An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management

by Will Larson

Most folks find being on-call for components that they’re unfamiliar with to be disproportionately stressful.

Strategies are grounded documents which explain the trade-offs and actions that will be taken to address a specific challenge. Visions are aspirational documents that enable individuals who don’t work closely together to make decisions that fit together cleanly.

Visions should be detailed, but the details are used to illustrate the dream vividly, not to prescriptively constrain its possibilities.

The fact that something stops working at significantly increased scale is a sign that it was designed appropriately to the previous constraints rather than being over-designed.

Engineers hate technical debt. If there is an easy project that they can personally do to reduce tech debt, they’ll take it on themselves. Engineering managers hate technical debt, too. If there is an easy project that their team can execute in isolation, they’ll get it scheduled. In aggregate, this leads to a dynamic in which there is very little low-hanging fruit to reduce technical debt, and most remaining options require many teams working together to implement them. The result: migrations.

Effective de-risking is essential, because each team who endorses a migration is making a bet on you that you’re going to get this damn thing done, and not leave them with a migration to an abandoned system that they have to revert to. If you leave one migration partially finished, people will be exceedingly suspicious of participating in the next.

if a team isn’t working on a migration, it’s typically because their leadership has not prioritized it.

It’s important to celebrate migrations while they’re ongoing, but the majority of the celebration and recognition should be reserved for their successful completion. In particular, starting but not finishing migrations often incurs significant technical debt, so your incentives and recognition structure should be careful to avoid perverse incentives.

Chasing the next promotion is at best a marker on a mass-produced treasure map, with every shovel and metal detector re-covering the same patch. Don’t go there. Go somewhere that’s disproportionately valuable to you because of who you are and what you want.

Hire until you are slightly ahead of growth. The best gift of time management that you can give yourself is hiring capable folks, and hiring them before you get overwhelmed. By having a clear organizational design, you can hire folks into roles before their absence becomes crippling.

However, the specters of technical debt and toil have been used to shirk so much responsibility that simply naming them tends to be unconvincing.

If you’ve been focused on growing the size of your team as the gateway to career growth, call bullshit on all that,13 and look for a gap in your organization or company that you can try to fill.

Define

Ceck back here for reference

A deeply flawed system can’t be saved by band-aids, but it can easily absorb your happiness to slightly extend its viability.

Check out this quote.

https://lethain.com/perf-management-system/

Link for performsnce