Leadership

Will Larson on Irrational Exuberance: Navigators

via Kevin Stewart: How to communicate like a GitHub engineer: our principles, practices, and tools - The GitHub Blog

via Greg Wilson: One of the most useful things I’ve ever found on the web comes from NOAA, and is about dealing with disruptive behaviors in meetings: If you want to post a framed copy on the wall in your office …

“An example … is separating problem definition from problem solution, having two separate meetings for that.” 💡!

via Dare Obasanjo: A great question managers should ask in one on ones; are you venting or asking for help?

via Joanna Denni: There are so many really great resources I’ve come across for engineering management, it’s hard to narrow them down!

via Matt Weagle: “To change the culture, you must change the system. To change the system, you must change what you reward.”

via Kevin Stewart:

via Kevin Stewart: More Effective Remote Working | Mike McQuaid

via Jon Reid: @woolie I see very few teams functioning as teams. It might be easier if my views came out in a coherent article rather than tooted in pieces, so check this out if you’re interested. (No obligation to read! I’m also happy to continue tooting.)

via Dragan Stepanović: If developers in your team have to repeat their asks or even worse beg 🙏 for reviewing their PRs (or any other help they need), your problem is not people not prioritizing other people’s work, “lack of professionalism” or lack of “team player spirit.”

via Kevin Stewart: The farther you go up the ladder, the less it’s about your technical skills – Jim Grey

via Kevin Stewart: The Agile Manager: Resistance

via Kevin Stewart: How engineering teams handle unplanned work | by Anna Debenham | boldstart ventures | Aug, 2023 | Medium

via Kevin Stewart: Remote work requires communicating more, less frequently

via Kevin Stewart: How Managers Can Make Time for Their Own Development

via Kevin Stewart: There’s more to life than OKRs: using EOS and W Planning for effective goal-setting in empowered teams

via Matt Weagle: Share your adaptive capacity across the team

Irrational Exuberance: Manage your priorities and energy

via Emily Nakashima: I wrote about why I hate the term “tech debt” and why using more specific terminology often helps us have better conversations about tackling non-product-roadmap work.

via Kevin Stewart: If agile isn’t dead, why is it still not working?

via Matt Weagle: “By the end, you’ll be prepared to operate effectively within an existing planning process, balance functional and cross-functional demands, and diagnose how your current planning process may be holding Engineering and your company back.”

via julia ferraioli :cc_by:: July’s piece dropped late last night—and it’s about undervalued work. Specifically what @whereistanya calls “glue work”.

I’m a big fan of the Changelog podcast. This snippet was a tight reminder about staying on track when starting a new venture:

via Matt Weagle: Excellent conversation

via Olamina Free: You might want to look at Carol Sanford’s book No More Feedback. Interesting framework as alternative to feedback.

via Martin Fowler: I’ve written a brief summary of Team Topologies, the model created by @matthewskelton and Manuel Pais at @TeamTopologies. Many of my colleagues are finding this to be a useful tool to think about how best or organize software development teams.

via Kevin Stewart: Managing your interrupt rate as a tech lead, part 1: You get more of what you reward - Human Who Codes

via Kevin Stewart: Gelling your Engineering leadership team

via Kevin Stewart: Leading vs. Managing in the Engineering World

via Emily Nakashima: I started my role as VP of Engineering @honeycombio three years ago, and since then I’ve noticed how little candid writing there is about paths to this job or what it actually entails. I’m working on a blog post series about this, and part 1 is out today.

Michael Loop on Rands in Repose: Ask Questions, Repeat The Hard Parts, and Listen

I think I’ve made many of these mistakes over the years:

charity.wtf: Helicopter Management and Other Mistakes

via kottke.org: Can Everyone Take a Sabbatical? “Sabbaticals also provide …a ‘check against total burnout.’” Feeling very grateful for the support of my readers in taking a sabbatical last year.

via Kevin Stewart:

via Kevin Stewart: Better Software Engineering teams – Structures, roles, responsibilities and comparison with common approaches.

via Dare Obasanjo: Abraham Lincoln famously said “Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the ax.”

via Mike Sperber: Easily the best post I’ve read on tech debt.

via jadeforrest: 🧠 FAST agile is the most interesting organizational practice I’ve learned about in a while. Today I share what FAST agile is, and explore whether it’s worth experimenting with.

via Kevin Stewart: Leader as Shock Absorber (Ed Batista)

Poignant read on how demand (“burden” in his wording) inevitably expands to reach and strain capacity, both for computers and humans:

Gabriela Riccardi at Quartz: How to frame questions to get honest answers from people you manage

via Matt Weagle: “If you want your colleagues to own their plan, they need to come up with their next steps themselves – with your support.”

via Kevin Stewart:

Via Matt Weagle: First, when you implement RFCs, you will be introducing friction to your team. Instead of going straight to building, we are required to think and write about what we’ll build. Friction brings frustration. Our industry has convinced us that programmers are supposed to be writing code for as much time as possible, leading to negative sentiments to practices that keep programmers away from their editors.