More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
May 6 - August 19, 2020
and the experience of being managed is the foundation on which you build your own management philosophy.
workplace. Being an introvert is not an excuse for making no effort to treat people like real human beings, however.
The bedrock of strong teams is human connection, which leads to trust.
Use your manager to discover what’s possible where you are, but look to understand yourself in order to figure out where you want to go next.
Listening is the first and most basic skill of managing people.
The alpha geek tries to create a culture of excellence, but ends up creating a culture of fear.
He knows exactly why that thing you’re trying to do won’t work, and when it doesn’t, believe me, he’ll remind you how he told you so. If only you had listened to him and done things his way!
Practicing the art of teaching can help us learn how to nurture and coach, how to phrase things so that others will listen, instead of just shouting them down.
Senior engineers can develop bad habits, and one of the worst is the tendency to lecture and debate with anyone who does not understand them or who disagrees with what they are saying.
He went chasing after the next refactoring, because he was sure that the problems were entirely in the way the code was structured.
Doesn’t agile software development get rid of the need for project management? No.
the value of planning isn’t that you execute the plan perfectly, that you catch every detail beforehand, or that you predict the future; it’s that you enforce the self-discipline to think about the project in some depth before diving in
You’re a nice person, so some of them admire you and listen to your opinions, but others seem to be jealous of your influence. New developers either want too much of your time or seem to be scared of you for whatever reason.
Process czars struggle when they fail to realize that most people are not as good at following processes as they are.
Give others a chance to speak, and hear what they say.
if you can’t communicate and listen to what other people are saying, your career growth from this point on will suffer.
It’s hard to accept that “new manager” is an entry-level job with no seniority on any front, but that’s the best mindset with which to start leading.
Don’t confuse “potential” as it might be described by a grade-school teacher with the type of potential you care about. You are not molding young minds; you’re asking employees to do work and help you grow a company.
Sometimes the negative person is just unhappy
But there is such a thing as artificial harmony, and conflict-avoidant managers tend to favor harmony above functional working relationships.
One variant of the toxic employee is the brilliant jerk, who, as we discussed earlier, produces individually outsized results, but is so ego-driven that she creates a mixture of fear and dislike in almost everyone around her.
It’s natural to feel some longing for simpler times, when it was just you and your computer and you didn’t have to deal with all these messy, complicated humans.
Managing your time comes down to one important thing: understanding the difference between importance and urgency.
We also tend to substitute obvious for urgent in determining something’s value.
There are many things that feel urgent that aren’t. The whole of the internet, for example.
This means that your manager trusts you to proactively deal with all those important but not urgent things before they become urgent, and especially before they become urgent for your manager.
skipping 1-1s because you’re too busy with other things is a great way to miss the warning signs of an employee who is going to quit.
“Yes, we can do that project, and all we will need to do is delay the start of this other project that is currently on the roadmap.”
Sometimes new tech leads are reluctant to push people for project plans because they don’t feel that they have authority and are flustered when they ask for something and the other person just never delivers.
In this modern era, frequency of code change is one of the leading indicators of a healthy engineering team.
Durable teams are built on a shared purpose that comes from the company itself,
“faster” is not about “the same number of hours but fewer total days.” “Faster” is about “the same value to the company in less total time.”
We focus so we can go home, and we encourage going home because it forces us to constantly focus.
Control freak managers, for example, don’t often show up as clearly in smaller management situations, instead holding that impulse back until they feel they have the true authority of title.
We’re barely capable of determining if an engineer is capable of writing good code in a team setting without driving the other team members crazy. And coding is at least a skill that we can ask people to demonstrate for us. Management is…well, what even is it? How do we interview for it?
Importantly, a manager must also be able to debug teams.
Managing teams is a series of complex black boxes interacting with other complex black boxes. These black boxes have inputs and outputs that can be observed, but when the outputs aren’t as expected, figuring out why requires trying to open them up and see what’s going on inside. And, just as sometimes you don’t have the source code, or the source code is in a language you don’t understand, or the logfiles aren’t readable, the black boxes of teams can resist yielding their inner workings.
A bunch of people who never talk to each other and are always working on independent projects are not really working as a team.
Estimates are often useful even if they aren’t perfectly accurate because they help escalate complexity to the rest of the team.
A good leader shapes technology discussions to inject the strategic objectives and take into consideration the nontechnical implications of a technical decision.
If you’re a leader with no power over business strategy and no ability to allocate people to important tasks, you’re at best at the mercy of your influence with other executives and managers, and at worst a figurehead.
Saying something is top priority is one thing, but making the actual tradeoffs on the schedule to get people moving on it is completely different.
When you want your boss to act on something, expect that you’ll need to tell him the same thing three times before he actually listens.
On the flip side, we undermine ourselves when we fail to talk so that nontechnical peers can understand what we’re saying. Throwing out jargon to people who aren’t familiar with it — and who don’t even need to be familiar with it — makes us look stupid to them.
If you try to maintain a “buddy” image, your reports are going to have a hard time distinguishing between their buddy thinking out loud and their boss asking them to focus on something.
How do you know if you’re creating a culture of fear? It can come from placing a high value on being correct and following the rules, and having a strong affinity for hierarchy-based leadership.
Unfortunately, when you’re the leader, the dynamic changes, and those who may have fought back when you were an individual contributor will feel threatened by you as a leader.
