productivity was 71% higher when meetings were reduced by 40%. This is largely because employees felt more empowered and autonomous. Rather than a schedule being the boss, they owned their to-do lists and held themselves accountable.”

A roadmap for getting meetings right.

“Before every formal meeting there's a smaller, more exclusive, less formal meeting where all the important decisions are made.”

“1on1s are the managers Swiss army knife” (source) - Another advice from the source: make them walk'n'talks.

A personal list of high-level questions from a manager.

A mega list in which most of them are great starters for conversation, some others are clearly bad ideas. A great source of inspiration nonetheless, but choose carefully.

“Daily, real-time meetings aren't practical for remote teams” might be the best practical reason.

Author experienced 3 formats of stand-ups before ending with one working for his team, and concludes that “the details that make up a good meeting are subtle and the pursuit of an artificial standard of aesthetics will prevent you from doing the necessary experimentation to improve from an ugly equilibrium”.

Team felt burned out by long, daily status update meetings masquerading as standups. Eliminating these faux standups got the team back on track.

Open-plan offices decrease face-to-face collaboration.

“An increase of 10 dB reduces productivity by approximately 5%.”

Company stopped providing free soda. The engineers were very upset, but it was just soda and they could afford it. But really it wasn't soda. Soda was the canary in the coal mine, triggering an exodus of its best engineers.

A reference. All the missing pieces are found below.

Resources, interviews, case studies, sample products & projects, communities, open source tools, free & paid services on product management, for technical people to learn the field.

A set of heuristics on tech companies and the ecosystem they live in.

A simple set of question which helped DARPA evaluates research programs to generate big rewards by taking big risks.

Lots of wisdom about space program management.

A satire with a grain of truth, especially the comparison between the basic vs experienced level.

A tale of building a product no user want to pay for. “You can't just create value for the user: that's a charity. You also can't just create value for your company: that's a scam. Your goal is to set up some kind of positive-sum exchange, where everyone benefits, including you. A business plan, according to this textbook, starts with this simple question: how will you create value for yourself and the company?”

“Details the story of how Weebly developed one of the most popular website creation and hosting sites on the web today.”

A complete overview of the concept: what is product-market fit and to measuring it.

“The ability to learn faster than your competition; to empathize with customers more than your competition; to communicate more effectively than your competition; The willingness to fail more than your competition; to wait longer than your competition”.

Mostly applied behaviour insights to help you build up strategies and tactics on product, design and planning.

A great example on why you should investigate complementary businesses.

A step further from the previous advice, in which is detailed an aggressive strategy to consolidate monopolies.

Windows Vista as a prime example of a sacrificial lamb product: a massive unpopular re-architecture required to pave the way for future innovative release. That's the cautionary tale of why you should be ready for intense criticism and adversity, if by chance or fate your wander down the path of monumental changes in a business software.

“A social phenomenon of customers canceling or deferring orders for the current soon-to-be-obsolete product as an unexpected drawback of a company's announcing a future product prematurely.” This is the price to pay for hasty marketing actions.

Targets lifestyle entrepreneur, but still full of fantastic quotes from reference books on customer relation, pricing and marketing a product.

Your organization will end up with Atlassian products because “their business model is: 1. Collect requirement lists from customers and prospective customers; 2. Make sure their product checks every damn box, no matter how stupid.”

“Fall in love with your problems and not with your solutions.”

Weak human + Machine > Machine > Strong Human.

An extensive list of cognitive biases and design principles with examples and tips to fine-tune your product and UX.

Lots of resources to help bootstrap your marketing activities and solve practical tasks.

How the biggest apps out there started: from going to your user directly (both online and offline), creating FOMO and word-of-mouth, to build a community first and get press.

The title is misleading, article's argument is: we don't need project managers if we already have product managers and scrum masters.

There is no silver bullet.

Relentless, irrational optimism; Daily progress documentation; Compounding investments; Time budgeting.

“Why do so many software projects fail? Software development is much closer to creating a new factory than running an existing factory. (…) Software development is made up of many unknown duration tasks, this fundamentally unpredictable nature makes traditional management's predictive planning techniques particularly unsuited for software projects.”

Greg Young described a good way to deal with requirements volatility: optimize from the beginning to be able to delete your code, and structure your code so that any part of it is no bigger than 1 week's worth of coding. So that any part can be re-written in 1 week.

“Start by accepting that change is inevitable. (…) As a consequence of this, software is never finished, only abandoned. (…) This means that no software product is ever exactly, perfectly satisfactory.”

“The problem with spending a lot of time on estimating is that it can feel useful, but often is so inaccurate that it hardly yields much value to the business.” The best we can do is measure and forecast.

“We are completely clueless about how long things should take.” Here is a trick to handle expectation of unreasonable estimates.

A.k.a. sunk-cost fallacy, or the rational explanation of why the hell do we still irrationally keep investing in a bad project.

“There are companies where those deadlines are set in stone, and a missed deadline is next to fire. That's when the problem starts.”

How not to manage projects approaching deadlines: “cutting finished features, yelling at people, and working people to the point of nervous breakdowns. Then they came upon a brilliant idea: let's steal over a hundred engineers from other teams and then the project will magically get done on time.”

The only honest estimate is "I don't know". But you can come up with some kind of probability assessment, that will inform about the shape of the risk. This is not unlike PERT, where an activity is bounded by optimistic, pessimistic and most-likely time. Now if managers don't take a range for an answer, don't fall in that trap. Tell them you're already trying as you possibly can. “And then the manager will have to do …

“Confirms the hunch that developers estimate the median well, but the mean ends up being much higher.”

“A hand drawn picture about the current system is a belief. Decisions should never be based on beliefs. Not in engineering. (…) As software is highly contextual we cannot predict specific problems. We can only predict classes of problems.” And that's why it is hard to estimate software projects: because developer's main activity is a long process of deducting the assumptions a system is built on.

“The NASA dataset contains 93 rows (that is not a typo, there is no power-of-ten missing), COCOMO 63 rows, Desharnais 81 rows, and (…) the China dataset contains 499 rows.”

Issue trackers needs to materialize ownership, queue position, state, task breakdown and aggressive closing. Priority, ticket type, software version, severity and long-life tickets are anti-patterns.

“Shipping is a social construct within a company. Concretely, that means that a project is shipped when the important people at your company believe it is shipped.” That is the dark side of delivery, in which you optimize for visibility by upper-management for the next performance evaluation cycle.

Curated review of facts, evidence, and opinions from relevant sources without vested interests, to help decision-makers make informed choices and get better results.

There's an interesting table in this article on the strereotypes of companies, their funding models, main engineering actors, and their central methodologies.

Because the short-term focused Scrum processes “seem suited to particular types of development, most notably consulting or contract programming, where the customer is external to the organizations, runs the show because they are paying for development, and can change their mind at any time”. Still, google engineers already practice a culture close to what looks like the original 10-points Agile manifesto. But that's it.

The alleged inventor of story points says they are probably a mistake.

US Department of Defense guide to detect software projects that are really using agile development versus those that are simply waterfall or spiral development in agile clothing (“agile-scrum-fall”).

“Why it didn't work? 1. Matrix management solved the wrong problem; 2. It fixated on team autonomy; 3. Collaboration was an assumed competency; 4. Mythology became difficult to change”.

An 3-years analysis of a team's retrospectives, with dire conclusions: people keep forgetting what they already learned, keep discussing unsolveable problems out of their control, and keep debating opinions based on biased interpretations or incorrect understandings.

If you are in the business of cloud services, these metrics are certainly great KPIs.

The worst KPIs to track a software team output: Lines of Code, Commit Count, Issues Resolved (aka “Shipping Velocity”) and Code Churn (aka "Efficiency").

On how OKRs articulates with a backlog.

Why OKRs might not work at your company: 1. You're still using feature teams instead of product teams; 2. Mixed-up manager and individual objectives; 3. Leadership opting-out of active management.

Spotify decision to stop using OKRs for individuals.

OKR grades are public, but not used for promotion. It was never taken very seriously there.

There is no shortage of content on how to measure and communicate objectives.

Discusses mentorship practices that work well engineer-to-engineer.

“Why apprenticeships beat classrooms”.

Very high-level guides and paths to learn different practice and tools.

“This is the textbook definition of a senior engineer. You see a problem, you solve it (thoroughly), you document it and you level up your team.”

“If you're considering nominating something for deletion, or changing a policy, because it doesn't appear to have any use or purpose, research its history first.” It's not we'd like to play conservative here, but because we need to fix the knowledge hole as described above.

Because writing software is “a creative process which is by its nature unpredictable and personal, in an environment which craves certainty, predictability and consistency.”

Outlines a practical and efficient three-pass method for reading research papers.

There is four kinds of documentation: tutorials, how-to guides, explanation and reference. Each with their own structure and mode of writing.

Critical infrastructure which aims to be available 24/7 needs a Disaster Recovery Plan. It generally takes the form of a document providing an overview of the expected severe failures and a set of procedures on how the system and the team operating it is prepared to deal with. The one linked here is a great example of such document, and is strong evidence the team is prepared for the worse.

Serves as a guideline on how to write a good technical paper, in the form of a typical journal publication.

An alternative approach, involving a weekly meeting of a writing group. An interesting dynamic to gather feedback and experience.

This collection of courses and learning resources aims to improve your technical documentation. Learn how to plan and author technical documents. You can also learn about the role of technical writers in a company.

A process to guide the preparation and refinement of manuscripts.

“The most efficient way to write scientific papers is to write while you are still conducting experiments”.

“Focusing on how readers consume information, we present a set of 10 simple rules to help you get across the main idea of your paper.”

Another set of tips, specifically using the example of a technical paper describing an improvement of an algorithm.

Tips on structure and style to produce great blog posts.

An effective list of do and don't when it comes to writing documentation.

When properly used, interactive written medium allows for asynchronous communication.

“BLUF is a military communications acronym—it stands for “bottom line up front”—that's designed to enforce speed and clarity in reports and emails.”

Simple reference on how (and why) to use these special characters.

On “Jeff Bezos's dotcom-era policy of banning PowerPoint within Amazon”, and how “this is neither about powerpoint nor about reading - it's about thinking.”

A set of 16 rules to avoid boring and ineffective presentations, and have your message reach your audience.

“1. Name a big change in the world; 2. Show there'll be winners and losers; 3. Tease the promised land; 4. Introduce features as "Magic Gifts"; 5. Present evidence that you can make the story come true.”

“If you ever find yourself buffering on output, rather than making hesitation noises, just pause. People will read that as considered deliberation and intelligence.”

A great progressive breakup of what it feels like to work at different levels of management.

Another take on the differences between Manager, Manager of Managers, Head of Org and Head of Function.

Be prepared to ask them as a recruiter or being asked about them for senior management roles.

You can build you own career engine, starting as a technical founder of a startup, building a great team, then grow with the company to learn and become a full-fledge CEO.

“For talented mid-career folks, when making job changes, how do you rank: 1. Title 2. Money 3. Scope”.

“Any product manager can go between any business—from groceries to film to games to Kindle. The skillset is interchangeable. They just have to learn the particular market.”

Identify scenario preventing managers to be promoted at the next level.

Describe the path and expectations at each management level.

This essay deconstruct why management ends up being seen as a promotion, how its new acquired privileges and powers creates an implicit hierarchy, which in turns creates bad incentives because of loss aversion. At the end, the only way forwards is to change the organization's culture.

Over-achieving talent is looking for a management promotion. Management does not recognize effort. Engineer become disgruntled and management is looking to discipline him. A case-study of a bad situation in which both side shows clumsiness.

How a promotion scheme marked the end of Uber's engineering excellence and the start of what made the company turn into a bureaucratic mess.

The cynical take: “an opportunist's career advice is: ignore OKRs, switch projects well before the consequences of your decisions can be measured, act happy and easy-going, package bad news as appeals for slow systemic adjustments, don't make anyone look bad, perform rituals with enthusiasm, grow headcount faster than baseline, let work invent itself, follow management fashions, avoid acute failures, believe this sincerely.”

There's this idea that, if you do great work at your job, people will (or should!) automatically recognize that work and reward you for it with promotions / increased pay. In practice, it's often more complicated than that.

“Incentives (or bribes) simply can't work in the workplace. (…) Most software managers have no choice but to go along with performance review systems that are already in place. If you're in this position, the only way to prevent teamicide is to simply give everyone on your team a gushing review”.

Compares salary range and compensation charts across big tech companies.

Same as above, but trying to evaluate the values of benefits across companies.

A reference point to what $M+ compensation packages looks like.

“and why the best way to get a bigger pay is to move to a new job.”

“Startups need an exit strategy. (…) The idea is to raise money fast, hire experienced people for ancillary services and develop the application in a way so that it is able to hold up till IPO. Defer all costs for post IPO.” So from this angle, the only reason to join a startup is for future money windfall.

Stock options, RSUs, job offers, and taxes—a detailed reference, including hundreds of resources, explained from the ground up and made to be improved over time.

“As a manager in a large corporation you are expected to be an aligner. (…) You have to manage frictions and strive to make the people above you look good.”

HiPPO stands for “Highest Paid Person's Opinion”, a trait of dysfunctional culture, in which power politics trumps data.

Machiavelli's ideas on how to accrue honor and power as a leader. Resorting to that level of politics in a company is a sure way to render the culture highly toxic, as well as corrupting and demoralizing the organization at all levels.

A cynical, bleak, but still fascinating take on the management ladder, based on The Office.

By Robert Greene. Can teach you how to cover your ass and be effective in a highly political org.

By Jeffery Pfeffer. Tells you how to play office politics if success in the workplace is the only thing you care about.

“In selectorate theory, three groups of people affect leaders. These groups are the nominal selectorate, the real selectorate, and the winning coalition. (…) To remain in power, leaders must maintain their winning coalition.”

“Changes of regime, revolutions, and so on occur not when rulers are overthrown from below, but when one elite replaces another.”

“Smart key supporters will always watch the balance of power, ready to change allegiance if the ruler look to be the loser in a shifting web of alliances. (…) Buy all the loyalty you can, because loyalty, in dictatorial organizations of all kinds, is everything.”

Tactics of hustling managers, and how the company reacting to that kind of manager makes or break a good place to work.

“It behooves organizations that want to develop highly authentic supervisors or organizational climates to seek to hire supervisors that are lower (or at least not higher) on symbolized moral identity.”

“The actual power wielded by a high level executive is usually inversely proportional to the size of the organization they manage.” (source: comment on Why large companies are so difficult to rescue).

“Most things at most startups are perpetually on fire, but if you can accept that, there is a lot to like. One well-known one: at a fast-growing startup, a hard-working, talented person who has some support from company leadership can often acquire an impressive title (or at least a lot of de facto power) very quickly.”

“It's common to promote someone to just get rid of that person :) Sometimes promoting is just easier that firing.” (source).

Derived from WWII-era Simple Sabotage Field Manual, a classic read to spot harassing and demoralizing behaviors.

“1. I'm kind of a big deal! 2. None of this is my fault! 3. Just do what I say! 4. Trust me; I'm never wrong.”

Describes 3 different approach a manager can take to accommodate new people in the team: 1. Sink or Swim; 2. Split and Absorb; 3. Absorb and Split.

Resonates with the Absorb and Split strategy discussed above: “if you have one team where the magic is flourishing, don't kill it. Feed it, grow it, and let it be a source of further strong teams. No rushing.”

Story of a manager trying to distill the concepts of a data-driven company while growing a tiny team of 3 people. Each step covers the evolution of the technical pipeline and interactions with existing stakeholders.

F50's data centers being migrated to commercial cloud provider. But what about the people currently doing legacy stuff? The answer: retrain.

“Few folks understand probability, and most executives don't care about the data, regardless of what it says.”

Blueprints of an organization at each stage of its 50/125/400/1000-employees stages, with typical ratios and ARR.

“If you know what problem you're solving and you know how to solve it, a bureaucratic organization will do. Stick with what you know. If you're writing software, that's a generative activity. You need a high-resilience org chart. Fewer boxes, more flexibility.”

“Trying not to repeat re-org mistakes, we started working on a structure that would make the re-org act like a feedback-fueled progress driven by the teams instead of by people above them.” This is an attempt to extract from the ground up signals pointing to inadequate structure. My cautionary tale: this might only work up to a point depending on the company's culture.

After 3 decades in a deeply flawed company, the author comes to a humble conclusion: leaders should embodies the value of their employees. Not the other way around. “Changes at the top — not speeches, training or hashtags — make the most cultural impact. If you want real and lasting cultural change, sweep away the made-men who succeeded under the previous culture and promote the people who look, act, and think more like their employees than their managers.”

Acqui-hire of a whole team can be seen as a type of reorg. In which managers will have to negotiate the new employment contracts in bulk in one or two days: “Because acquihires are “star” oriented, if you're a senior leaders who doesn't explicitly refuse to move forward, pressure will converge on you from all sides”.

An e-book-sized synthesis on sleep research “with a view to practical applications, esp. in people who need top-quality sleep for their learning or creative achievements.”

Short ones. “Reason one: holiday memories tend to depend not on how long the holiday was, but on the intensity of the experiences. Reason two: a change of activity can be a spur to creativity. Reason three for taking a short break: if we need rest to prevent exhaustion, a single, long vacation won't do the trick.”

“toxic handler, a manager who voluntarily shoulders the sadness, frustration, bitterness, and anger that are endemic to organizational life. Although toxic handlers may be found at every level in organizations, many work near the top”.

“How do I handle how tired I am as a manager? 1. Defrag your calendar; 2. Delegate messy and unscoped projects; 3. Say no.”

“Promote a false sense of urgency, destroy focus, allow for bypassing project prioritization, strip away essential business context, encourage poorly thought-out communication”. To remediate this, see How to Use Slack and Not Go Crazy article.

How a jealous boss, who felt either betrayed or ridiculed, bullied a capable employee to force him out. Don't be that kind of asshole boss.

“Burnout is a very serious situation. If you burn yourself out hard, it will be difficult to be effective at any future job you go to, even if it is ostensibly a wonderful job. Treat burnout like a physical injury.”

“Our tendency to overwork and burn out is framed by a complex combination of factors involving our profession, our organization, and ourselves. At the heart of it is insecurity.”

“A particular confluence of high achievement, intense competitiveness, and culture of overwork has caught many in a perfect storm of career enmeshment and burnout.”

“Extensive research by the military on sustainable performance in stressful conditions teaches that leaders should become champions of health, rather than taskmasters.” Describe the symptoms of toxic organizations and how managers can protect their teams from systemic burnout.

“Be willing to say no; Know what you don't want; Use your energy level realistically; Be kind to your future self”.

“Veteran software developers often recommend to: 1. Work at a place where you can grow; 2. Build transferable skills; 3. Have creative outlets and create a space to focus on yourself, switch off, and relax; 4. Of course, there's always the nuclear option: make your money and get out.”

“Today, CISO jobs come with low budgets, long working hours, a lack of power on executive boards, a diminishing pool of trained professionals they can hire, but also a constant stress of not having done enough to secure the company's infrastructure against cyber-attacks, continuous pressure due to newly arising threats, and little thanks for the good work done, but all the blame if everything goes wrong.”

“Despite an early setback, individuals with near misses systematically outperform those with narrow wins in the longer run.”

“Management research and education should focus on prescriptive theories that can help business practitioners move from 'incompetent to OK', rather than focusing on those that address how to move from 'good to great'.”

“Short treatise on the nature of failure; how failure is evaluated; how failure is attributed to proximate cause; and the resulting new understanding of patient safety”.

Explores how the factors accounting for disasters accumulates unnoticed until it's too late. This has been studied on other fields, but not in software engineering.

On how sales and marketing takes over product focused companies.

When a company lacks technical leadership: developers waste time in costly refactors, over-engineered systems, and ends up detached from the business and product.

“I understand now why the saying is: people leave managers, not companies.”

“Most of the time people leave bosses, not the job or the company.” And why you're unlikely to get any substantial insights from exit interviews. (source)

“Something I've seen multiple times is that, when a VP leaves, a company will become a substantially worse place to work, and it will slowly dawn on people that the VP was doing an amazing job at supporting not only their direct reports, but making sure that everyone under them was having a good time.” (source)

“It's okay to like your job and employer. Just understand that, as an employee, you are disposable.” Also: “This is not news. If you are loyal to your employer and do not own a significant part of the organization, then you should take a good hard look at why you're loyal -- and whether or not your employer is loyal to you in return.” (source).

How Hideo Kojima creatively used a playable teaser as a way to bypass NDA and to tell the story about the turmoil at Konami leading to his leaving of the company. But that only works if you're an influential and popular game designer.

“There is a great deal of talk today about the "mid-life crisis" of the executive. It is mostly boredom. At age forty-five most executives have reached the peak of their business career and know it.” In paragraph Ⅴ, you'll find why knowledge workers needs to manage themselves, and plan for the second half of their life.