A common challenge for engineering leaders looks something like this: The team they are managing is frustrated. They are struggling to ship features, and they complain that the issue is that the old systems are just too hard to work in. They are written in a legacy programming language that…

Your company’s most pointless meetings may not be the type you expect! — Meetings, ugh. Even those of us who like a good meeting have plenty of experience sitting through painful, boring, poorly-run meetings that seem to exist only to waste our time. Engineers hate meetings: they take you out of flow and (in the pre-remote days) away from your monitors so that…

But I still love them — I see a lot of bad OKRs (Objectives and Key Results). Usually they are just KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) given the OKR name. You know these because they tend to be something like Objective: deliver product x Key Result: product x is in production Objective: drive adoption of product y …

It’s now about your impact, not just your abilities. — In most tech companies, the first few levels of an engineering career ladder are pretty straightforward. You must grow from someone who needs a lot of oversight to an independent engineer. You need to develop your best practices and have evidence that your code is of high quality. You build…

Have you ever been on a team that seemed to work very hard but never move forward? Where you look back quarter after quarter, or perhaps year after year, and you did a lot, but nothing actually seemed to happen? Congratulations, you’re in the middle of Groundhog Day. Groundhog Day…

Hint: The change starts in engineering — Adding product management to more traditional software infrastructure organizations, sometimes with a shift towards platform engineering, is all the rage today. As someone who has done both these things, it doesn’t surprise me to see so many people struggling to make it work. Both of these shifts require going from…

Software engineers are attracted to formulas, algorithms, and structures. As people whose job it is to take ideas and turn them into predictable executable code, it is unsurprising that we’re drawn to ways of thinking that categorize and systematize things. This attraction continues as engineers become engineering managers and leaders…

Most companies have carefully created separate senior career tracks that provide details of the differences between being a manager and being an individual contributor (IC). And yet, many people still believe that you can’t get ahead without becoming a manager, and many companies who want more senior individual contributors struggle…

Build vs buy, the never-ending debate. Should we buy a vendor product, or build the system ourselves? Despite popular consensus that it is critical to focus on work that is core to our business, engineers the world over continue to build non-core products instead of buying them. What gives? It’s…