More on this book
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
May 3 - August 3, 2022
It is your job to keep the team’s eyes on the priorities with a process that works for them.
Harvard research says that best way to stay motivated at work is by achieving and documenting small wins,
One-on-ones generally are misconstrued as a place for doing status updates.
Engineering managers generally have a lot going on, so it’s very useful if you as an engineer take the initiative to make sure actions are followed up on and the proper conversations are had.
Individual contributors often get stuck when they need to: Finish the last 10–20% of a project. Start a project completely from scratch. Do project planning (You need me to write what now? A roadmap?). Work with unfamiliar code/libraries/systems. Work with other teams (please don’t make me go sit with data engineering!!). Talk to other people (in engineering, or more commonly, outside of engineering). Ask for help (far beyond the point they realized they were stuck and needed help). Deal with surprises or unexpected setbacks. Navigate bureaucracy. Pull the trigger and going into prod. Deal
...more
It doesn’t matter how well an engineer can code if their code is unusable because they’ve neglected to communicate with coworkers.
You can compare candidates more equitably by asking them the same interview questions, and creating a rubric to guide interviewers on how to evaluate candidates’ answers.
Having the interviewer collaborate with the candidate in a technical interview not only simulates a more realistic scenario of what it’s like to work together,
Thomas Chandler Haliburton, a nineteenth-century Nova Scotian politician and author, observed that, “Wherever there is authority, there is a natural inclination to disobedience.”
We need to be able to solve problems, inspire, and motivate teams with positivity during change.
Managers need to overcommunicate during times of change and optimize for the exact balance of these methods: Use one-way (i.e., presentations) and two-way (i.e., small group Q&A) communications strategically Use the proper mix of both written and in-person communications Be as transparent as you can Provide enough context about why change is happening Actively listen and communicate in an empathetic way
Invest in only the most important initiatives even when it’s easy to invest in more Continue to improve your ability to execute and deliver Become great at regularly prioritizing and reprioritizing the work
Engineering is a team sport.
you need to bring your team together regularly to discuss the work!
regular quick standup meeting for briefly reviewing in-flight work and priorities, and periodic retrospectives to look back and talk about what went well and what could improve.
Think about the roles that each team member plays with respect to the team as a whole.
Where do the responsibilities of these roles overlap, and where are there gaps?
Thinking of the team as a system itself instead of just a grouping of individuals can help you avoid one of the common early management traps, which is micro-optimizing for individual happiness over the strength of the team.
Homogeneity might facilitate smooth and effortless interactions, but diversity drives better decisions.
premortems, in which a project team imagines that a project has failed and works to identify what potentially could lead to such an outcome.
During a crisis or incident, having a team whose culture is open and inclusive allows them to accept ideas from many viewpoints. This results in more creative problem solving and faster resolution of issues.
You can reduce the time to first “Hello World” by reading the documentation (e.g., asking questions): learn about the person-service.
conflict arises when expectations don’t meet reality.
A good set of logs and dashboards will help you and your person-services understand overall performance. Check in on each of your person-services once each week to review performance, set expectations, and plan for future scaling. This time is also a good opportunity to improve APIs, review load, and discuss external factors that might be affecting day-to-day efficiencies.
One of folks’ core needs at work is to have a sense of improvement or progress toward a goal; this could be a goal for the organization, for their team, or for themselves personally.
A one-on-one is between a manager and their direct report; a one-on-one-on-one includes both the former manager and the new manager. this is an opportunity to ensure that direct reports’ career momentum doesn’t experience that hiccup.
During the one-on-one-on-one, state the goal: to make sure you and the new manager are transparent in the handoff of this direct report’s career, how they want to grow, and the best ways that their new manager can support them.
If the direct report is quiet, the managers in the room should be routinely asking things like this: How do you feel so far about what’s been said? Does this description match your experience? Are we missing something on that topic? Anything we should clarify? Anything you disagree with?
One of the most difficult things to do when you step into a manager’s role for the first time is understanding when you should be a friend and when you should be a manager.
honest self-assessment; not for the organization during appraisal time, but for yourself to assess whether what you’re doing makes you happy.
A good leader motivates people, looks for ways to unblock them, mentors them, and guides them through problems, and also recognizes when they are not the right person for the job.
Work is often allocated based on CapEx and OpEx budgets. These allocations can happen via the organization chart, as a separate career ladder for engineers who are developing new products and features versus those who maintain software that’s already been deployed.
CapEx, or capital expenditures, are costs that go toward the creation of an asset that holds lasting value. Think of a monument. These are treated as an expense that is spread across the expected life of the asset. Sure, that pyramid cost us a lot to build, but it’s something we can amortize across thousands of years, so our cost per year is low.
Operating expenditures (OpEx), are the opposite of a capital investment. When you’re in the business of making a consumable product, like hamburgers, you hope they will be delivered in the same fiscal year. Most of the cost of that burger is OpEx.
Whenever you can eliminate a substantial recurring operating expense with a one-time CapEx project, you can create value,
This idea underpins the rise of SaaS companies: if you can take what was a substantial CapEx investment for your customers and instead meter it based on usage in a given year, the waste that’s reduced and the risk eliminated will create a significant ROI.
core unit of work was the “project,” which was probably someone else’s CapEx investment. The maintenance and hosting fees were OpEx.
Self: Keep a Log At the end of each day, jot down the most impactful thing you did that day. Let yourself generously speculate about possible downstream effects.
Internal: Find Peer Support One or a group of trusted peers can act as a sounding board.
Many potentially great managers go back to primarily IC work because of inadequate support,
Join a broad and large number of channels and systematically read them (one to two times per day) so that you can gather as much information as possible. Create a system and culture where creating public channels to build company networks is the norm, to foster frequent and open communication within and across those networks. Communicate in channels deliberately. Reward loudly and publicly the culture and results you want to see. When you see problems, offer support and help in a safe way, and show that you’re listening and taking action.
Make discussions confidential by default unless you explicitly ask someone if you can share something in order to help them.
Write weekly emails/posts This is an excellent way to model and foster open communication throughout the entire organization and communicate decisions. Write about specific things you worked on, important results, and things you want to share and reinforce. Write about problems often. The more specific and authentic, the better because you’ll build trust and a culture of open communication. Send it to as broad an audience as you feel comfortable with so you can align everyone and model open communications. This includes your team, across your peer group (other managers at your level), and up
...more
I would focus on continuous improvement instead of just continuous learning.
Folks aren’t fired because they can’t do the job. They’re fired because the people involved can’t get to an understanding of what the job is and, in the process of hashing it out, have torn their relationship to shreds.
Maybe the team doesn’t have the ability to do the work. But, most of the dysfunction I’ve seen comes from some flavor of lack of goal clarity. Whether that is failure to define the goal, rapidly changing the goal, having too many goals, or not having a strong story about why achieving the goal is important.
Working overtime is a short-term fix, and it should be a last resort. Otherwise, it’s damaging not just to your organization, it’s damaging to your people.
activity you’ll need to do with your team is to break down the work. For any project, no matter how long, be deliberate about breaking the work down into smaller pieces. Allow your team to verify assumptions quickly and have a regular discussion about progress.
how confident they are as to whether they’re going to reach those goals. A 1-to-10 scale is sufficient,
At the end of each week, review your progress. Did you achieve your goals? If so, keep going! If not, what got in the way? Were those goals too optimistic? Adjust your goals for the next weeks based on what you’ve learned.
